Kinsta WordPress Hosting
$25
Pros
- Fast loading time
- PHP7, HTTP/2, NGINX & LXD Container
- Google Cloud Platform
- DDoS Protection, Free SSLs & advenced WP security
- 24/7 Proactive support staff
Cons
- Not multiple small websites
- No email hosting
Last Updated on January 10, 2022 by Obaro Alidou K.
Is your WordPress website more than a hobby to you? And you are looking for the most reliable WordPress hosting with the best concierge service? Then you will find Kinsta to be your best friend. After years of silence, I decided to break the glass about Kinsta’s Managed WordPress hosting.
Kinsta web Hosting Background?
Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting provider founded in 2013 by Mark Gavalda, a WordPress developer. It is an independently owned company that aims at providing high-end service at a competitive price point along with the best performance ever.
Kinsta claims high to be the best managed WordPress hosting in the market and most users and big bloggers are even praising their service. But, behind the scene, is Kinsta really worth the high money? Keep reading…
Kinsta Web Hosting Platform
Kinsta totally stands out from all the hosting companies we were used to. They are powered exclusively by Google Cloud Platform and even utilize Google Cloud’s premium tier global network to ensure your site loads even faster. As if it wasn’t enough, Kinsta is recommended by Google as a fully-managed WordPress hosting solution.
Their hosting platform has nothing to do with the habitual industry infrastructure used for shared, VPS, or dedicated hosting.
In fact, Kinsta uses LXD managed hosts and orchestrated LXC software containers for each site.
What does it mean?
Every WordPress site is housed in its own isolated container, which has all of the software resources required to run it (Linux, NGINX, PHP, MySQL). The resources are 100% private and are not shared between anyone else or even your own sites. Each of your sites has its own resources.
Best of all, your account scales automatically when your sites need more resources preventing your business from going down.
Data Centers & Hosting Locations
Kinsta gives you the option to choose from 20 data centers for your site. Each of your sites can have a different data center as they utilize multi-regional deployments.
- Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA
- Ghislain, Belgium
- Changhua County, Taiwan
- Sydney, Australia
- Singapore
- Los Angeles (USA West 2)
- The Dalles, Oregon, USA
- Ashburn, Virginia, USA
- Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA
- São Paulo, Brazil
- London, UK
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Jurong West, Singapore
- Tokyo, Japan
- Mumbai, India
- Montréal (northamerica-northeast1)
- Netherlands (europe-west4)
- Hamina, Finland (europe-north1)
- Hong Kong (asia-east2)
- Osaka, Japan (asia-northeast2)
See the full hosting locations’ map.
Companies That Trust Kinsta
Kinsta seems to be unknown but it is trusted by some big websites out there. In fact, Kinsta is hosting companies like Ubisoft, TripeAdvisor, Drift, Freshbooks, aSOS, Buffer, INTUIT etc. The following might surprise you: Kinsta even hosts the incomparable MariaDB website!
Stories from Kinsta’s Clients
There are many other brands that host with Kinsta. Here are some success stories.
How Kinsta Helps SkyocketWP manage over 100 WordPress site
Why INTUIT migrated to Kinsta? The happy story
Why Neuralab moved their eCommerce to Kinsta and what happens next?
aThem Loading time with Kinsta
aTheme is one of the most popular WordPress themes and their Business website receives 400,000+ page views each month. After the company migrated to Kinsta, it experienced a huge speed boost—loading time went from 2.26s to a circa 0.836s.
Learn more about Kinsta’s successful Clients.
Kinsta Managed Hosting Service
Kinsta provides managed WordPress hosting only in 5 different varieties to choose from. From Starter that cost $30/month, Pro and Business plans, to the Enterprise plans and managed WooCommerce Hosting. No matter the power you need, Kinsta has everything to save your back. And, compared to WP Engine, Kinsta is cheaper. Let’s dive into each plan to get what they offer.
