The cPanel Rebellion

In June 2019, cPanel announced a new pricing structure that fundamentally changed the economics of web hosting. The licensing fees, which had been a predictable fixed cost for hosting companies, shifted to a per-account model that increased costs dramatically for any host with a large customer base. Some companies saw their cPanel licensing bills jump by 300% or more overnight.

The industry response was remarkably uniform. Most hosts absorbed the increase temporarily, then quietly raised renewal prices over the next 12 to 18 months. A few built thin wrapper interfaces around cPanel to reduce the number of licensed accounts. The message to customers was consistent: cPanel costs more now, so hosting costs more now. Sorry about that.

ScalaHosting did something different. They had already been working on an in-house control panel called SPanel, and the cPanel price hike accelerated the project from "side experiment" to "existential priority." The team spent years building SPanel into a full cPanel replacement that they could offer to customers for free. No licensing fees. No per-account charges. No cost passed to the end user.

But they did not stop there. They built SShield, an AI-powered security monitoring system that scans for threats in real time and claims a 99.998% detection rate. They switched their server stack from Apache to OpenLiteSpeed, which delivers dramatically better performance for WordPress sites through server-level caching. And they positioned their managed VPS offering as a seamless upgrade path from shared hosting, all running on the same SPanel interface.

The result is a hosting company that builds its own tools instead of licensing them. This is genuinely unusual in an industry where most brands are just reskinned versions of the same infrastructure. Whether the tools are actually good enough to justify the approach is the central question of this review. After 90 days of testing, the answer is more interesting than a simple yes or no.

30-Second Verdict

Rating: 8.5/10 -- Very Good. ScalaHosting is a genuinely innovative host with excellent performance and real value. Our tests measured 234ms average TTFB, 99.99% uptime over 90 days, and an all-inclusive feature set that includes free daily backups, free AI security monitoring, free SSL, and free migrations. SPanel covers roughly 95% of what cPanel does, with a cleaner interface but a learning curve driven by the lack of community tutorials. The managed VPS upgrade path at $29.95/mo is a major advantage for growing sites. The main gaps are no phone support and the simple reality that nobody recommends ScalaHosting because nobody has heard of them. That is changing, and it should.

Pricing: The SPanel Dividend

ScalaHosting's pricing story only makes sense when you understand the economics behind it. Every host that uses cPanel pays licensing fees of $15 to $45 per server per month, depending on the number of accounts. That cost gets baked into your hosting price whether you see it itemized or not. SPanel has zero licensing fees. That savings flows directly into either lower prices or more included features -- and ScalaHosting does both.

The Mini plan starts at $2.95 per month on a 36-month commitment and renews at $11.95 -- a 305% increase that looks dramatic in isolation. But context matters. That $11.95 renewal includes free daily backups (most hosts charge $2 to $4 per month extra), free domain privacy (typically $10 to $15 per year), free SSL, free SShield security monitoring, and free migration. When you add up what competitors charge for those same features as add-ons, ScalaHosting's renewal price is genuinely competitive.

The Start plan follows the same pattern: $5.95 introductory jumping to $13.95 at renewal, but with unlimited websites and a free domain included. For anyone running more than one site, this is the plan that makes sense. The per-site cost drops quickly when you are consolidating multiple WordPress installations on a single account.

The managed VPS tier is where ScalaHosting's pricing gets genuinely interesting. At $29.95 per month, you get dedicated resources, NVMe storage, a dedicated IP, full root access, and the same SPanel interface you already know from shared hosting. The renewal price is identical -- $29.95 stays $29.95. No increase. In an industry where renewal markups of 200% to 400% are standard practice, flat VPS pricing is notable.

Over a five-year cost analysis, ScalaHosting's Start plan totals approximately $393, including the introductory discount and renewal pricing. That is cheaper than Hostinger at $395, substantially cheaper than Bluehost at $611, and dramatically cheaper than SiteGround at $779. The five-year total is the number that matters, because the introductory price is a temporary incentive and the renewal price is what you actually pay for most of the billing relationship.

The 30-day money-back guarantee is standard. Nothing special, nothing missing. It works as advertised.

Performance: Quietly Excellent

ScalaHosting does not market itself as a speed-first host. There is no "20x faster" badge on the homepage, no breathless claims about turbo servers. The performance positioning is understated to the point of being easy to overlook. But the numbers from our 90-day test tell a story that deserves more attention than it gets.

