Since around 2013, we have been involved in various types of online businesses and activities. We used to have a variety of personal blogging, affiliate marketing, and portfolio websites.
We have used a variety of hosting services so far to host our websites. One thing we have noticed is that as long as the traffic volume is low, low-budget hostings provide good service.
But whenever the monthly traffic reaches several thousand, there is no alternative to using premium hosting. As we have long-term plans for TableBerg, we’ve recently moved our site to Kinsta.
We’re excited to share our insights and experiences with Kinsta’s hosting services. In this review, we’ll explain why we picked Kinsta, overview the onboarding experience, and cover performance statistics.
We’ll also illustrate how their customer support works, highlight the key features, analyze the price, and discuss the pros and cons.
- What is Kinsta WordPress Hosting?
- Reasons for Choosing Kinsta
- How does the Kinsta cPanel (Dashboard) look?
- What Was Our First Experience of Kinsta?
- Performance We Enjoyed by Various Metrics
- Pricing Plans of Kinsta
- Comparison Table: Kinsta vs Other Hosting Providers
- Weaknesses of Kinsta: We Have Experienced
- Users’ Reviews over Kinsta on G2
- Final Evaluation
What is Kinsta WordPress Hosting?
Kinsta is a premium managed WordPress hosting provider. Kinsta exclusively offers a service fully optimized and tailored for WordPress sites of all sizes. As a result, Kinsta handles all the technical issues related to WordPress hosting itself.
Kinsta is built on Google Cloud Platform’s Premium Tier network. They use the Google Cloud’s infrastructure, especially the Google Compute Engine. It allows them to instantly scale up resources to meet the demands of any website, even during periods when traffic unexpectedly spikes. Kinsta’s infrastructure is also enhanced by LXD container technology which allows the complete isolation of each site on the platform; the resources are allocated privately, and not shared with any other site. An enterprise-level Cloudflare integration is included for all clients, free of charge, with many powerful features from an extensive CDN network, free wildcard SSL, Edge Caching and much more.
We personally know many Kinsta users. Considering their reviews and our experience, we’ve realized that, like any top-class hosting provider, Kinsta also offers high-performance hosting, uptime, and top support.
Sorry if the last sentence sounds a bit promotional. Kinsta makes hosting a WordPress site easy for businesses and individuals.
Some Top Features of Kinsta: A Quick Snapshot
You will find almost all the features that any premium hosting provider offers in Kinsta. Some notable features among them are:
- PHP 8.0, server-level caching, and a CDN with 260+ locations.
- Enterprise-level firewalls, DDoS detection, and daily backups
- Staging environments, Git integration, and SSH access
- Powerful dashboard for easy site management
- Simplified SSL management with free Wildcard SSL support
- C2 machines in 37 worldwide data centers and C3D in 6 centers for fast speed
- Image optimization and code modification for additional speed
- Troubleshoot sites with just one click
- 24/7/365 support for any technical assistance
- Provides extensive knowledgebase and documentation
Reasons for Choosing Kinsta
We had a deal with another hosting company. They offered cheap shared hosting, but as a growing website, we needed better tools and better performance. The reasons we decided to choose Kinsta over other hosting providers include:
- Performance and Speed: Their infrastructure is powered by Google Cloud Platform and its fastest C2 and C3D machines, which should be faster and more reliable than other shared hosting alternatives.
- Managed Services: Kinsta provides us with a fully managed hosting environment, relieving us from the technical load and allowing us to focus on the content creation and business expansion aspects of our service.
- Customer Support: That you’d get help 24/7/365 from WordPress professionals was a selling point.
- Scalability: If our site traffic grew and peaked, we’d need a hosting solution that could scale effortlessly and with no sacrifice in performance.
How does the Kinsta cPanel (Dashboard) look?
Let’s clarify at the beginning! Kinsta doesn’t offer a traditional cPanel like the other hosting providers. Unlike others, they offer a custom dashboard, which they developed themselves, called MyKinsta.
MyKinsta provides a clean and user-friendly interface that is very easy to use. It gives you all the details and metrics that are crucial for your day-to-day website management.
In fact, you will get almost everything you would get in other traditional cPanels, but in a simpler way. You can perform the following actions easily using MyKinsta.
- Managing WordPress websites
- Managing apps
- Managing databases
- Managing SSL certificates
- Controlling cache
- Managing redirects
- Malware scanning
- Configuring CDN
What Was Our First Experience of Kinsta?
When we first considered Kinsta for our hosting needs, we were drawn by its promise of superior performance and robust features. Here are the things we have experienced with Kinsta since the beginning:
- Migration Experience
Kinsta offers free site migrations and promises a hands-off experience as they care for your migration. For our migration, Kinsta managed to get it done within less than 24 hours with very brief downtime and no data loss.