STARTER PLAN
Kinsta Starter plan costs $30/month and includes:
- 1 WordPress install
- 10 GB disk space
- 25,000 visits per month
- Free SSL & CDN
- Free Site Migration from experts
PRO PLAN
It costs $60/month and allows:
- 2 WordPress installs
- 20 GB disk space
- 50,000 visits per month
- Free SSL & CDN
- Free Site Migration from experts
Kinsta BUSINESS PLANS
In case you need more resources, Kinsta also has 4 Business Plans including…
BUSINESS 1
- 5 WordPress installs
- 30 GB disk space
- 100,000 visits per month
- Free SSL & CDN
- Free Site Migration from experts
BUSINESS 2
- 10 WordPress installs
- 40 GB disk space
- 250,000 visits per month
- Free SSL & CDN
- Free Site Migration from experts
Cost: $200/month
BUSINESS 3
- 20 WordPress installs
- 50 GB disk space
- 400,000 visits per month
- Free SSL & CDN
- Free Site Migration from experts
Cost: $300/month
BUSINESS 4
- 40 WordPress installs
- 60 GB disk space
- 600,000 visits per month
- Free SSL & CDN
- Free Site Migration from experts
Cost: $400/month
If none of the above plans suits your needs, Kinsta also offers ENTERPRISE PLANS for more demanding sites.
Kinsta ENTERPRISE PLANS
Here is the highest level of Kinsta Managed Hosting. The Enterprise plans allow more WordPress installs, disk space, and bandwidth. Here is how they differ.
ENTERPRISE 1
- 60 WordPress installs
- 100 GB disk space
- 1,000,000 visits per month
- Free SSL & CDN
- Free Site Migration from experts
ENTERPRISE 2
- 80 WordPress installs
- 150 GB disk space
- 1,500,000 visits per month
- Free SSL & CDN
- Free Site Migration from experts
ENTERPRISE 3
- 120 WordPress installs
- 200 GB disk space
- 2,000,000 visits per month
- Free SSL & CDN
- Free Site Migration from experts
ENTERPRISE 4
- 150 WordPress installs
- 250 GB disk space
- 3,000,000 visits per month
- Free SSL & CDN
- Free Site Migration from experts
Similar Managed WordPress Hosting to check: Liquid Web, Flywheel, WPXHosting
Pros of Using Kinsta Managed Hosting
Let’s now enter the actual reasons why you should/should not use Kinsta.
#1. Best Hosting platform ever
As stated from the beginning, Kinsta is powered exclusively by Google Cloud Platform and uses Google Cloud’s premium tier global network to ensure faster speed. They also use LXD Container software to supply each website with its private resource. Furthermore, Kinsta auto scales your account without cutting your business down.
- Google Cloud Platform
- LXD Container
- Auto-scaling
Those three facts combined is the best web hosting combo.
In a single sentence, Kinsta reflects what web hosting should normally be.
#2. Ease of Use
When you hear the technical speech behind Kinsta like PHP7, LXD Container, Nginx, etc. you might think it is difficult to manage. But, you know what? Kinsta is damn easy to use. Sorry, but it is the word that suits the most instead of saying REALLY, REALLY, REALLY easy to use.
The fact is you will not even realize you are doing something because everything is 1 or 2 clicks away. From adding a new website to installing SSL Certificates, everything is freaking simple.
#3. Top-notch Control Panel
It is hard to talk about Kinsta without mentioning its control panel.
After having tested so many hosting companies, I thought I have already come across the most useful and beautiful control panels. But, when I saw Kinsta’s dashboard, I have been captivated.
Honestly, Kinsta Control Panel is one the simplest, well-designed, and straightforward hosting panel I have ever seen. Compared to cPanel, the Kinsta control panel is ways more intuitive.
The dashboard shows you everything related to your hosting account and websites. You can get insight on your bandwidth usage, visitors, and invoices straight without the need to dig.
