Although ScalaCube has been around since 2019, it has built quite a name for itself. The company is headquartered in Vizivarava (Estonia) and is passionate about gaming, focusing its services on designing game servers with an easy place for minecraft.
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- The Forever Free plan offers a great way to enter the space
- Free site and forum with all premium plans
- Unlimited servers with all premium plans
against
- It can get expensive
- The free plan is limited to one player
Shockbyte has been around since 2013 and has offered gamers affordable and easy to setup servers for Minecraft but also other games like Rust, ARK: Survival Evolved, Conan Exiles and the list goes on.
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- 100% uptime guarantee
- Customer support is available at all times
- Easy to use control panel
- Unlimited disk space with all packages
- Very budget friendly options
against
- The 24-hour money-back guarantee is a little stingy
- Customer support may need some improvement
To enjoy a smooth, secure, and superior Minecraft gaming experience, you will need to take advantage of one of the best server hosting services that specialize in the game of your choice. However, easier said than done.
With a lot of Minecraft server hosting (Opens in a new tab) Options on the market, varying in cost and quality, finding the right one can be more difficult than one might expect. To help you out, we’ve created this run-down comparison guide and broken down the pricing, features, performance, security, and support of two major players among Minecraft Server Hosting Providers – ScalaCube (Opens in a new tab) and Shockbyte (Opens in a new tab).
ScalaCube services are highly scalable and include virtual and dedicated servers (VPS). (Opens in a new tab)), but also a good forever free server that you can use to try out the platform. For server locations, players can choose between the USA, UK, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Shockbyte offers server locations across Europe, North America and Singapore. Although there is no free version, the paid plans are about as pocket-friendly as it gets.
ScalaCube vs. Shockbyte: key similarities and differences
While ScalaCube and Shockbyte share the same purpose and support server hosting for some of the same games, they differ slightly in terms of pricing, product range, hosting type, server locations, and of course, freebies.
Both providers will provide you with strong security, great performance, and the ability to apply multiple modpacks for a customizable action-packed adventure. Also, both of our competitors have the ability (although somewhat slow) customer support to back you up if something goes wrong – however, support availability is somewhat different.
Also, in terms of hosting types, ScalaCube is very popular for its VPS packages, while Shockbyte offers dedicated server hosting.
Comparison pricing
ScalaCube offers a forever free 24/7 Minecraft server hosting plan that includes all versions of Minecraft, DDoS protection, server monitoring service, 3GB of RAM, 30GB of SSD storage, and single server support. However, Minecraft isn’t the only game with a freemium version – you can also use a free server for ARK: Survival Evolved, Rust, Hytale, Velheim, and Project Zomboid.
If you want a little more of everything, you can choose from multiple plans — it’s nine plans for Minecraft servers and pricing starts at $4 and ends at $192 per month. However, you will get a 50% discount on the total cost for the first month.
As an add-on, you can also purchase automated backups and the Minecraft launcher for a one-time fee.
In contrast, Shockbyte does not offer a free version but does offer a variety of plans for more than 25 game servers – much more than ScalaCube. Minecraft server hosting plans start at $2.50 per month and end up with a premium version that costs you $40 per month. Additionally, you have the option to create a custom plan and can choose from three server locations: America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
So while ScalaCube provides a free forever plan, the variety of plans Shockbyte offers cannot be exceeded. In addition, all of its plans and features are presented in a more creative yet easy-to-understand manner.
While ScalaCube offers a 7-day money-back guarantee, with Shockbyte, the money-back guarantee only lasts 72 hours.
Payment methods accepted with both providers include major credit/debit cards and PayPal, but Shockbyte goes a step further and adds bank transfers and Paymentwall to the list.
Features
Since ScalaCube puts its focus on hosting Minecraft, most of its premium features are related to it to some extent. However, all Minecraft-focused plans include unlimited slots for players, support for multiple servers, and DDoS protection (Opens in a new tab)plugin / mod / modpack support, custom JAR, full file access, but also free domain name and free MySQL database.
Also, all premium plans include a pre-built site with a forum – and it’ll be ready to use in no time. This will help you monitor everything on your server from the number of players to its overall performance. Even better, it’s customizable so you can add your own content if you’d like.
Another strength of ScalaCube is its intuitive and easy to use interface (UI) that will help you manage and monitor every aspect of your server effortlessly.
As with its competitor, with Shockbyte, you also get a free subdomain and hassle-free setup backed by an automated wizard, 100% DDoS attack protection, free MySQL databases, unlimited slots, full FTP access, snapshot support, and automatic backups. , and much more.
While all plans include unlimited SSD storage, with premium plans (“Spartan,” “Zeus,” and “Titan”) you’ll get lightning-fast NVMe SSDs.
Shockbyte also provides a clear, color-coded console that makes your work as smooth as possible – it looks and feels much more modern than ScalaCube’s UI.
Modpack installation
Both ScalaCube and Shockbyte will get one-click installs of over a thousand unique mod packs like Voids Wrath, Feed The Beast, and CurseForge. This means that any of them can be launched in a matter of seconds. The same is true for plugins, which can be installed via the convenience feature in the dashboard or manually uploaded via FTP.
If you are not a fan of any of these modpacks, you can create your own modpack and upload it. Since both of our contenders offer easy-to-follow guides and easy-to-use dashboards, this should be a piece of cake.
In general, modpack support is about the same, and modpack installs went smoothly with both ScalaCube and Shockbyte, so we can’t really pick one over the other.
Uptime and speed
ScalaCube does not offer a guarantee of uptime, indicating that you shouldn’t expect more than the industry average uptime of 99.9%. In return, Shockbyte guarantees 100% network availability for all application services covered by the Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Although this does not mean that your server will run day and night without any downtime, you will be compensated for every five minutes of server downtime that it suffers.
To test this, we monitored the main sites of both contenders for a month and couldn’t find any trace of downtime, which looks very promising.
As for speed, Shockbyte takes the lead and leaves ScalaCube far behind. This comes as no surprise since Shockbyte uses NVMe SSDs that should be about six times faster than the standard SSDs used by ScalaCube.
After testing its speed with GTmetrix (our trusted tool), Shockbyte got an A grade while ScalaCube had to settle for a B grade for overall speed performance.
protection
While ScalaCube and Shockbyte both protect against DDoS attacks, Shockbyte stands out because it backs up this promise of protection with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) (Opens in a new tab)Backed warranty. Also, since Shockbyte provides its user with a 100% uptime guarantee, it seems to be more trustworthy among the competitors.
However, no major security incidents have been reported with any of the hosting providers.
customer support
Both contenders offer robust self-help options including a full set of step-by-step guides on all the important issues made up in the knowledge base. However, we found Shockbyte’s knowledge base to be better organized and easier to use – it offers a search box option in addition to categories.
Also, with both ScalaCube and Shockbyte you have the option to submit a support ticket, but with ScalaCube you only get relief if you do so from the main dashboard. In addition, the ScalaCube support team is only available during business hours – Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm – so you don’t get into trouble on the weekends.
In turn, Shockbyte’s technical team will be there to help you around the clock – so, 24/7. On top of that, Shockbyte also offers live chat support, but beware, the team isn’t famous for being particularly fast.
Overall, Shockbyte offers more channels of customer support and is available more often – thus, it wins this round.
Final verdict
In the end, while ScalaCube is still a great option for those on a tight budget, Shockbyte does everything a little better than its competitor. They pack a whole host of features into their packages, offer 24/7 customer support, and have a plan that fits every pocket. It is a solid, reliable and secure option for anyone looking for a Minecraft server hosting solution.
- Check out our list of the best web hosting (Opens in a new tab) services there