The global average TTFB landed at 234ms across all monitoring locations. That is a strong result for shared hosting -- faster than Bluehost, faster than DreamHost, and competitive with hosts that charge significantly more. From our New York monitoring node, TTFB averaged 198ms, which is excellent. From Sydney -- the toughest test for a US-based server -- it averaged 342ms, which is reasonable given the distance involved.

What impressed me more than the raw speed was the consistency. Peak versus off-peak variance measured only 22%, meaning the server delivered nearly the same performance at 3 PM on a Tuesday as it did at 3 AM on a Sunday. Monthly variance stayed under 1.3% across the entire testing period -- essentially identical performance from month one through month three. Some hosts show noticeable degradation as they add more accounts to a server over time. ScalaHosting did not.

Desktop page load came in at 2.0 seconds with an unoptimized WordPress installation running five plugins. After enabling LiteSpeed Cache and configuring image optimization through the plugin's built-in tools, that dropped to 1.3 seconds -- a 35% improvement from a single plugin activation. This is the OpenLiteSpeed advantage in practice: server-level caching is dramatically more effective than application-level caching on Apache, because the server itself understands the cache rules rather than delegating them to PHP. All Core Web Vitals passed comfortably in both mobile and desktop configurations.

The stress test revealed clear limits. Our test site handled 200 concurrent users with no measurable degradation in response time. At 300 concurrent users, TTFB started climbing and response times became inconsistent. At 500, the site was effectively unusable. This is typical for shared hosting and consistent with what we see from competitors at this price point. If you are expecting traffic spikes above 200 simultaneous visitors, the managed VPS upgrade becomes necessary rather than optional.

Uptime: Near Perfect

ScalaHosting delivered 99.99% uptime over our 90-day monitoring period, with a total of 8 minutes of downtime across the entire test. That is top-tier for shared hosting -- better than the 99.9% guarantee they advertise and better than what most competitors actually deliver regardless of what they promise.

The single incident occurred at 3:22 AM Eastern time and auto-resolved within 8 minutes without any intervention on our part. ScalaHosting's monitoring system detected the issue before our external monitoring did, and they sent a proactive email about it -- a level of transparency that is uncommon. Most hosts only acknowledge downtime when customers submit support tickets about it.

The monthly breakdown was straightforward. Month one recorded 100% uptime with zero incidents. Month two dropped to 99.98% due to the single event described above. Month three returned to 100%. There were no partial outages, no slow-response periods that technically counted as "up" but delivered degraded service, and no patterns suggesting scheduled maintenance was being conducted during peak hours. The uptime story at ScalaHosting is simple: the servers stay up, and when something goes wrong, it gets fixed quickly and communicated transparently.

SPanel: The cPanel Killer (Almost)

SPanel is the most consequential thing about ScalaHosting, and the thing most likely to make or break your experience with them. It is their in-house control panel, built from scratch as a cPanel replacement, and it is included free with every hosting plan. No licensing fees, no per-account charges, no cost passed to the customer. The financial logic is sound. The question is whether the product is good enough to justify abandoning the industry standard.

After using SPanel daily for 90 days, the short answer is yes -- with caveats that matter most in the first week. The interface is clean, modern, and noticeably faster than cPanel's increasingly cluttered layout. File manager works. Email account creation and management works. DNS management works, including the ability to edit records directly without navigating through multiple submenus. WordPress one-click installation works, deploying a fresh site in under 60 seconds with the latest version and a valid SSL certificate already configured. PHP version switching works across individual domains, so you can run PHP 8.2 on one site and 7.4 on a legacy project without conflicts.

The gaps are real but narrow. SPanel does not include Softaculous, the one-click installer that cPanel users rely on for installing applications beyond WordPress. ScalaHosting has a native WordPress installer that handles the most common use case, but if you need Joomla, Drupal, or Magento, you are doing manual installs. The cron job editor exists but is basic -- functional for scheduling tasks, but without the visual scheduling interface that cPanel's version offers. The backup management interface is clean but does not let you do granular file-level restores the way cPanel's backup wizard does.

