Kinsta
Do you have a growing blog or a thriving business website built on WordPress?
Are you seeking a reliable and scalable web hosting infrastructure that won’t break even when traffic explodes?
Kinsta’s managed WordPress hosting is worth checking out.
After a week of researching and testing Kinsta-hosted websites, I created this Kinsta review to give you a comprehensive understanding of the service.
I’ll start by highlighting the company’s strengths, followed by areas where it could improve.
- Kinsta offers premium managed WordPress hosting with Google Cloud for high performance.
- Key features include auto-scaling, daily backups, free CDN, and enterprise-level security.
- Pricing starts at $35/month, with plans scaling up for larger needs.
- Pros: fast speeds, expert support; cons: lacks email hosting, limited phone support.
Basics to Understand
Kinsta is a cloud-based hosting company specializing in premium, fully managed WordPress hosting powered by Google Cloud Platform.
The Kinsta hosting environment is purpose-built and optimized with tech infrastructure (such as MariaDB, PHP 8.0, and Ubuntu) that delivers lightning-fast speed and performance to WordPress websites.
With Kinsta’s fully managed hosting, you have your site maintenance and hosting management in capable hands. Kinsta handles caching, backups, and database optimization, freeing up your time for other essential tasks.
Performance and Reliability
Kinsta is the first WordPress hosting provider to fully adopt Google’s next-generation compute-optimized virtual machines (C2), which guarantees nearly 100% uptime and is super scalable.
Unlike most providers, who rely on free Cloudflare CDN to serve static assets through a secondary domain, Kinsta’s enterprise-level Cloudflare CDN serves live websites at lightning-fast speed.
Kinsta runs uptime checks on your website every 2 minutes to ensure it has never had downtime. If it does, their engineers fix things even before you notice.
According to its Service Level Agreement, the company will credit your account if it fails to meet its industry-standard 99.9% uptime guarantee.
MyKinsta Dashboard
Unlike most providers, which offer traditional cPanel with all the bells and whistles you’ll hardly need, the Mykinsta dashboard only has features for managing WordPress sites.
Kinsta does a great job making the dashboard intuitive and beginner-friendly. It features a clean interface with on-side navigation panels that expand upon click.
Upon signing up, the first action you’ll take on this dashboard is to add your site. To do that, go to WordPress Site on the left panel, select Add Site, and click Create New Site.
Next, select the type of site you want to create. You’ll see three options:
Select Install WordPress and follow the on-screen prompt to complete other steps.
You’ll select a data center for your site during this setup process. A data center is the server location where your site data is stored.
The closer it is to your users, the faster your website load times, as that reduces data latency and TTFB.
Fortunately, Kinsta offers 37 locations and is still counting. You can see the complete list of Kinsta data centers here.
If you’re switching providers, migrating to Kinsta is just as easy. Kinsta offers unlimited free site migration from 16 popular providers.
Don’t worry if your provider is missing from the list. You’ll get one free premium migration on any Kinsta plan.
Notable Features
All Kinsta plans have features like free CDN, daily site backups, free SSL certificates, and regular uptime checks, regardless of your tier.
What does all these mean for your website? I ran some tests on a Kinsta-hosted website.
Kinsta Speed Test
A slow-loading site will turn users off. To see how fast our Kinsta-hosted website will respond to requests, I used uptime.com to test its server response time from different locations.
As you can see, Kinsta delivers incredibly fast speed, less than one second, across all locations.
The test above shows server response time across multiple locations, which is great. But I wanted to see this site’s overall performance for better context.
So, I ran the website on GTMetrix.
GTMetrix scored our website 87%, a result 90% of websites can only dream of. Also, as you can see, other core speed metrics are well above average.
Kinsta Uptime Test
The next test I perform is to verify Kinsta’s 99.9% uptime guarantee. I started by checking the Kinsta infrastructure status.