#4. Beginner and Developer-friendly
As Kinsta is easy to use, you might wonder “what about developer features?”.
Calm down; it doesn’t matter if you are just starting with web hosting or a seasoned user; Kinsta has got you covered. They support most developer features you will need.
Kinsta Developer Feature
- Python 3
- Linux 4.4 kernel
- OpenSSH 7.2p2 and Apt 1.2.)
- PHP 7, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 plus HHVM available
- HTTP/2 (the latest protocol for faster in-browser speed by providing 3x better parallelism, multiplexing, smaller headers, etc.)
- MariaDB ( The fastest database server)
- Free DNS
- Staging area (test changes before making your site live)
- SSH, Git, and WP-CLI on all plans and much more.
- Multi-user access (Add any number of users to your team. Give them access to all your sites, just billing or add them as developers or administrators to a subset of your sites).
#5. Free hack fix
In case your website is hacked or infected, Kinsta will clean it and take it back with immediate priority. Most companies will charge you for that.
#6. Nearly 100% Uptime
Downtimes make you lose readers/clients and money. Don’t worry though. Kinsta runs 1440 uptime checks per day per website to find and fix any uptime issue.
And, with Google Cloud platform, needless to say, that uptime is one of the top things Kinsta excels at.
The test has been run for a period of 6 months. And, as shown in the screenshot above, Kinsta has been down for 32 minutes. When you do the maths, that is 0.012% downtime for that period—meaning that Kinsta has been up for 99.98% from March to August as explained in my Managed WordPress Hosting Guide.
#7. Unmatched Speed
Most people on the web are praising Kinsta for its server speed. I have seen unbelievable loading times published by big blogs. Even the trustworthy ReviewSignal gives top credit to Kinsta. So, I decided to find out myself.
From SSD Drives to Google cloud platform along with LXD Container, I knew that Kinsta would perform great. But, I never give my heart for words but, only after testing.
Honestly from 98+ web hosts that know, Kinsta delivers the best speed ever. Even WP Engine doesn’t come close.
When you take a look at the above uptime screenshot, you easily see that loading is 229ms in general and 1156ms in hard conditions/for demanding websites.
Furthermore, I also dealt with TTFB for a better understanding of how fast Kinsta runs. I think it is required especially when I’m dropping $30/month to host a website. So let’s see what happened…
The TTFB (Time To First Byte) is surprisingly 0.298s …. See the screenshot below.
More tests have been made and results are here in my managed WordPress Hosting guide.
#8. MariaDB, NGINX, HTTP/2, HHVM, LXD, and PHP7 ready
NGINX + MariaDB + HTTP/2 + PHP7 or HHVM is the flawless configuration when it comes to web hosting. And, Kinsta doesn’t miss any of them.
They not only host MariaDB website, but they also use it as database server for faster MySQL deployment. NGINX, HTTP/2, and PHP7 which are the standard to run WordPress software efficiently are all present. Best of all, they are all free! And available on all plans
#9. Pro-active WordPress Support
Kinsta is a managed hosting provider. It means you don’t have anything to do. They run ongoing scans, monitor your websites and scale resources when needed and you focus on growing your business. Consequently, support is Kinsta’s first priority.
They have a team of WordPress experts to troubleshoot WordPress issues no matter the day or time. You break your site at 3 AM? No worries, the dedicated team is just a click away through live chat.
The support is responsive, user-friendly, they answer questions fast, and solve issues like a charm.
#10. Free Daily Backups
Kinsta performs daily backups of all your sites and keeps them for up to 30 days. Useful in case you mess things up. You can then restore your work at any time from your dashboard free of charge.
#11. Free Website Migration
You should normally not have to migrate your site yourself when switching over to a new host unless you want it. Why?.. because it is a daunting and risky process for your entire site.
