Kinsta WordPress Hosting Review: Benefits, Pricing, and Cons

Kinsta’s managed service handles setup, administration, management, and support, making it ideal for businesses that want an autopilot hosting solution.

In this Kinsta Managed WordPress hosting review, we’ll go through its in-depth review, covering its benefits for WordPress hosting plans, features, pricing, pros/cons & how Kinsta works, and its alternatives.

What is Kinsta WordPress Hosting?

Kinsta is a popular USA-based hosting provider (founded in 2013) that offers premium WordPress-managed hosting focusing on reliability, security, and speed.

Over 120,000 users worldwide use Kinsta, ranging from high-traffic eCommerce stores to agencies and even Fortune 500 companies. In 2023, it generated $16.7M in revenue ^[1].

Kinsta runs on the Google Cloud Platform, with 36 data centers in Singapore, Belgium, the USA, the Netherlands, and other countries. This explains its high performance and ability to scale for high-traffic sites. It offers excellent uptime with low site load time.

Kinsta has highly secure hosting. It utilizes isolated container technology and Cloudflare integrations with Enterprise-level firewall and DDoS protection. It is also SOC2 compliant, meaning customer data is protected against security incidents, unauthorized access, and other vulnerabilities.

Kinsta’s custom MyKinsta dashboard simplifies the user experience. It supports 10 languages, including English, Dutch, Danish, Italian, Japanese, German, Spanish, Swedish, and Portuguese, making it accessible worldwide. 24/7/365 days customer service through live chat is provided as well.

Apart from these, Kinsta has 6 advantages to offer:

1. SSL support is available via free Let’s Encrypt and is directly installable through the dashboard.
2. Ability to choose the CDN of your choice, in addition to Cloudflare.
3. Offers free migration for new users, making onboarding easy and welcoming.
4. It provides a staging area to make site changes without disrupting the live site.
5. An excellent knowledge base that answers most basic queries.
6. Daily automated backups with no server overhead. Each backup is entirely isolated for single-click restoration.

Kinsta provides all these features at a premium price, so if you’re on a budget, It might not be for you.

5 Benefits of Using Kinsta for WordPress Hosting

Using Kinsta as your WordPress hosting provider comes with the 5 following benefits:

1. Incredible performance as it uses Google Cloud Platform’s Premium Tier Network.
2. Has WordPress-specific features such as easy WordPress debugging, a staging environment, and support for WooCommerce.
3. The MyKinsta dashboard is excellently easy to use. The dashboard summarizes the site’s performance and provides access to many other features, including website migration requests, a hosting activity log for troubleshooting and security checks, the Domain Name System(DNS), and the ability to manage multiple sites from dashboards.
4. Top-notch backup system that creates complete isolated backups daily, resulting in easy one-click restoration.
5. Kinsta offers 24/7/365 customer support via chat and a 30-day money-back guarantee on monthly and annual plans.

Kinsta: Features

Kinsta is a feature-rich hosting platform, with 13 of its advanced features mentioned below.

