Today, we’re taking a look at a managed WordPress hosting service with a sharp reputation – Kinsta.
Launched in 2013, Kinsta was the brainchild of a group of WordPress experts unimpressed with the WordPress hosting solutions on the market. Today, it’s one of the fastest-growing WordPress hosts in Europe and America.
Offering lots of impressive WordPress management tools and a clean UX, Kinsta delivers all the speed and scaling advantages you’d expect from a cloud-based host. Add this to a highly-skilled support team of WordPress developers and you’ve got yourself a premium hosting solution, albeit at a premium price. Learn more.
Kinsta Review And Expert Opinion
Kinsta caters to a lot of different sites, ranging from $35 – $1,650 per month. That’s a very wide spectrum, but for this comparison, we’ll only focus on the first three key consumer plans, Starter, Pro, and Business 1. After Business 1, it goes up to Business 4, and then Enterprise 1 – 4.
The key thing to note is that the prices displayed are for monthly payments. You get 2 months free when you buy annually, which I think is a pretty good deal.
What is Kinsta?
Kinsta is a cloud-based host offering managed WordPress plans with server power and optimization that you won’t find anywhere else. It blew past the competition in my performance tests, while still being fairly easy to use. It’s just a shame that the pricing is somewhat prohibitive.
Kinsta is a hosting provider (from the USA) that offers premium managed WordPress hosting powered by the Google Cloud Platform with some fantastic features.
Their hosting services are designed for everyone, from startups to larger companies.
Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting company designed for enterprises and websites with high-volume traffic. Kinsta, the managed WordPress hosting company, was founded in December 2013. Led by its founder and CEO, Mark Gavalda, the company host some of the global-recognized brands including Intuit (Quicken), Ricoh, ASOS, General Electric, and Ubisoft on its servers. While the company may not be the largest managed WordPress hosting operation in the market, Kinsta has a solid offering that is worth a closer look.
Kinsta Review: Features of Kinsta
Even though Kinsta is a highly reputed managed WordPress host, they are not for every kind of WordPress site. For anyone who is looking to compromise on hosting quality in order to save some bucks, Kinsta is definitely not for them.
For an entry-level blog, a shared hosting plan is better as it usually costs <$10/month. Kinsta pricing starts at $30/month which is not cheap.
However, for any WordPress or WooCommerce site, which is built to perform well and needs 100% uptime, this pricing is not a problem.
What’s under the hood of Kinsta is what really matters.
Let me quickly give you a glimpse of everything they offer.
Hosting on Google Cloud
With Kinsta hosting, your site is hosted on the Google Cloud platform, which is one of the top-notch infrastructures you can get for your website.
You also have the option to choose your data center.
Free Site Migration
If you are moving your existing WordPress site from any host to Kinsta, you don’t have to worry about migrating your site.
Just sign up for an account, use the migration form from your Kinsta dashboard, and their migration team will schedule a time and migrate your site for you.
There will be zero downtime with this migration, and they will even test your site before making it live. This way you are sure that everything works as intended after moving your WordPress site to Kinsta.
This is a timesaver, as handling migration yourself could take a lot of time + hassles. Just to let you know, I enjoy such tech challenges, but having someone more knowledgeable taking care of it, saves a lot of time, and offers mental peace.
Support from WordPress experts
When you are paying so much, you can’t accept any sub-standard support. In the past five years, I have never had to worry about any WordPress issues.
If I ever have an issue, I need to send them a quick ping, and within a few minutes, they usually resolve the problem.
There were only 1-2 instances when a few of my tickets took an hour to resolve, but that has only been a small minority of my experience with them.
What I like about their customer service team is their dedication to finding a resolution. Instead of guessing and assuming, the kinds of suggestions and solutions I receive are top-notch and are obviously from very knowledgeable people.
Custom client Dashboard
The dashboard offered by Kinsta is very powerful. Even if you are new to managed WordPress hosting, you will have no problem understanding it.
Daily Automated Backup and On-Demand Backup
If you are paying for any 3rd party backup service like VaultPress or Updraftplus, you can save money.
Kinsta takes daily automated backups of your WordPress blog; you can also make an on-demand backup.
They store 14 instances of backup copies. With one click, you can always restore your backup to a live production site or a staging site.
Staging Site
You can create a copy of your live site as a staging site (test environment) and can make all the changes there. After moving to Kinsta, this has become part of our development process.
First, a developer makes changes on a staging site, and once we approve it, we make it live on the production site.
The staging site is a must-have feature for any high-end managed hosting site. When you are shopping for managed WordPress hosting, ensure that that host offers a staging feature.
Free SSL & Advanced Tools Under Your Control
Kinsta offers free SSL using LetsEncrypt, and it’s easy to set up. You can enable SSL for your site within minutes. You can also use a custom SSL certificate if you need it.
They have a particular page called Tools where you can do various things like restart the PHP, change the PHP engine, enable/disable SSL, and clear the cache.
They also have a custom WordPress plugin that automatically purges the cache when you publish a new post. Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the infrastructure and features offered by Kinsta hosting.
Kinsta Review: Kinsta Pricing
Kinsta caters to a lot of different sites, ranging from $35 – $1,650 per month. That’s a very wide spectrum, but for this comparison, we’ll only focus on the first three key consumer plans, Starter, Pro, and Business 1. After Business 1, it goes up to Business 4, and then Enterprise 1 – 4.