Thankfully, Kinsta offers free unlimited migrations. Bear in mind though that as they are not cPanel based, the migrations are handled when you are coming from specific web hosts like WP Engine, Flywheel, Pantheon, Cloudways, Pagely, DreamHost, GoDaddy, Bluehost, HostGator, A2 Hosting, or tsoHost.
#12. Free SSL Certificates with Let’s Encrypt Integration
Protect your readers/clients’ data and boost your SEO with SSL Certificates. Also, as it is through Let’s Encrypt, you do not need any long process. Activating SSL is just a matter of clicks from your control panel.
Kinsta also has two-factor authentication and an activity log to safeguard your account.
#13. Managed hosting Perks
- Free Website Monitoring Tool
- No upgrade/downgrade fee
- Full intuitive analytics from your control panel
- Free CDN
- Staging areas
- Site cloning
- Free Application Updates & Upgrades
- Fixed Pricing
- 30 days money-back guarantee
- Enterprise-level Security
- DDoS and Brute-force Protection
- Free Virus and Malware removal
Cons of Using Kinsta
As always, no company is perfect. Here are some points I hate about Kinsta.
#1. Bandwidth limits
The STARTER plan costs $300/year and allows 25,000 unique visits/month. This is not a big deal, but what if your site gets 100,000 unique visitors per month? You will need to pay the BUSINESS1 plan that costs $100/month or $1,000/year.
Well; you might think 100K is huge traffic but you are wrong. When you have a reputable website, you will soon realize how tiny a “100K unique visits” is. It is even worse when you are allowed to host multiple websites on the plan.
In sum, if I have to pay $100/month for 100K UVs, it is not worth the money in my opinion (if speed and support are not considered). Thankfully, to solve this problem, Kinsta doesn’t freeze your account when you hit the limits. Instead, they simply charge you small fees like most managed WordPress Hosts and it is $1 for each additional 1,000 visits and $0.10/GB in CDN overuse (Kinsta’s overage prices in detail).
Let’s now think bigger. What if your traffic reaches 1M visits/month? You will have to purchase the ENTERPRISE1 plan and guess what? It costs $6,000/year. OK; I hear you saying a 1M visits/month website should normally be making around $100k per month as well so it is not a big deal.
However, if I put support and speed aside, Kinsta is not that worth the money for small websites that do not make any money unless you have the budget and want hassle-free hosting.
#2. No Cron Jobs
This might not be a problem for most users as Kinsta takes care of auto-backups, ongoing virus scans, etc., but what if you want to schedule regular server auto-tasks? You’ll need WP-Cron to save your back.
While Kinsta has an article that explains how to set cron jobs, they do not explicitly support the feature. So make sure you read the tutorial for more insight.
Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting Plans, Price, and Features
| STARTER | PRO | |
| WordPress Installs | 1 | 2 |
| Monthly Visits | 25,000 | 50,000 |
| SSD Disk Space | 10 GB | 20 GB |
| Free CDN | 50 GB | 100 GB |
| Free migration | Yes | Yes |
| Free SSL | Included | Included |
| Imported SSL | Supported | supported |
| Auto-backups | Included | Included |
| Manual Backup points | Yes | Yes |
| Backup retention | 14 days | 14 days |
| Multisite Support | No | Supported |
| SSH access | Allowed | Allowed |
| PHP7.x | Supported | supported |
| Staging | Supported | supported |
| WP-CLI, Git | Included | Included |
| Price/month | $30 | $60 |
| Renewal price | $30 | $60 |
| Price/year | $300 | $600 |
| Guarantee | 30 days | 30 days |
| Visit | Visit |
BUSINESS PLANS
| BUSINESS 1 | BUSINESS 2 | BUSINESS 3 | BUSINESS 4 | |
| WordPress Installs | 5 | 10 | 20 | 40 |
| Monthly Visits | 100,000 | 250,000 | 400,000 | 600,000 |
| SSD Disk Space | 30 GB | 40 GB | 50 GB | 60 GB |
| Free CDN | 200 GB | 300 GB | 500 GB | 500 GB |