1. Free Migration: Kinsta’s dedicated migration team handles free migrations from hosting platforms such as WP Engine, SiteGround, Bluehost, Pagely, etc. You only need to request the migration request form from the MyKinsta dashboard.
2. Intuitive MyKinsta dashboard: Kinsta offers a custom, intuitive dashboard with an easy-to-use interface and access to features such as migration requests, detailed site analytics, staging server deployment, etc.
3. Blazing Fast Performance: Kinsta’s state-of-the-art hosting stack (Nginx, PHP 7.3, MariaDB, LXD Containers, Server-side caching), coupled with Google Cloud Platform’s faster server and 36 data center locations, results in fast website performance. Its edge caching feature reduces the number of server requests, making web page loading speed 80% faster.
4. Useful Database hosting: Kinsta also offers database hosting, which allows you to host databases such as Redis, PostgreSQL, SQL, and MariaDB.
5. Premium staging environment: A completely separate staging environment (accessible from the MyKinsta dashboard) lets site owners make changes without affecting the live production site.
6. Excellent Security: Kinsta offers a highly secure environment via enterprise-level firewall and DDoS protection through Cloudflare, which uses Google Cloud’s premium tier network, free SSL, and complete isolation technology.
7. Top-notch DDoS Protection: With state-of-the-art infrastructure, Kinsta can detect DDoS attacks proactively while offering DDoS protection through Cloudlfare’s strict rules filter, which blocks IPs associated with DDoS attacks.
8. Malware Security: Kinsta’s experts will remove malware from your site if it gets infected for free (a $100 one-time fee applicable for already-infected sites moving to Kinsta from another hosting provider).
9. Free SSL with WildCard support: Let’s Encrypt offers free SSL on all Kinsta plans, which offer renewed SSL with 256-bit SHA256 encryption. Kinsta also supports wildcard domains through Cloudflare, making it easy to manage multiple sites.
10. Free Kinsta CDN: Kinsta offers a high-performance content delivery network(CDN) free of cost (enabled by default on all new sites).
11. Daily Backups: Kinsta performs daily backups with intervals between hours and 6 hours.
12. Uptime Checks: Kinsta performs uptime checks every 3 minutes with New Relic technology, notifying users of downtime and ensuring they match their 99.9% uptime service-level agreement (SLA).
13. Excellent Support: Kinsta experts are available 24/7/365 via chat and offer real-time updates in English, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish.

Kinsta WordPress Hosting: Pricing

Kinsta offers multi-tier pricing divided into Starter, Business, and Enterprise plans.

Apart from these, Kinsta provides single-site plans starting at $90 per month and an agency plan at $340 monthly. You can contact them for custom plans. Furthermore, they offer add-ons such as external backup, Nginx, and Disk Space Add-ons at an extra price.

How Kinsta Works

Once you sign up for any of Kinsta’s plans, follow the steps below.

1. Log in to your account.
2. If you already have a WordPress site with other hosting, you can raise a migration request (free for one-time use only) from the custom MyKinsta dashboard.
3. After the migration completes, your site should go live!

If you don’t already have a site, follow the steps mentioned below:

1. To create a new WordPress site, click on ‘Add’ a new site.
2. From there, you can choose to install WordPress, select your domain name (you can buy one from domain name providers such as Namecheap.com if you don’t have one), and finally, choose from the 36 available data centers.
3. After the WordPress installation, connect the site’s domain name by pointing the DNS from your domain name provider to Kinsta-provided DNS.
4. Your site should go live after the DNS reflects (should take around 1 hour).

Kinsta handles the automatic backups, security, performance, updates, and troubleshooting since it is a managed provider. In comparison, a non-managed hosting provider doesn’t offer a seamless hosting experience. You must carry out all the operations, such as manually installing WordPress, installing SSL, configuring the DNS, etc., which also requires much time and technical knowledge.

Kinsta Pros

Kinsta is perfect for WordPress hosting due to these 4 pros:

1. Performance: With Kinsta, WordPress sites load faster (with a lower average response time) than competitors due to using Google Cloud’s premium-tier servers. The sites are also easily scalable and handle spikes, making them ideal for WooCommerce sites.
2. Easy to use: You can launch your site in a few steps. If you already have an existing WordPress site, Kinsta will migrate it for free. Users do not have to worry about security, updates, backups, and configurations because Kinsta offers managed services. Its premium staging environments are helpful as they make changes to the site easy and intuitive.
3. Features: I like the MyKinsta custom hosting dashboard as it is user-friendly, making managing websites and team members easy. You get features such as an easy migration request option, the ability to change DNS settings, access to website performance analytics, add new users, and do better troubleshooting with activity log access.
4. Security: The isolated container technology and Cloudflare protect you from malware and DDoS attacks despite its faster load times. The automated 14 to 30-day backup (depending on your package) gives you complete peace of mind, as you can revert to a stable state with one-click restores. Uptime is also strong, at 99.9%, thanks to rigorous uptime checks with a generous 30-day money-back guarantee.

