TLDR
- Cloud-based hosting is the future, and here is your journey to the stars! ☁️☁️🌟
- Website hosting, CDNs, excellent security, and more – you’re in safe hands here. 🤗
- Stellar technical support made of industry experts only.
- 100s of 5 star reviews found on their website ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Trusted by Hosting Advice, Google Cloud, TrustAHost, and many more!
Kinsta is one of the leading cloud-based hosting providers for WordPress, and it is widely talked about throughout the industry.
But what makes Kinsta so great? Today we’re breaking it down with a review of its features, what we liked and disliked, and much more. 🤩
What Exactly Is Kinsta?
Kinsta is a beginner-friendly cloud hosting service that can be used for a number of different sources. It uses Google Cloud to store all of your data and servers, leaving you free of traditional hosting platforms. 😎😎😎
There is no cPanel admin for hosting your servers. Instead, Kinsta offers its own solution for how you should manage your account. Here you’ll find all of the most important details and metrics for your servers and accounts. 👌
Kinsta is one of the top-rated cloud-based hosting platforms in the industry right now, so it’s well worth checking out if you haven’t already.
Our Kinsta Speed Test
When it comes to your server platform, speed is everything. Studies show that most people will click off a website if it hasn’t loaded within three seconds, so your server has to be up to the challenge!
Otherwise, you’ll be losing plenty of meaningful visits and traffic.
The faster your page loads, the higher your conversion rate, the more time your visitors will spend on your page, and your SEO will also be improved. Don’t think that Google’s analytics aren’t watching for loading speed!
To see if Kinsta was up for the job of supporting our websites, we conducted a speed test. We created a WordPress site through Kinsta and ran it on a speed test. Here are the results:
Understandably, these pages are going to load differently to fleshed-out websites with CDN and caching technologies. These would cut the loading times, making these results even better.
However, the fact that our speed tests came back this good without these optimization techniques gives us no doubt that Kinsta will keep your website running incredibly fast.
Website Hosting In The Clouds ☁️☁️☁️
Kinsta keeps everything in the Google Cloud server, which is different from traditional hosting platforms.
This makes the infrastructure different through a single server in the data center where the hosts utilize the virtual server space. This is a pretty complex network of physical servers. 🕸️🕸️
Using cloud-based server platforms gives you numerous advantages, such as better speed, scalability, flexibility, and reliability. 👏
Kinsta uses Google’s cloud system, which can reach speeds of up to 10,000 TB per second! 😱😱😱 That is unheard of in most cloud systems and makes sense why Kinsta would only offer this solution.
Kinsta also has access to 29 cloud server locations across the globe, meaning that you can choose one geographically closest to your audience. This keeps your latency lower and overall speed quicker. Yes, please! 🙌
Finally, Kinsta also has access to premium DNS through Amazon Route 53, which is just another tool offered to you to keep things snappy.
Where Does Cloudflare Come Into All Of This?
Cloudflare is one of the largest content delivery networks in the world! The partnership that Kinsta has now introduced with Cloudflare gives them a unique edge over its competitors. This also benefits you by offering a Kinsta CDN at no additional cost. 🤑
Kinsta CDN allows you to turbocharge your websites to your intended audience for free.
With the sheer size of Cloudflare’s network (200 locations over 100+ countries, to be exact!) your reach will be incredible. 😍😍😍
Kinsta used to partner with KeyCDN, and they only have 60 points of presence. This is the same for other popular CDN providers such as Bunny CDN, and Stack Path. Cloudfire really is in a league of its own! 🤯
Speaking of Cloudflare, it also offers HTTP/3 support, which is an improved form of HTTP/2. This gives you access to benefits such as a quicker SSL handshake, and 0-RTT support.
CDNs can improve load times by up to 50%, offload up to 70% of bandwidth requests from hosts, and help support traffic surges. 👌👌
If you do not yet have a CDN, get to know! And who better to go with than Cloudflare, while managing it through Kinsta? 😏
Your Site Is In Good Hands
Kinsta is a managed WordPress host, and it gives you the opportunity to worry less about your website. Instead, you can focus on growing it quicker.
There are plenty of features to see across Kinsta that allow you to continue improving your website. These all come with the security of not worrying about technical issues on the hosting platform. 😎😎
Let’s have a look at some of these site management tools that can benefit you from Kinsta.
MyKinsta Dashboard
The MyKinsta dashboard is unique from the traditional cPanel of Plesk dashboards that you’ll see on many other cloud-based hosts. It also includes original features that other hosts don’t offer. 💪
Updates Management
Forced updates are annoying for everyone, and it can be difficult to manage your time around them. Instead of forcing you to sit through updates, Kinsta offers you the ability to reach out to them and tell them to take care of updates from now on.