| Free migration | yes | yes | yes | Yes |
| Free SSL | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Imported SSL | Supported | Supported | Supported | Supported |
| Auto-backups | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Manual Backup points | yes | yes | yes | Yes |
| Backup retention | 14 days | 14 days | 20 days | 20 days |
| Multisite Support | Supported | Supported | Supported | Supported |
| SSH access | Allowed | Allowed | Allowed | Allowed |
| PHP7.x | supported | supported | supported | supported |
| Staging | supported | supported | supported | supported |
| WP-CLI, Git | included | included | included | included |
| Price/month | $100 | $200 | $300 | $400 |
| Renewal price | $100 | $200 | $300 | $400 |
| Price/year | $1,000 | $2,000 | $3,000 | $4,000 |
| Guarantee | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days |
| Visit | Visit | Visit | Visit |
ENTERPRISE PLANS
| ENTERPRISE 1 | ENTERPRISE 2 | ENTERPRISE 3 | ENTERPRISE 4 | |
| WordPress Installs | 60 | 80 | 120 | 150 |
| Monthly Visits | 1,000,000 | 1,500,000 | 2,000,000 | 3,000,000 |
| SSD Disk Space | 100 GB | 150 GB | 200 GB | 250 GB |
| Free CDN | 1000 GB | 1000 GB | 1000 GB | 1000 GB |
| Free migration | Yes | yes | yes | Yes |
| Free SSL | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Imported SSL | Supported | Supported | Supported | Supported |
| Auto-backups | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Manual Backup points | Yes | yes | yes | Yes |
| Backup retention | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days |
| Multisite Support | Supported | Supported | Supported | Supported |
| SSH access | Allowed | Allowed | Allowed | Allowed |
| PHP7.x | supported | supported | supported | supported |
| Staging | supported | supported | supported | supported |
| WP-CLI, Git | included | included | included | included |
| Price/month | $600 | $900 | $1,200 | $1,500 |
| Renewal price | $600 | $900 | $1.200 | $1,500 |
| Price/year | $6,000 | $9,000 | $12,000 | $15,000 |
| Guarantee | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days |
| Visit | Visit | Visit | Visit |
Visit www.kinsta.com
How Kinsta Count Visits to your WordPress site?
The host measures bandwidth based on the total number of monthly visits to your site on the server. The number of visits in a given month is the sum of the unique IP addresses seen each 24-hour period as recorded in the Nginx logs.
Here are a few examples of what exactly triggers and doesn’t trigger a visit at Kinsta:
- When a human arrives to your site and loads the page, this is a visit.
- When a human arrives to your site and then browses to a new page, this is still considered one visit.
- When a human arrives to your site from two different browsers, this is treated as one visit due to the fact that it is the same IP address.
- When a human arrives to your site at home and then later from work they will have used two different IP addresses to access the site and will be counted as two different visitors.
- This also means that every visit in a day from a given location will be only counted once no matter how many devices were used to load your site from that location, as long as the visitor in question uses the same internet connection.
Source: Kinsta visit count post.
When to use Kinsta?
You can’t use Kinsta for basic hosting needs unless you are just curious or have enough money. Therefore, here are 4 situations where Kinsta is worth trying.
- Your WordPress site is more than a sideline
- Your site visitors can convert directly into money: like eCommerce sites with steady sales per month, huge online course websites etc.
- You have a high traffic Blog
- You are an Enterprise, an organization, or a serious business owner
Competitors to Kinsta
WP Engine is the biggest name when it comes to premium WordPress hosting and by the same time is the direct competitor to Kinsta. So how does Kinsta stack?