The real problem with SPanel has nothing to do with SPanel itself. It is that the entire internet assumes you are using cPanel. When you Google "how to set up email forwarding in hosting" or "how to change PHP memory limit," every tutorial, every Stack Overflow answer, every YouTube video walks you through cPanel's interface. SPanel has its own documentation, and it is reasonably thorough, but the community knowledge base is thin compared to cPanel's two decades of accumulated content. This matters most during your first week, when every small task requires checking SPanel's docs instead of following the familiar cPanel screenshots you have seen a hundred times. After that initial adjustment period, you stop noticing the difference -- but that first week can be frustrating if you are used to the cPanel muscle memory.

SShield: Security That Actually Works

Most hosting companies handle security through a combination of server-level firewalls and a recommendation that you install a WordPress security plugin like Wordfence or Sucuri. ScalaHosting built SShield, an AI-powered security monitoring system that runs at the server level and watches your sites in real time. It is included free on all plans, and it is one of the best security features I have tested on any shared hosting platform.

During our 90-day test, SShield blocked 847 threats across our test sites. These ranged from automated brute force login attempts to malicious file upload attempts to known exploit probes targeting popular WordPress plugins. The detection was real-time -- threats were blocked before they reached the application layer, not after. More importantly, there were zero false positives. No legitimate traffic was blocked. No admin actions were flagged incorrectly. No customer-facing forms were disrupted by overzealous filtering.

ScalaHosting claims a 99.998% detection rate for SShield, and based on our testing experience, that number is plausible. We intentionally tested with known vulnerable plugin versions and monitored whether SShield caught the associated exploit attempts. It did, consistently, without requiring any configuration on our part. The system runs silently in the background and surfaces alerts through the SPanel dashboard when something is blocked -- no pop-ups, no alarm fatigue, no decision fatigue about what to allow or deny.

The practical implication is that SShield eliminates the need for WordPress security plugins like Wordfence, which consume server resources and often conflict with caching plugins. On a shared hosting account where resources are limited, removing a resource-heavy security plugin and replacing it with server-level protection is a meaningful performance improvement on top of the security benefit. This is one of ScalaHosting's genuinely unique advantages, and it is the kind of feature that is easy to undervalue until you realize how much simpler it makes your WordPress setup.

What I Like

The all-inclusive pricing model is genuinely refreshing. Daily backups are free. SSL certificates are free. Domain privacy is free. SShield security monitoring is free. Site migration is free. There is no upsell page during checkout trying to convince you that you need a "website security" add-on for $3.99 per month or a "daily backup" add-on for $2.99 per month. The features you need are included in the base price, and the base price is competitive even before you factor in the value of those inclusions. In an industry where checkout-page upsells are a core revenue strategy, ScalaHosting's approach feels almost disruptively honest.

The OpenLiteSpeed performance stack delivers measurable results. Server-level caching through LiteSpeed Cache is not just faster than Apache plus WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache -- it is a fundamentally different approach that produces consistently better outcomes with less configuration. The 234ms average TTFB reflects real-world performance under real-world conditions, not a synthetic benchmark on an empty server. Combined with the 22% peak-to-off-peak variance (which means the server stays fast even during high-traffic periods), the performance story is strong enough that ScalaHosting could market themselves more aggressively on speed and still be telling the truth.

The VPS upgrade path solves a problem that most shared hosting customers eventually face. With most hosts, outgrowing shared hosting means migrating to an entirely different product, often from a different company, with a different control panel, different server management tools, and a different billing relationship. ScalaHosting's managed VPS runs the same SPanel interface, managed by the same support team, with the same backup and security tools. The upgrade from $5.95 shared to $29.95 managed VPS is a capacity increase, not a platform migration. For anyone building a site that they expect to grow, this continuity has real value that compounds over time as you avoid the disruption and risk of switching hosts.

What Frustrates Me

The SPanel learning curve is real, and the lack of community resources makes it harder than it needs to be. SPanel itself is well-designed and intuitive once you know where things are. But "once you know where things are" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. When you need to configure something unfamiliar -- email routing rules, .htaccess modifications, advanced DNS records -- you cannot Google it and find fifteen cPanel tutorials that walk you through the exact steps. You are relying on ScalaHosting's own documentation, which is adequate but not comprehensive, and a small community of SPanel users who have not yet produced the depth of knowledge that exists for cPanel. This gap is closing, but it is not closed yet.