Alternatively, you could tell them to leave the updates as your responsibility, if you’d prefer. 🤷♀️
One-Click Staging
Test new WordPress versions, code, and plugins in a controlled environment before making them live on your website. This gives you a chance to make sure that they do what you want them to without making them public and potentially ruining your traffic. 😱
There is also a Selective Push feature here that gives you granular control over what you want to push live and what you want to keep behind.
Multiple User Access
If you’re part of a business, this feature is excellent. It gives you all access to your account and the ability to control it from anywhere. There are also settings to alter the permissions that other users have. 🥳
Developer-Friendly Tools
There are plenty of developer-friendly tools across Kinsta, such as site cloning, and access to SSH for WP-CLI updates.
You also now have access to their newest tool, DevKinsta, which helps you to design, develop, and deploy WordPress websites locally.
Speed Tuning
Speed tuning includes performance reviews and caching.
Kinsta is always adding new features for better site management and performance. These constant updates are excellent as the platform continues to change with the times and keeps your site relevant. 🧐🧐
Having Issues? Technical Support Has You Covered
If you’ve ever heard anyone raving about Kinsta, we’ll bet that they also mentioned the technical support. This is really where Kinsta thrives, with a team completely made of veteran WordPress developers and Linux hosting engineers. 🤩🤩🤩
This makes the technical support that you get from Kinsta some of the best in the business. They only hire 1% of all applicants, so you know you’re getting the best of the best. 💪
Instead of having to sit through multiple support sessions to find the right person you need, Kinsta’s experts will be able to assist you from start to finish.
You’ll have access to round-the-clock support via the intercom widget which will take you to the live chat or ticket solution.
Intuitive as ever, the chat session stays live and saves your messages even as you navigate through the platform. This means that if you need to check different areas of Kinsta to get to the bottom of your troubles, you won’t lose your chat with your support representative.
In our experience, we have never had a query be answered in longer than three minutes. The experts are all very friendly and our experiences have been overwhelmingly positive. 👍👍
Kinsta also has a blog and a knowledge base, where you can find quick answers to small queries you might have. You can also learn tips and tricks here, as well as learn more about the wider picture.
Beginner-Friendly Certified ✔️
One common reason people put off setting up their own cloud-based server is due to the worry that it’s too much work. However, set those worries aside! Kinsta is super easy for beginners to use, and you can get your account up and running within seconds.
Kinsta is designed to help everyone – from complete beginners to seasoned developers.
In fact, every single Kinsta plan comes with a free site migration from its current host. This is completed by professionals so your website is in good hands. 🤝
Being able to leave such a large task to the professionals is a huge weight off of your mind, and you can spend more of your time working to grow your site rather than migrating it.
If the sheer convenience here wasn’t enough, you also won’t have to deal with any downtime either. All you need to do is request the migration from your dashboard, and the professionals will be in touch as to how they’ll do it.
You’ll then be contacted again once the migration process is complete so that you can verify everything is running correctly before the professional close your case. Any issues, give them a message and they’ll jump back into helping you! 🤓🤓🤓
If you’d prefer to complete the migration process on your own, then you can also do this without the help of Kinsta’s experts. 👌👌
Safe And Secure Servers, Always
There are plenty of benefits that come with using Kinsta as your server host, and one of our favorites is the fact that you can rest in the knowledge that your site is completely safe and secure.
They offer multiple features to ensure this is always secure, which we’ll look at now.
Daily Back-Ups
Daily backups for WordPress are often needed to make sure that all of your data is kept somewhere safe. This is in case any of it is deleted or corrupted. These backups are also available for all sites on your account. 👍
You have access to the restore points on your MyKinsta dashboard, and they are kept for 14 days.
Manual Back-Ups
With your Kinsta account, you can make up to five manual backups, including one downloadable backup each week.
Triggered Back-Ups
Some events that you create through Kinsta will automatically trigger a backup. For example, changing your site’s status from staging to production will create a backup of your live site in case anything goes wrong. 🤬🤬🤬
We hope that you’ll never have to use this backup, but it’s always invaluable to have!
External Back-Ups
This is a new feature that Kinsta has introduced, allowing you to create a backup and send it to either Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. This gives you peace of mind from a backup that is stored away from Kinsta itself. 😵
Bear in mind that you will need to pay an additional fee to use the storage space for these external storage solutions. However, the peace of mind is often worth it. 🙌
SSL Support And Firewall Hardware
You’ll get free one-click SSL certificate activation with your Kinsta account. Each site comes with automatic wildcard SSL support through its Cloudflare integration, meaning that you benefit from better peace of mind.
Continuous Monitoring
Your site is alerted instantly in an event of hacking or crashing, meaning that your site is in safe hands if you were to be targeted. Kinsta’s staff begin working on resolving this as soon as the alert hits, so your site won’t be compromised for too long. 👌👌
Automatic Updates
Kinsta offers free updates daily that include hack fixes, DDoS attacks, blocking code injection, daily malware, and spyware scanning, and much more.