Kinsta vs WP Engine
| Kinsta | WP Engine | |
| Lowest Plans | STARTER | STARTUP |
| Number of sites | 1 | 1 |
| Monthly Visits | 25,000 | 25,000 |
| SSD Disk Space | 10 GB | 10 GB |
| Free CDN/Bandwidth | 50GB | 50GB |
| Free migration | included | Included |
| Free SSL | Included | Included |
| Web App Firewall |
Yes | $300/year |
| DDoS Protection |
Yes | $300/year |
| Auto-backups | Yes | Yes |
| Multisite Support | Supported | $200/year |
| PHP7 and HTTP/2 | Supported | Supported |
| Server locations | 20 worldwide | Worldwide |
| Email hosting | No | No |
| Staging, WP-CLI, Git | Supported | Supported |
| Price/month | $25 | $29 |
| Renewal price | $25 | $29 |
| Guarantee | 30 days | 90 days |
| Visit | Visit |
Cheap Alternatives to Kinsta
It is clear that Kinsta is not for everyone. Pricing goes from $30 to $1,500/month. That is huge money. Thus, for simple blogs, multiple small websites owners, or small businesses with a tiny budget, there are, thankfully, some cheaper web hosting options to start with. I have done the hard work and found for you the one that supports PHP7, HTTP/2, and NGINX or LiteSpeed Web Server.
#1. A2 Hosting: Fastest Shared hosting for WordPress with SSD storage, free SSLs, WP-CLI, Git, SSH, Staging, high-security level, Free HackScan, Perpetual Security, LiteSpeed Turbo Web Server (up to 20x faster), and more.
#2. FastComet: Best web hosting plus VIP support for beginners and designers with Varnish, Memcached, CloudLinux OS, account isolation, dedicated resources, free Virus & Malware removal (which SiteGround doesn’t) , BitNinja security, 10 Datacenters, PHP7, HTTP/2, and free site & domain transfer.
#3. ChemiCloud: Fast, reliable, and secure cheap cloud hosting with free domain name for life and Unimify360 securit
#4. Cloudways: Best managed cloud hosting for multiple small website owners and high traffic sites, five cloud providers (DigitalOcean, linode, vultr, AWS, and Google Cloud to choose from, free CDN, and free DDoS protection.
Final Thought
For the services provided, Kinsta is the best managed WordPress hosting provider if you can afford it. But, for tiny budgets or multiple small websites’ owners, it might not be the right choice.
However, when it comes to Managed WordPress hosting, the most important points are technology, security, support, and WP specific features— and Kinsta excels at each. My hosting geek’s brain has tried, for a long time, to find a breach into Kinsta’s infrastructure but, has never found even one. Performance and support along with the hosting platform make it worth the money for serious WordPress website projects and eCommerce sites.
If I had a WordPress site that brings in money and on which I rely as a source of revenue; and I had to choose a managed WordPress hosting, I won’t think twice—Kinsta would be my best companion.
Overall Reasons to Go with Kinsta
- Free CDN
- Google Cloud Platform
- Free Let’s Encrypt SSL
- Staging environments
- Automatic daily backups
- Manual backup points
- Auto-update & upgrade
- Full-page caching at the server-level to deliver content almost instantaneously to visitors.
- PHP 7, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. support
- Free hack fix.
- Free constant Malicious attack scans
- Server-side optimizations for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Download sites to ensure a smoother checkout experience for customers.
- A custom-designed dashboard with lots of data that helps you improve further your site.
- MyKinsta analytics reports for data analysis and performance insights
- Multi-user access with fine-grained permissions.
- SSH access, Git, and WP-CLI.
- Free migration, completed by the expert support team.
- 24h/7 Support by WordPress experts
- Uptime guarantee with 1440 uptime checks each day.
- MariaDB + NGINX + LXD Container
[Get Spacial 2 months Free]
Visit Kinsta And Claim your 2 months free deal!
Kinsta doesn’t suit your needs? Check Similar Companies: WPEngine A2 Hosting FastComet .
What is your pain now? Any question? Any experience with Kinsta? Share your review in the comment section below. Bad or good, just be honest. We are all here to share and help.
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Cheers!
Obaro