ScalaHosting Partners with MariaDB Foundation and Moves Its Fleet to MariaDB 11.8

ScalaHosting is upgrading the database layer across its managed cloud VPS fleet from MariaDB 10.11 to MariaDB 11.8, and has joined MariaDB Foundation as a Gold Sponsor. Both are Long Term Support releases; 11.8 has been generally available since June 2025 and is maintained through June 2028. The upgrade is handled as part of the managed service, with no migration or application changes on the customer side.

Where the performance difference shows up
The substantive change is the query optimizer. MariaDB reworked its cost model in the 11.0 series, moving to a purely cost-based approach with costs recalculated for SSD-backed storage rather than the spinning disks the original model assumed. That work ships in 11.8. MariaDB's published estimate is that roughly 10 queries in 100 get a different execution plan, and that most of those are faster.
The gains concentrate in specific query shapes:

• Joins spanning more than two tables — faceted product filters are the canonical case.
• Low-cardinality columns in large tables (status, category), and filters matching more than ~10% of rows.
• Year-range filters on date columns, which can now use the index — the pattern behind order-history screens.
• Bulk DELETE with subqueries, which can now use MariaDB's full set of subquery strategies.

This is a planner improvement, so it surfaces in multi-table, multi-condition workloads under concurrency - not in single-row lookups or in CPU and disk micro-benchmarks.
11.8 also brings vector search to general availability. It runs inside the same server as ordinary tables, so meaning-based matching can be combined with plain SQL predicates in one query, without provisioning a separate vector database alongside the VPS.

Gold sponsorship and what follows
"MariaDB has been a dependable foundation for our platform for years. It is the default database on every SPanel server we run, and it powers our high-availability clusters through Galera and MaxScale," said Vlad Georgiev, co-founder of ScalaHosting.
The sponsorship funds independent, community-led development of MariaDB Server. It confers no early access or preferential treatment. MariaDB Foundation's announcement is here.
ScalaHosting is also deepening MariaDB management inside SPanel, its in-house control panel. Next on that roadmap is point-in-time recovery with minute-level granularity, letting developers restore or download a database as it existed at a specific timestamp rather than falling back to the nearest daily snapshot. It is planned for inclusion in existing plans at no additional cost.

More information: scalahosting.com