Kinsta Cons

Kinsta has 3 cons, as listed below:

1. Price: Its premium plans, which focus on performance, stability, and security, are costly, especially for sites with massive traffic, where you must pay additional costs for additional CDN, traffic, and storage usage. Not all backups are free as based on the plan, users can opt for daily backups up to 14 to 30 days free. If you opt for 6-hour or hourly backups, you must pay anywhere from $20/site/mo to $100/site/mo.
2. No free trial: Kinsta does not provide a free trial, and to avail of the 30-day money-back guarantee, users would have to share their credit card information. Furthermore, there is no phone support, so users might feel a bit hesitant to share their details when they won’t be able to avail of instant phone support.
3. No email hosting: This adds to the cost as users need to rely on third-party email hosting solutions such as Zoho Mail or G Suite. Similarly, Kinsta doesn’t allow every plugin and theme on their hosting.

What are the Managed WordPress Hosting Providers other than Kinsta?

Kinsta’s pricing and lack of email hosting options can be a big deterrent for many users. The following managed WordPress hosting providers have their advantages.

#1. WP Engine

WP Engine is an excellent Kisnta alternative that uses Amazon Web Services to host websites. Its managed WordPress plans offer similar features, including staging, server caching, fast performance, etc., at better value for money. However, it doesn’t scale visit limits, which is not ideal for growing sites.

Additionally, WP Engine offers phone support on all plans (except the entry-level StartUp plan). WP Engine’s security is also well known as it deploys custom security solutions and Cloudflare protections.

WP Engine pricing starts at $20 per month which is cheaper than Kinsta’s basic plan at $30 per month (both their basic plans offer almost similar features).

#2. Siteground

Siteground is a perfect choice for users with a limited budget. Their hosting services provide cheap yet feature-rich WordPress-managed hosting, but in a shared virtual environment, which has disadvantages, including compromised security, speed, and accessibility.

SiteGround pricing starts at just $2.99 per month, whereas Kinsta basic plan is $30 per month.

#3. Cloudways

Cloudways offers way more options than Kinsta when it comes to cloud providers and that too at a cheaper price.

With Cloudways, you can choose between Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Linode, Vultr and Digital Ocean. It also offers a 3-day free trial with no credit card requirement. Cloudways charges users only for the resources they use, making it an ideal choice for startups. However, this approach also means no 30-day money-back guarantee.

Cloudways lets users work with all types of content management systems, such as WordPress, Joomla, PHP, and Drupal. With Kinsta, users need to be content with WordPress as they cannot work with non-WordPress sites. 

 As for features, Cloudways lacks automated WordPress updates, but it does offer free hourly backup (which is chargeable at Kinsta), or you can take manual backups. 

Overall, Cloudways is a better pick if you’re on a budget and want a more versatile approach to hosting. Due to how Cloudways offers hosting plans, its cheapest plans start at $14 per month.

Comparison of Kinsta and its Alternatives

The comparison of the features of Kinsta with those of its alternatives is given in the table below based on their security features, backup process, staging sites, etc.

My Kinsta Verdict

Kinsta is a strong contender in the WordPress-managed hosting space. It is fast, secure, and easy to use. It provides users with additional features, like allowing them to delete personal data if they want to remove their accounts, which is a huge plus for businesses that deal with sensitive data.

The pros of Kinsta outweigh its cons, making it the right choice for businesses looking for no-compromise top WordPress-managed hosting. However, it is not for every use case, such as sites starting to build their audience. Good alternatives, like WP Engine, SiteGround, and Cloudways, offer value for money.

Kinsta receives Geekflare Editorial’s Choice Award as it is a feature-rich hosting service with decent pricing options. It is ideal for growing startups, businesses, and enterprises that want a no-compromise solution for their WordPress hosting needs.

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