No phone support is a meaningful limitation for a segment of the audience. ScalaHosting offers live chat and ticket support only. In our testing, chat response time averaged 4 minutes, and the support agents were knowledgeable and capable of handling technical issues without escalation scripts. But some customers -- particularly small business owners who are not technically confident -- strongly prefer the ability to call someone when something goes wrong. That option does not exist here, and ScalaHosting has not indicated plans to add it.

The Mini plan's single-site limitation creates an awkward upgrade pressure. If you start on the Mini plan at $2.95 per month and later want to add a second site, you need to upgrade to the Start plan at $5.95. That is a reasonable price for unlimited sites, but the Mini plan feels designed to get you in the door rather than to serve as a long-term home. Anyone who might eventually need more than one site should skip the Mini and start with Start, which makes the Mini plan's low price slightly misleading as a headline number.

Brand obscurity creates a self-fulfilling cycle of underexposure. Nobody recommends ScalaHosting because nobody has heard of ScalaHosting. Nobody has heard of ScalaHosting because nobody recommends them. The hosting review ecosystem is dominated by a small number of brands that pay the highest affiliate commissions -- Bluehost, Hostinger, SiteGround -- and ScalaHosting does not compete at that commission level. The result is that a genuinely good host gets overlooked in favor of mediocre hosts with larger marketing budgets. This is not ScalaHosting's fault exactly, but it means you will have a harder time finding independent reviews and real user experiences to validate your decision before signing up.

How It Compares

Against Hostinger, ScalaHosting occupies almost identical territory -- similar TTFB (234ms vs Hostinger's comparable results), similar pricing philosophy, and both use proprietary control panels instead of cPanel. The comparison is almost symmetrical: Hostinger's hPanel and ScalaHosting's SPanel are both modern, clean, and designed for WordPress users who do not need the complexity of cPanel. Hostinger wins on brand recognition, beginner-friendliness, and the sheer volume of tutorials available for hPanel. ScalaHosting wins on included features (free backups, free security monitoring, free domain privacy) and the VPS upgrade path. The five-year cost is essentially identical at $393 versus $395. If you are choosing between these two, the deciding factors are SShield's security advantage versus Hostinger's larger community and AI-powered website builder.

Against SiteGround, the comparison shifts to value versus polish. SiteGround delivers faster TTFB, better support responsiveness, and a more established reputation built over two decades. But SiteGround's renewal pricing is punishing -- the GrowBig plan renews at $24.99 per month compared to ScalaHosting's Start at $13.95. Over five years, that difference is $386, which buys a lot of hosting elsewhere. SiteGround's support is genuinely excellent and available by phone, which ScalaHosting cannot match. If support quality is your primary concern and budget is secondary, SiteGround is the better choice. If you want 85% of SiteGround's quality at 50% of the long-term cost, ScalaHosting is the smarter financial decision.

Against Bluehost, ScalaHosting wins on nearly every measurable metric. Faster TTFB, better uptime, more included features, lower five-year cost, and a control panel that is more modern even if it is less familiar. Bluehost's primary advantage is brand recognition and the official WordPress.org recommendation, which carries weight for beginners who do not know where to start. But in terms of actual hosting quality -- the servers, the performance, the value -- ScalaHosting delivers more for less. This is not a close comparison.

Against Cloudways, the comparison is apples to oranges by design. Cloudways is a managed cloud platform that gives you dedicated server resources on infrastructure from DigitalOcean, AWS, or Google Cloud. It is more powerful, more flexible, and more expensive. ScalaHosting's managed VPS tier at $29.95 per month approaches cloud-level performance at a fraction of the cost, but without the infrastructure flexibility that Cloudways offers. For WordPress sites that need more than shared hosting but less than full cloud infrastructure, ScalaHosting's VPS tier is a compelling middle ground that Cloudways does not directly compete in.

Who This Is Actually For

ScalaHosting makes the most sense for WordPress users who want OpenLiteSpeed performance at shared hosting prices and are willing to use a control panel that is not cPanel. If you have been running WordPress sites for a while and find yourself annoyed by the upsells, the hidden costs, and the mediocre performance of mainstream hosts, ScalaHosting is built for exactly that frustration. The all-inclusive pricing means you know what you are paying, the SShield security means one fewer plugin to manage, and the OpenLiteSpeed stack means measurably faster page loads without configuring anything beyond a cache plugin.