This type of service could have saved us considerable time and effort in the past, as we always manually handled site migrations.
- Initial Setup
Immediately after the migration, we set up our website’s settings, managed SSL certificates, and configured the server environment.
We found MyKinsta great for accessing all our hosting features: resource usage, staging setup, and detailed analytics – all from the same place.
- User-Friendly Interface
The MyKinsta dashboard’s user-friendliness was immediately apparent. It was easy to use and featured an intuitive UI. Managing our sites was very simple, as everything was right at our fingertips via the dashboard.
This fully eliminated the inconvenience we had been dealing with throughout our early hosting experience.
For example, important functions such as site monitoring and analytics, managing backups, and accessing staging sites were easy to accomplish on the dashboard.
- Customer Support
We were overwhelmingly pleased with our early experiences with Kinsta’s customer support. Kinsta provides 24/7 live chat support staffed with what Kinsta describes as ‘WordPress experts.’
Our support queries were answered almost immediately (response time was under two minutes, with many answering within 10 minutes) and solved quickly by extremely knowledgeable customer support agents.
From a purely selfish perspective, this was one of our major reasons for staying with Kinsta.
- Performance Boost
We noticed a big jump in performance right away: pages were much quicker to load, and overall, the site felt a lot slicker and a lot more responsive for visitors.
This performance boost confirmed for us that Kinsta’s infrastructure was a massive step up from what we’d been using previously.
Performance We Enjoyed by Various Metrics
Performance is where Kinsta really shines. We put it to severe testing to see how fast it loads pages, maintains uptime, and more. Here are the results:
- Page Load Speeds
Prior to our move to Kinsta, our goal time was 3.5 seconds per page load. After migration, our load times dropped to an average of just 1.2 seconds.
Cutting load time down to 35% improved user experience, and we also began to see improvements in our SEO rankings.
- Uptime
One of Kinsta’s eight committed-level agreements is offering us an SLA of 99.9% uptime. In the past six months, our site never showed a drop in availability, which equals 100% uptime.
We cannot overstate the importance of visitors trusting us to keep our home on the internet available at all times.
- Support Quality
I can page them 24/7 via live chat, and the folks there are professional WordPress experts. During our entire testing, we never felt that we were dealing with anything less than a professional support team.
Every query was answered thoroughly, and, in many cases, the issues we had were fixed in less than 10 minutes (the average time to hear back from them was under two minutes).
Pricing Plans of Kinsta
Kinsta’s pricing is higher than that of traditional shared hosting, but the value provided justifies the cost. Here’s a breakdown of their plans:
- Starter Plan: $30/month for one WordPress install, 25,000 visits, and 10 GB of disk space.
- Pro Plan: $60/month for two WordPress installs, 50,000 visits, and 20 GB of disk space.
- Business Plans: Ranging from $100 to $400/month, supporting multiple sites and higher traffic volumes.
- Enterprise Plans: Custom pricing for large-scale businesses with specific requirements.
Notes: Besides, they offer hosting services for web applications, databases, and static sites. You can check their starting prices from the image below.
Despite the higher price point, the performance gains, advanced features, and excellent support provide significant value for money.
Comparison Table: Kinsta vs Other Hosting Providers
If you search online, you will find hundreds of hosting providers. But most of them only resell plans and don’t offer managed hosting for WordPress. So, in this section, we will compare Kinsta and others that offer managed hosting for WordPress.