Amazingly, there’s no record of downtime in the last 90 days across all 37 Kinsta data centers.
To double confirm that, I input our test site into UptimeRobot, a website monitoring tool. The result shows that there has been no downtime with our test site in the last 30 days.
Kinsta Stress-Loading Test
The old science is that most websites will lag due to high traffic. But does that apply to a website on Kinsta’s integrated Google Cloud servers? Let’s see.
I used Sucuri’s Load Time Tester to send 200 virtual visitors to our testing site and here’s the result.
As you can see in the graph above, the response time remains stable even as the number of visitors gradually increases.
This shows the server didn’t experience any bottlenecks and can handle heavy traffic without slowing down.
Reliable Autoscaling
Kinsta’s use of Google’s next-generation compute-optimized virtual machines makes it highly scalable.
So, in the event of a traffic spike on your website, Kinsta automatically scales your server resources, RAM, and CPU cores to contain the spike.
This auto-scaling feature makes it highly reliable. You won’t have to worry about your website crashing or the providers shutting it down.
Either scenario would play out if it were other non-scalable providers.
Of course, Kinsta autoscaling isn’t free. You’d be charged for exceeding your monthly traffic limit. In my opinion, that’s better than having my website inaccessible when users need it the most.
Expert Support
Kinsta doesn’t have tiered support levels. It offers premium 24//365 support to every customer. You can reach them via email ticketing, phone call, or live chat.
Each member of the Kinsta support team is a seasoned developer with extensive experience in Linux and WordPress. This makes Kinsta’s support team unparalleled.
Take a look at this at the requirements for the Technical Support Engineer role at Kinsta.
Since every support team member is an expert, you won’t have to wait long for your issue to be resolved.
Kinsta also has a robust knowledge base with tutorial articles to help you solve issues on your own.
This knowledge base is arranged into topics for easy access.
Pricing & Cost
Kinsta offers several web hosting packages divided into Starter, Business, and Enterprise plans, with pricing ranging from $35/month to $675/month.
The Starter plan, priced at $35/month, offers 1 WordPress install, 10 GB storage, 100 GB CDN, and 25,000 visits/month.
Next is the Pro plan, which is simply 2X the cost and features of the Starter plan. Kinsta also offers Business and Enterprise plans starting at $115/month and $675/month, respectively.
Currently, Kinsta does not offer discounts. However, if you opt for their annual hosting plan, you can enjoy two months of hosting for free.
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My Honest Thoughts
Despite its strengths, Kinsta has a few areas where it could improve. Firstly, Kinsta doesn’t offer email hosting, a feature most competitors provide.
This means users must seek email hosting elsewhere, incurring additional costs and complicating their service setup.
While Kinsta’s support service is commendable, phone support is only available for sales calls.
You can’t have a voice conversation with support when your website encounters an issue. No matter your issue severity, you are restricted to email ticketing or live messaging.
Is Kinsta Worth The Cost?
If your WordPress site demands best-in-class infrastructure and your budget permits, it’s a definite yes.
And for all the infrastructure it offers for free, like the enterprise-level Cloudflare CDN, which could cost as much as $20/month, Kinsta Managed WordPress hosting offers excellent value for money.
Other providers will charge you separately for most of these features; if you add them up, it’s likely to fall in the same price range or even more.
Alternatives
Like Kinsta, WP Engine specializes in managed WordPress hosting but offers a slightly lower price point, $20 per month, for its starter plan, which offers nearly the same features as Kinsta’s.
Both companies promise 99.9% uptime, but Kinsta has the edge when it comes to speed and scalability, thanks to its Google Cloud servers.
SiteGround is a popular shared hosting provider that also offers managed WordPress hosting. Starting at just $2.99/month, Siteground is a good option for beginners who want decent hosting for their WordPress site.
Since SiteGroud is built to accommodate all types of websites, its performance doesn’t measure up to Kinsta’s WordPress-specific infrastructure.
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