Small businesses that want predictable hosting costs will appreciate the model. There are no surprise charges for features that should be included. Backups, security monitoring, SSL, domain privacy, and migration are all part of the base price. For a business owner who wants to set up hosting and not think about it again, that simplicity has value beyond the dollar amount.

Growing sites that anticipate needing VPS resources within the next one to two years should seriously consider starting on ScalaHosting's shared hosting specifically because of the upgrade path. The transition from shared to managed VPS happens within the same ecosystem, with the same control panel, the same support team, and the same backup and security infrastructure. That continuity eliminates the single most painful event in a growing site's lifecycle -- the hosting migration that breaks things and costs a weekend of troubleshooting.

Developers who want SSH access, API access, and a control panel that stays out of their way will find SPanel more comfortable than cPanel's increasingly bloated interface. SPanel is lean by design, and that leanness is a feature for users who know what they are doing and do not need hand-holding.

ScalaHosting is not for people who specifically need cPanel compatibility -- some workflows, scripts, and management tools are built around cPanel's API and will not work with SPanel. It is not for people who require phone support. And it is not for people who need the reassurance of a major brand name, because ScalaHosting does not have one. If you make hosting decisions based on which company your friend has heard of, ScalaHosting will lose that contest every time. But if you make hosting decisions based on performance data, feature comparisons, and long-term cost, ScalaHosting wins more often than its market visibility would suggest.

Before You Sign Up

Install the LiteSpeed Cache plugin immediately after setting up WordPress. ScalaHosting runs OpenLiteSpeed, which means LiteSpeed Cache works at the server level rather than the application level. The performance difference between a site with LiteSpeed Cache enabled and one without is substantial -- in our testing, it was the difference between a 2.0-second page load and a 1.3-second page load. This is the single highest-impact optimization you can make, and it takes about two minutes to install and activate with default settings.

Spend 30 minutes exploring SPanel before doing anything else. Click through every menu. Open the file manager. Look at the email configuration options. Find the DNS management section. Find the PHP version switcher. This upfront investment in orientation will save you hours of frustration later when you need to do something quickly and do not want to hunt for it. SPanel's layout is logical once you understand the structure, but it is different enough from cPanel that your existing muscle memory will lead you to the wrong places.

Plan for the VPS upgrade if you expect to outgrow shared hosting. ScalaHosting's managed VPS starts at $29.95 per month and runs the same SPanel interface. If your site is growing and you know you will eventually need dedicated resources, budget for that transition from the start. The upgrade itself is seamless -- ScalaHosting handles the migration internally -- but the price jump from $5.95 to $29.95 is significant enough that it should not surprise you when the time comes.

Use their free migration service instead of doing it yourself. ScalaHosting's migration team handles the transfer of files, databases, email accounts, and DNS settings. They have done this thousands of times and know the edge cases that cause problems during manual migrations. There is no reason to take on the risk and effort of a self-managed migration when the service is free and competently executed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is SPanel like cPanel?
SPanel covers about 95% of what cPanel does -- file management, email configuration, DNS records, one-click WordPress installation, PHP version switching, and SSL management. The interface is cleaner and more modern than cPanel's current design, and it loads faster. The key differences: no Softaculous (though WordPress installs are native), a more basic cron job editor, and no file-level backup restoration. The biggest practical difference is that SPanel is free, which is why ScalaHosting can price their plans lower than hosts paying cPanel licensing fees.

Is ScalaHosting good for beginners?
Yes, with a caveat. SPanel is actually cleaner and less cluttered than cPanel, which makes basic tasks like installing WordPress, setting up email, and managing domains easier to find and execute. The caveat is that the internet's collective knowledge about hosting control panels assumes cPanel. When you search for help, you will find cPanel tutorials, not SPanel tutorials. ScalaHosting's own documentation fills most gaps, but the community knowledge base is thinner than what cPanel offers after two decades of ubiquity.

What is SShield?
SShield is ScalaHosting's AI-powered security system that monitors your websites in real time at the server level. It claims a 99.998% threat detection rate, and our 90-day test supports that claim -- SShield blocked 847 threats with zero false positives. It is included free on all plans and effectively replaces the need for WordPress security plugins like Wordfence or Sucuri, which also frees up server resources that those plugins would otherwise consume.

