Mar, 2024 : Best web hosting services for 2024 by Techradar

📅 March 26, 2024 - ScalaHosting is an experienced Dallas-based provider with 15 years experience in the web hosting business.

The company has plenty of budget hosting plans for simple sites and projects, but it's made my list for its strong VPS range, which is still very affordable but has the power to handle very demanding business and other websites.

Features

ScalaHosting has eye-catching features right across its range. Signing up for shared hosting gets you unlimited emails and daily offsite backups, often premium extras elsewhere. Even the cheapest plan uses fast NVMe storage, while many competitors only use slower standard SSD.

The VPS range stands out for its extreme configurability. Other hosts might force you to choose from 3 or 4 basic products, but ScalaHosting allows you to build your own plan, using anything from 2 to 24 cores, 4 to 64GB RAM, and 50 to 2000GB storage (vastly more powerful than I've seen elsewhere).

Then there are the free site migrations. Some providers promise this, then give you a plugin to do it yourself; ScalaHosting carefully migrates all your sites for you, and will even migrate them elsewhere if you're not happy and cancel your account.

Once you're up and running, your site benefits from free SSL, speed-boosting CDN integration, real-time malware protection, and experts can choose their preferred web server (Apache, Apache with NGINX, OpenLiteSpeed and more).

Testing

ScalaHosting allows customers to manage their web space via its own custom control panel, SPanel. I usually prefer the industry-standard cPanel, but SPanel is a powerful, easy-to-use alternative, and a great web home for newbies and experts alike.

I tested ScalaHosting performance by using top benchmarking tool GTmetrix to measure download speeds. The results were fractionally below average, but far ahead of the budget competition, and well within reach of big names such as GoDaddy,

I went on to monitor my test site availability for a year, and ScalaHosting scored a very reasonable 99.94% (and that's with the cheapest shared plan: VPS hosting should be even better).

Performance

(Image credit: Uptime.com)
What else you need to know

Sign up with ScalaHosting and (with most products) you're protected by its generous Anytime Money-Back Guarantee. Not only does this give you 100% of your money back if you cancel within 30 days, but you can also get prorated refunds after that (pay for a year, you can cancel after 6 months and still be refunded for the 50% you haven't used).

Why it's best

Cloud hosting is a service where a website or application is hosted on a network of interconnected servers, rather than a single physical server. I've looked in depth at this in our guide What is cloud hosting and how do you use it? As resources are allocated to a virtual server, you only pay for what you need as you need them. if you're looking for a cloud hosting service that scales with your business, ScalaHosting should be on your list.