Name Servers
Most of Kinsta’s competitors offer you two name servers so that you can set up DNS pointing. However, Kinsta offers four – and these all come with different website suffixes (.com, .net, .org, etc.).
This helps make sure that you can rely on another suffix in case one of the others goes down.
Is Kinsta Worth The Price?
Kinsta does the utmost for its users, and we cannot ignore its amazing features to guide you on your way to cloud-based hosting.
There are 10 paid plans that Kinsta offers, each offering different features on its scale.
The Starter plan costs $35 a month, and the highest-paid plan (Enterprise 4) is $1,650 a month. They offer discounts for when you pay annually, too, so you can make some good savings.
There is no free trial for Kinsta, but you can fall back on the 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re not vibing with the platform.
Let’s look at an overview of the type of payment plans you’re offered.
Single Plans 🤑
The starter and pro plans are for single business owners who only need to test Kinsta out before jumping into the higher-paid plans. These range from $35 to $70 a month and offer features such as:
- 1-2 WordPress installations
- 25,000 to 50,000 visits
- 10-20 GB disk space
- Free SSL, CDN, and Staging
- Free Migrations
Business Plans 🤑🤑
The Business plans (1, 2, 3, and 4) range from $115 to $450 a month. Here are the features that you can expect:
- 5-40 WordPress installations
- 100,000 to 600,000 visits
- 30-60 GB disk space
- Free SSL, CDN, and Staging
- Free Migrations
Enterprise Plans 🤑🤑🤑
There are also four enterprise plans, and these are suitable for large businesses who have outgrown the business plans.
These range from $675 to $1,650 a month, and these are the features you’d be benefitting from with one of these plans:
- 60-150 WordPress installations
- 1,000,000 to 2,500,000 visits
- 100-250 GB disk space
- Free SSL, CDN, and Staging
- Free Migrations
Custom Plans 🤑🤑🤑🤑
Once you have outgrown the enterprise plans (anything is possible!), there is then the choice to contact Kinsta and create a custom plan.
Kinsta hosts agencies and enterprise clients of all sizes, so it’s possible to connect with them and create a higher plan. They even offer dedicated VMs, which pulls them apart from their competition, who often don’t offer these services. 🤔
What We Loved About Kinsta?
There is plenty to like about Kinsta but to keep this short and sweet, we have listed out two favorites here.
Industry-Leading Technical Support
We cannot stop talking about this technical support. 😂 The fact that you have access to industry experts every time you have an issue is amazing. They’re quick to reply and get your issue resolved, which is a stark difference from many other cloud-based hosting platforms out there.
Free Cloudflare Access
Did we mention that you also get Cloudflare for no charge at all with your Kinsta membership? A Cloudflare membership is normally priced at $200 a month, so you’re getting an awesome deal here. 🥳🥳🥳
What We Didn’t Like About Kinsta?
Now onto what we didn’t like so much…
There’s No Email Hosting
Email hosting is an important part of owning an online business, and people who want an all-in-one hosting solution might be disappointed that Kinsta doesn’t offer email hosting. 🤔
Their explanation for this is that they wanted to leave email hosting up to the experts, which is a fair point. However, make sure you’re not expecting this to be a part of your package deal.
Comparison: Kinsta Vs. InMotion
InMotion is another cloud-based hosting service that is often regarded as one of Kinsta’s top competitors. But which one takes the cake? 🤔🍰
One major difference between these two platforms is that Kinsta requires you to pay separately for each WordPress site you add to your account. However, InMotion allows you to pay one fee for unlimited WordPress sites added to your account.
This is great for people who have multiple WordPress sites that need monitoring through your platform. 👌
With that being said, most of us won’t mind paying extra for the added quality that Kinsta brings. Kinsta offers better back-ups, free malware protection and solving, global data centers, and free Cloudflare Enterprise.
In contrast, InMotion offers no malware hack prevention, not the best backup management, and a limited number of data centers. 🤷🤷
InMotion offers better storage than Kinsta, which can be handy for larger websites with lots of bells and whistles. They include a cPanel, too (although Kinsta’s alternative to a cPanel is still very effective).
Overall, Kinsta has the edge on InMotion as it is better in most ways. Did we mention that Kinsta also offers the best technical support in the industry? 🤣🙌🙌
Our Verdict
Kinsta is an excellent cloud-based hosting solution for almost all of your needs. Depending on the plan you choose, you can host multiple WordPress sites without a hitch thanks to the global data centers Kinsta has all around the world. 🌎
Excellent technical support, great security measures, and fast speeds are just a few of the things you can expect from your Kinsta membership. Overall, we think this is an excellent hosting provider – one of the best! 🥳🥳🥳