The key thing to note is that the prices displayed here are for monthly payments. You get 2 months free when you buy annually, which I think is a pretty good deal.
When you are shopping for quality managed WordPress hosting, pricing is usually one of the significant catches. Kinsta offers entry-level hosting for $30 which allows 20K views in a month.
They offer various plans, and you should pick one based on:
- How many WordPress blogs/sites do you want to host
- How many views your blog is getting every month
- How many PHP workers do you need
They offer Starter, Business Plans, Enterprise Plans, and Custom Solutions.
Kinsta Review: Kinsta Pros and Cons
Pros
- Solid speed: Kinsta’s loading speed was impressive when we tested it. It’s good for both your SEO and your user experience. The powerful CDN, free SSL, and last-gen PHP also give them points here.
- Uptime: Nothing to complain about here, Kinsta runs virtually 100% of the time. If the rate drops below 99.9%, you get some money back. This is not bad at all, however, WP Engine guarantees 99.95% uptime in their service level agreement (SLA).
- Support: It’s via chat only, but Kinsta support is some of the best I’ve received.
- Server features and locations25+ locations worldwide to choose from.
- Ease of use: Straightforward navigation and a pleasant user experience for those who need to spend a bit of time in their hosting provider dashboard.
- Team management: unlimited users and you can easily define permissions and roles, both at the company and site levels.
- Site backups: You only get 14 days of automatic backups on the lower plans. You’ll need to move up to the Business 3 plan to get 20 days. Manual backups and cloud backups are also available. Backups can be downloaded too.
- Made for WordPress: That means the support team knows what they’re talking about, the architecture is optimized for the CMS, and you get useful resources on plugins and other WordPress-specific tools.
- Free migrations: Kinsta has a WordPress plugin for you to automatically migrate a site into Kinsta. But all plans also come with some professional migrations that Kinsta’s team will do on your behalf; not many other providers offer this.
Cons
- WordPress only: You won’t be able to install any other CMS on a Kinsta server.
- A lot of limits: No unlimited storage, CDN, or monthly visits. If you go over, you’ll be charged extra.
- Higher prices: Kinsta isn’t the cheapest managed WordPress hosting provider. You get what you pay for, but it’s not for everyone.
- Some WordPress plugins banned: Due to security and performance reasons, Kinsta bans some plugins. This includes a range of external caching, backup, and optimization
6 Reasons Kinsta Is A Seriously Good Hosting Solution
1. It’s Blazing Fast
As we all know, as far as websites go, speed is everything.
A faster page loading time not only correlates with higher conversions, longer average visitor duration, and decreased bounce rates, but also much better SEO.
2. Cloud-Based Infrastructure Built For Speed
Let’s dig a little deeper into Kinsta’s build.
Its most distinguishing feature is that it exclusively offers Google cloud server hosting.
This makes its infrastructure fundamentally different from the traditional shared or dedicated hosting of its competitors.
3. Inclusive Software To Turbocharge You
The third pro? You guessed it – speed again.
Kinsta is fortified with ‘speed-obsessed architecture’ (their words, not ours) through technologies like Nginx, PHP 7, LXD software containers, and MariaDB.
We could fill pages talking about Kinsta’s various add-ons and plug-ins, but one thing you’re definitely going to want to use is CDN.
ail to correct error response codes within 30 minutes, your account will be credited. This guarantee holds true, 24/7, every day of the year.
4. It’s (Nearly) Hands-Off
As the name suggests, managed WordPress hosts should allow you to spend less time worrying about your website, and give you more time to focus on growing it.
Kinsta has a really wide range of features that provide an optimized environment for you to keep improving your website, without needing to worry about technical issues.
5. Awesome Technical Support
One of Kinsta’s biggest strengths is its support team.
We mean it – it’s comprised entirely of veteran WordPress developers and Linux hosting engineers. This means the technical level of support is one of the best on the market. They even boast that they hire less than 1% of applicants who apply!
Instead of needing to go through a series of level 1 or level 2 support reps, Kinsta users always have real experts directly at their beck-and-call.
Kinsta offers 24/7 support via the Intercom widget, a live chat, and a ticket solution. It’s actually a pretty nifty system with an automatically stored chat history and window that stays open even as you navigate through different pages in the dashboard.
6. Simple Set-Up And Migration
So, how easy is it really to get the ball rolling?
Turns out – very.
When we signed up for Kinsta we were struck by how quick and simple it was. Creating an account literally took seconds, then up came our new dashboard and a wealth of resources that were angled to help everyone – from total beginners to seasoned developers.
Is Kinsta worth the money?
As a managed WordPress hosting company, they always try to exceed their customers’ expectations with what they do. At Kinsta, they work hard to provide their customers with an unpaired managed WordPress hosting experience that makes their life and business better. Join the growing club of 25,150+ companies that made the switch to better, faster hosting.
Final Kinsta Review Comments
Now let’s wrap it all up and gather our thoughts about Kinsta here.
The main takeaway for me is that Kinsta is reliable, fast, and good for business WordPress sites. That includes online stores too. Developers will love all the technical options, and business owners will enjoy the ease of use and safety features.
Kinsta Review: From Customers
Summary
Whether you’re a beginner, marketer, web designer, or developer, Kinsta includes all the tools and resources you can trust to succeed online.