| Features | Kinsta | SiteGround | WP Engine | Bluehost | HostGator |
| Performance | Built on Google Cloud Platform, consistently fast load times and 99.9% uptime guarantee | Good performance with advanced caching and CDN | Solid performance, but lower than Kinsta in load times | Decent performance but can be inconsistent under high traffic | Variable performance, lower reliability |
| Customer Support | 24/7/365 expert WordPress support via live chat, average response time < 2 minutes | 24/7 support via chat, phone, and tickets, helpful and responsive | 24/7 support via chat, phone, and tickets, knowledgeable team | 24/7 support via chat and phone, can be hit or miss | 24/7 support via chat and phone can be hit or miss |
| Key Features | Free CDN, daily backups, staging environments, advanced security, automatic SSL | Free CDN, daily backups, advanced security, managed WordPress plans | CDN, daily backups, staging environments, strong security, automatic SSL | Basic security, daily backups, free SSL, free CDN on higher plans | Basic features, free SSL, free CDN, daily backups, security add-ons |
| Pricing | Starts at $30/month for 1 WordPress install, scalable plans | Starts at $6.99/month for basic plans, managed WordPress plans start higher | Starts at $25/month for managed WordPress plans, scalable options | Starts at $2.95/month for shared hosting, higher for managed WordPress | Starts at $2.75/month for shared hosting, higher for managed WordPress |
| Scalability | Excellent scalability, handles traffic spikes with ease | Good scalability with higher-tier plans | Good scalability with higher-tier plans | Limited scalability with basic plans, better with higher tiers | Limited scalability with basic plans, better with higher tiers |
| Security | Robust security features including DDoS protection, hardware firewalls, and continuous monitoring | Good security with built-in protections and daily monitoring | Strong security features, including malware scans and firewalls | Basic security, better on higher plans | Basic security, better on higher plans |
| Ease of Use | User-friendly MyKinsta dashboard, easy migration, and setup | Easy-to-use interface, cPanel for advanced management | User-friendly dashboard, seamless migration tools | User-friendly cPanel interface, straightforward setup | User-friendly cPanel interface, straightforward setup |
| Backup Options | Automatic daily backups, manual backups available | Automatic daily backups, on-demand backups for higher plans | Automatic daily backups, on-demand backups | Automatic daily backups, manual backups for higher plans | Automatic daily backups, manual backups for higher plans |
| Uptime | 99.9% uptime guarantee, reliable | 99.99% uptime guarantee, highly reliable | 99.95% uptime guarantee, reliable | 99.9% uptime guarantee, can be inconsistent | 99.9% uptime guarantee, can be inconsistent |
| Free Migration | Free professional migration service | Free migration on higher plans | Free migration included | Free migration on select plans | Free migration on select plans |
Key Takeaways From the Comparison
- Kinsta: Ideal for high performance, reliability, robust security, and excellent customer support. It is best suited for businesses willing to invest in premium hosting.
- SiteGround: A strong competitor with good performance, solid features, and lower starting costs. Suitable for small to medium-sized businesses.
- WP Engine: Similar to Kinsta but with slightly lower performance metrics, WP Engine is suitable for those looking to manage WordPress hosting with strong support.
- Bluehost: Affordable entry-level plans with basic features, best for beginners and small websites. Performance and support can vary.
- HostGator: Budget-friendly with basic features, suitable for small personal websites or blogs. Performance and reliability can be inconsistent.
This table provides a comprehensive comparison of Kinsta with other popular hosting providers, helping you make an informed decision based on your specific needs and budget.
Weaknesses of Kinsta: We Have Experienced
We have experienced several cons/weaknesses of Kinsta while subscribing to and using it. Take a look at them below.
Cost
Key Point: Higher than average pricing may be a barrier for small businesses or personal blogs.
Discussion: Kinsta’s pricing starts at $30 per month for one WordPress install, which is higher than many competitors. SiteGround and Bluehost offer entry-level plans at $6.99 and $2.95 per month, respectively.
Limited Email Hosting
Key Point: Kinsta does not offer email hosting, requiring users to manage email services separately.
Discussion: Unlike many hosting providers that include email hosting in their packages, Kinsta requires users to use third-party services for email. This can be inconvenient for businesses seeking an all-in-one solution. For instance, Bluehost and HostGator include email hosting with their basic plans.
Users’ Reviews over Kinsta on G2
Kinsta is extremely easy to use and intuitive. What’s even better is that they have plenty of staff to handle any questions you may have if they aren’t immediately intuitive for you. Working with them is EASY! I am a complete novice user but can handle anything thrown at me with their help. I’ve been running my own website for a year and haven’t once worried about support. There are so many features and guides to understand them that it doesn’t feel overwhelming. Best of all, everything I had to integrate into my website was never an issue with Kinsta. They even helped me with the integrations. No matter how complicated something seemed at first, they made the ease of implementation seamless. At first, I had to fequently use Kinsta’s staff and features. As I’ve become more proficient, I use them less. But it never felt hard.
As a WordPress website owner, I have seen tangible benefits, including improved search engine rankings, all thanks to Kinsta’s hosting platform. Their customer service has consistently impressed me with its speed and efficiency. Whenever I needed help, Kinsta’s support team was quick to respond and provide solutions, ensuring a satisfying experience. Additionally, Kinsta’s security features, including daily backups and uptime monitoring, have been extremely effective, which are key reasons why I feel safe with them. Finally, setting up redirects is simple and their CDN reliably improves performance.
Filippos F.
Jury Member Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
Final Evaluation
Our experience with Kinsta has been overwhelmingly positive. The transition to their managed hosting service brought significant performance improvements, enhanced security, and outstanding customer support.
While the cost is higher compared to traditional shared hosting, the benefits far outweigh the expenses, especially for websites that prioritize performance and reliability.
In conclusion, Kinsta is highly recommended for businesses and individuals looking for a premium managed WordPress hosting solution.
The investment in Kinsta’s services translates into a smoother, faster, and more secure website, ultimately benefiting both the site owners and their visitors.
