TechRadar Verdict
Great range of premium features
Easy-to-use interface
No phone support
Renewal rates a bit pricey
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ScalaHosting is a very respectable email hosting provider, especially if your are looking to scale fast. Growing businesses, in particular, are likely to require multiple accounts and ScalaHosting’s plans let you set up multiple email accounts for the same fee, rather than charging per account.
There’s also a real variety of plans on offer - something to cater for companies of all sizes depending on how big your businesses currently is. Security and support are also both robust, so you hopefully won’t encounter any issues with ScalaHosting, but if you do, someone should be able to assist
ScalaHosting: Plans and pricing
With ScalaHosting you have the choice of signing up to four email hosting plans, each on either 12-month or 36-month contracts. These plans are StartUp, SmallBiz, Medium, and Cloud. With the StartUp plan, you get 10 email accounts for $6.95 a month on the 12-month contract or $4.95 for a 36-month plan.
If you choose a SmallBiz contract, this will cost $9.95 per month for 50 email accounts on a 12-month plan or $6.95 on a 36-month one. The Medium plan costs $14.95 per month for 100 email accounts if you sign up for 12 months and $9.95 per month if you choose 36 months. The Cloud plan is the most premium on offer and lets customers set up an unlimited number of email accounts. It will cost you, however. The Cloud plan costs $19.95 per month for a 12-month plan and $14.95 per month for a 36-month contract. This is also the only pricing tier where you can sign up for just a single month - but this costs a whopping $34.95.
It’s notable that ScalaHosting’s email pricing comes with multiple email accounts even with the most basic pricing plan. In this sense, it’s somewhat similar toIceWarp, which can only be signed up with a minimum of 10 users. It contrasts with a lot of other email hosting providers that offer prices per mailbox, such asDreamHost. Overall, ScalaHosting’s email plans are pretty affordable, but if you don’t need the 10 email accounts that come with the StartUp plan, there are cheaper alternatives out there.
Features
One of the most useful features that comes with every SalaHosting email plan is daily offsitebackups. With businesses facing a huge number of cyberattack threats every day - and email representing a popular attack vector -disaster recoveryis crucial to ensure businesses don’t face financial or reputational damage as a result of a compromised email account.
Other features that come with a ScalaHosting email hosting plan include a range ofemailaccounts, domains, and web-based email. On the other hand, if you sign up for the more expensive Cloud plan, you get a number of premium features, such as improved inbox delivery. This provides your outbound email with a dedicated IP address, which significantly reduces the likelihood of your emails going straight into the spam box of your customers.
And as one of the main reasons why businesses choose a dedicated email hosting plan is to improve the credibility of their brand, the inclusion of additional branding and whitelabelling as a premium feature could also come in handy. With this feature, you can set your company name and upload your logo to the control panel so your email account has a more professional look and feel.
Support
ScalaHosting’s support is impressive, although only really goes up a notch when if your subscribe to the Cloud plan. You’ll need to be a customer at this tier if you want access to premium support, which means your requests are looked into before any other standard support requests.
However, ScalaHosting’s standard support remains impressive. It consists of a 24/7 professional technical support team that can be contacted either vialive chatfor an instant response or via support ticket, with the latter still promising an impressive 15-minute response time. This support is available for anything hosting-related, whether it concerns your email plan or not.
ScalaHosting also has a bespoke client area, a technical support email contact, and an extensive Knowledge Base. The Knowledge Base is easy to search and has a range of resources that relate specifically to email hosting, like tips for when your emails are being classified as spam, ways to add an email signature, and account management issues.
Security
Standard security is offered across ScalaHosting’s StartUp, SmallBiz, and Medium plans, with High security coming as part of the Cloud plan. One of the most fundamental security features of any business email hosting plan is anti-spam protection. With ScalaHosting, this correctly filters 99.98% of the spam messages you receive.
As the spam filtering success rate shows, it’s impossible to prevent 100% of malicious exploits targeting your email accounts. That’s why it’s important to have a gooddisaster recoveryplan in place should you suffer something like a data breach or ransomware attack. The good news is that ScalaHosting’s email hosting plans are backed up offsite daily in a server located on a different continent. This means you can recover any file or email with a simple click, regardless of what happened to the original.
The competition
In terms of pricing, ScalaHosting’s introductory offer represents good value, especially if you consider that all plans come with multiple email accounts. While some email hosting plan, likeA2 HostingandIONOScharge per account, even ScalaHosting’s cheapest plan, designed for startups allows you to create up to 10 email accounts.
Aside from price, ScalaHosting offers generous amounts of cloud storage - maybe not as much as you get with IceWarp - but still an amount that should be enough. In other areas, ScalaHosting holds up well too. Its support and security credentials are a match for most of the other email hosting providers out there.
ScalaHosting: Final verdict
ScalaHosting offers great business email hosting plans. It is reliable, secure and comes with all the features you need to add credibility to your brand. It’s also pretty affordable, especially if you’re a business that expects to need multiple accounts. A good choice, particularly for companies with ambitious expansion plans.
We’ve also featured thebest email hosting services.
Barclay has been writing about technology for a decade, starting out as a freelancer with ITProPortal covering everything from London’s start-up scene to comparisons of the best cloud storage services. After that, he spent some time as the managing editor of an online outlet focusing on cloud computing, furthering his interest in virtualization, Big Data, and the Internet of Things.
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