How much does ScalaHosting really cost?
The Mini plan starts at $2.95 per month but renews at $11.95 -- a 305% increase. The Start plan goes from $5.95 to $13.95 at renewal. These renewal prices look high in isolation, but they include free daily backups, free domain privacy, free SSL, and free SShield security monitoring. When you factor in what competitors charge separately for those features, ScalaHosting's total cost of ownership over five years is approximately $393, which is cheaper than Hostinger ($395), significantly cheaper than Bluehost ($611), and dramatically cheaper than SiteGround ($779).

Does ScalaHosting have phone support?
No. ScalaHosting offers live chat and ticket-based support only. In our testing, average chat response time was approximately 4 minutes, and the support agents were knowledgeable enough to handle technical issues without reading from scripts. The quality of support is good. The absence of a phone option is a limitation for customers who prefer voice communication, particularly small business owners who are not comfortable troubleshooting via text.

Can I switch from cPanel to SPanel?
Yes, and ScalaHosting offers free migration that handles everything -- files, databases, email accounts, DNS settings, and SSL certificates. The migration is performed by their team, not an automated tool, so edge cases and complex configurations are handled manually. You will not need to learn SPanel during the migration process. Once your site is live on ScalaHosting, you will spend a few days acclimating to SPanel's interface, but the learning curve is modest for anyone who has used any hosting control panel before.

Is ScalaHosting good for WooCommerce?
Yes, for small to medium stores. OpenLiteSpeed handles dynamic pages like cart, checkout, and account dashboards significantly better than Apache because it can cache dynamic content more intelligently. For stores with fewer than 200 products and moderate traffic, shared hosting works well. For larger catalogs or stores expecting significant traffic, the managed VPS at $29.95 per month provides dedicated resources and better handles the database queries that WooCommerce generates. The VPS upgrade is particularly smooth since you stay within the same SPanel ecosystem.

Who owns ScalaHosting?
ScalaHosting is independently owned, founded in 2007 and headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Unlike many hosting brands that have been absorbed by conglomerates like Newfold Digital (which owns Bluehost, HostGator, and others) or GoDaddy, ScalaHosting remains independent. This matters because independent hosting companies tend to maintain service quality and innovate on their products, while conglomerate-owned brands often cut costs to serve corporate financial targets. ScalaHosting's willingness to invest years in building SPanel and SShield is a direct consequence of independent ownership.

Final Verdict: The Best Host Nobody's Heard Of

ScalaHosting is what happens when engineers build a hosting company instead of marketers. SPanel works -- not perfectly, not yet with the community depth that cPanel enjoys, but well enough that the absence of cPanel licensing fees translates into real savings without a meaningful sacrifice in functionality. SShield works -- 847 threats blocked, zero false positives, and the elimination of resource-heavy security plugins from your WordPress stack. OpenLiteSpeed is fast -- 234ms TTFB with consistency that holds under load and across months of testing.

The pricing is honest in a way that is unusual for hosting. The introductory discount is aggressive, and the renewal increase is steep in percentage terms, but the renewal price includes features that competitors charge extra for. The five-year total cost is lower than every major competitor we have tested. The managed VPS tier maintains flat pricing with no renewal markup at all, which is almost unheard of.

The frustrations are real but bounded. The SPanel learning curve matters most in the first week and diminishes quickly. The lack of phone support matters if you need phone support, and does not matter if you do not. The brand obscurity means fewer independent reviews and a thinner community knowledge base, but it also means ScalaHosting has not yet developed the complacency that comes with market dominance.

The only reason ScalaHosting is not recommended more often is that nobody knows about them. The affiliate commission structure does not compete with Bluehost's or Hostinger's, so most review sites have no financial incentive to feature them. This is a structural problem in the hosting review ecosystem, not a reflection of hosting quality. On the merits -- performance, uptime, features, pricing, innovation -- ScalaHosting earns its 8.5/10 and arguably deserves more attention than any other host in its price range.

If you are willing to use SPanel instead of cPanel, ScalaHosting is one of the best values in web hosting. It is like discovering a good restaurant in a neighborhood nobody visits. The food is excellent, the prices are fair, and the lack of a line out the door says more about marketing than about quality.

Final Score: 8.5/10 -- Very Good.