Completely stunned by the level of professionalism running this company
First things first. I'm admittedly a difficult customer, at least in the sense that I have high expectations for my hosting company. If you consider the relationship you're entering into with a host, it's a bit of a marriage. You are transferring over all your data and clients to them, putting it all in their hands, and asking them to take care of it for you. And if you’ve been in this game a while, you’ve been burned enough to be careful before you choose a new one.
You're trusting them with security, speed, support, etc. And the profit margins in hosting are not usually such that companies can afford to care too much about individual accounts. How could they? They'd go bankrupt.
And so it goes. They promise you the world for a low ball price and you bite.
Things are ok for the first year. But then year 2 rolls around and your renewal fees are a shocker, but switching hosts is a daunting task, so you pay the renewal fees anyways, and lock yourself into a 3 year deal with them to get a better price per year.
All the sudden, you start getting IP blacklisted, the quality of support drops and your sites slow down because they cram tons of other users on your shared server. You are dissatisfied and your clients are complaining. The solution? Oh, no worries, just upgrade to a better plan… for double the price… or get your own Virtual Private Server or a Dedicated Server with SSD and the all new “Hyper-Warp-Mega-RailGun-Grand-Chinese-Buffet-Under-New-Management” feature they are offering for “free”… for triple the price.
So, you bite the bullet and upgrade. Then all hell breaks loose and they:
⁃ Throttle down your account (My experience with GoDaddy),
⁃ Cap your bandwidth (Everyone's experience with VPS),
⁃ Offer you a huge server size but then screw you on the inode count so you can't actual use it (my experience with NameCheap),
⁃ Promise you 24/7 "live" support from "a small and passionate USA based tech team" (No more chatting with Sandeep) but it's actually a snail-mail ticketing system they answer at their own pace (My experience with WebHostPython),
⁃ Sell out to EIG (My experience with Bluehost),
⁃ Create their own crappy panel (since cPanel raised its prices) and force you to switch over to from your beloved cPanel (My experience with SiteGround),
⁃ Or your client list grows and you hear about “reseller” accounts, where you can become your own host and registrar by renting out your server metal to clients and charging them monthly fees, but the “we will migrate all of your old sites over for free!” guarantee turns out to be more complicated then you thought, especially if you want to smash your old hosting file hierarchy into multiple new panel instances and combine old single WordPress installations into WPMU multi-site accounts (My current situation with ScalaHosting).
I’ve seen it all and been threw it all. It’s a complicated and frustrating world out there. I can say though, that throughout this journey to find the best host out there, Scala has not only met the mark, they have bent over backwards and upside-down to stand alone in the industry. These people have thrown logic and caution to the wind when it comes to customer satisfaction. They do not run a cost evaluation on “how much are we paying employee X to talk to customer Y -VS- how much the customer Y is paying each month”. They just deal with it, no matter who you are.
I was also concerned about the structural differences between cPanel and sPanel. And the error prone nature of manual migration vs an automatic cPanel import. I can say that all of my concerns have been addressed at Scala, and then some. And not in a small way. They have blown me away with the amount of concern they have for their customers. My monthly bill is only $12 a month for a VPS and yet they escalated my case to the director level to make sure it was handled properly. They get the big picture and they are in it for the long haul, for sure.
Scala will do right by you.
---UPDATE - First Month---
Had some issues with sPanel, as it's new. But as a company Scala has been available to fix anything, it seems to get better daily and even the top brass are available to jump in and make any issue right. So far it's been a great experience.
