While the majory of our reviews and comparisons are for regular web hosts, we also sometimes venture out to review more specialist game server hosting providers. Today we’ll focus on ScalaCube, one of the most popular Minecraft server hosting providers. If you’ve realised that’s not what your looking for, you can also check out our best web hosting services list to see which hosting provider could meet your business needs.
What is ScalaCube?
This web hosting is arguably quite far along the game hosting spectrum, as ScalaCube is mainly concerned with Minecraft server hosting, although it also offers hosting for Rust, Ark, and several other games. That being said, the hosting provider assures you that you can use the server for numerous purposes as long as your actions don’t violate any laws and company’s terms and conditions.
Since one of the most vital things for online gaming is low latency, ScalaCube offers virtual and dedicated servers all around the world, across North America, Europe, the UK, Australia, as well as Asia — so you can very much count on finding one close to where you’re based in order to get the lowest ping times.
ScalaCube Minecraft Hosting Summary
| Hosting Types | Game server hosting (VPS) for Minecraft, Hytale, Ark and Rust |
|---|---|
| Storage | HDD or SSD up to 320GB |
| Bandwidth | Unlimited |
| Starting Price | $2.50 per month |
| Support Channels | Ticket via control panel (live chat only for sales) |
| Money-Back Guarantee | 24 hours |
| Uptime Guarantee | 99.9% |
Features and Ease of Use
ScalaCube offers 9 Minecraft VPS plans, 9 Minecraft PE VPS plans, 12 Ark plans, and 41 Rust plans. The nine Minecraft VPS plans provide you with:
- 768 MB to 32 GB RAM
- 1x to 8x 3.4GHz CPU
- 10 GB to 320 GB SSD storage
- Automated backups (paid separately, for a one-time fee)
These game hosting plans allow you to install an unlimited number of “slots” on one VPS server, subject to the “max-players” value set for your server. It means your server can seamlessly support a large number of players providing the CPU power and RAM are sufficient.
Despite the gaming bias, the hosting plans also provide everything you would expect to find for traditional web hosting, including a control panel, root access, FTP, MySQL with phpMyAdmin, PHP, and Apache. You also get a pre-configured website and forum for free.
ScalaCube lets you choose between HDD and the far faster (and more reliable) SSD storage, and it provides unlimited traffic without throttling. You get a 99.9% availability guarantee, which is around the industry average.
Pricing and Support
ScalaCube’s Minecraft VPS plans are priced quite competitively in comparison with other competing Minecraft hosting services. You can pay for plans monthly in a wide range of currencies including USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, NOK, SEK, MXN, BRL, NZD, and RUB. At the time of writing this review, you can also get a 50% discount using our unique link below.
The company only provides 24h money-back guarantee, but this shouldn’t be an issue since you’re only committing to monthly payments. Also we have not come across any negative reviews on the server reliability front.
Although you can contact the hosting provider via various methods (including email and live chat), the company emphasizes that the 24/7 support team only responds to tickets submitted via the control panel. We’ve checked the promptness of the support and unfortunately some of our live chat messages were never answered.
How does ScalaCube match up to the competition?
For your convenience, we have created a small table with a side-by-side feature list, so you can easily compare ScalaCube with other leading Minecraft server hosts.
As you can see ScalaCube’s entry plan is one of the most affordable out there with features being fairly comparable with other providers. While Shockbyte offers similar pricing it lacks custom control panel which often proves to be quite useful.
| Host | Price From | RAM | Max Players | Control Panel | Mods |
| Shockbyte | $2.50 / month | 1GB | 20 | Multicraft | ✓ |
| Apex Hosting | $3.99 / month | 1GB | ∞ | Multicraft 2.0 | ✓ |
| Hostinger | $8.95 / month | 2GB | 70 | Multicraft | ✓ |
| GameTeam | $2.50 / month | 1GB | ∞ | Multicraft | ✓ |
| ScalaCube | $2.50 / month | 768MB | 10 | Dedicated | ✓ |
ScalaCube FAQs
Q: How good is ScalaCube’s customer support?
Boasting 24/7 customer support, ScalaCube’s hosting provision only includes ticketing support when logged into the control panel – a little disappointing in the age of live chat. While you can contact the company via live chat, not all our messages were answered when we tried.
Q: Does ScalaCube offer free trials?
Although ScalaCube doesn’t offer free trials on their paid plans, you can test a free single-player server. There is no limit on how long you can use this free plan, but it doesn’t work for hosting a Minecraft party, so it won’t tell you how the servers will perform with multiple users – you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan to find out.
Q: How much does ScalaCube cost?
You can actually get a free plan with ScalaCube. Although it comes with only 3GB of RAM, you can set up a solo Minecraft server without spending a penny. You’ll have to pay if you want to invite friends to play too.
Starting from $2.50/month with a 10-player capacity, ScalaCube’s plans scale to accommodate up to 300 players in your region. Dedicated game server hosting for other games (such as ARK and Rust) is more expensive, but still affordable in comparison to ScalaCube’s competitors.
Q: Is ScalaCube’s VPS hosting worth it?
As a dedicated game server provider, ScalaCube’s VPS hosting is perfect for hosting Minecraft, Hytale, ARK, Rust, and Valheim servers. Designed to be easily scalable and moddable, there are over 1,000 click-to-install modpacks like Spigot and Fabric.
If you’re specifically looking for VPS hosting for other use cases than gaming, you may also want to have a look at our list of the most reliable VPS hosts for 2022 before making a final decision.
ScalaCube Review: Conclusions
ScalaCube could be a good choice for game server hosting; specifically for Minecraft. It’s just a pity we couldn’t get a pre-sales support response. It’s also a shame that the hosting features are quite niche and limited if you’re planning to use the hosting beyond gaming. This is one of the reasons that ScalaCube isn’t featured on our best web hosting services list. We would recommend, however, checking out Hostinger’s super affordable plans since it offers more features, high performance and high-quality hosting. Hostinger also offers Minecraft hosting, although their dedicated plans are bit more expensive.
We hope this review was useful. Click below to let us know what you think or leave a comment in the comment section!
