Kinsta: A Deep Dive into Premium Managed WordPress Hosting

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When it comes to best web hosting and website management, there is no shortage of options. The vast majority of companies out there offer affordable services that are good enough to get the job done. For us, Kinsta is the standout choice for agency hosting.

Kinsta is a cloud-based hosting solution providing services for WordPress websites. They provide access to high-performance servers and features such as staging environments, automatic backups, enterprise-level Cloudflare integration, and more.

Kinsta also includes quality security features such as DDoS protection, SSL certificate with wildcard support, and malware scanning and removal.

From the main website, you can access Kinsta’s official blog. It’s easy on the eye and filled with a myriad of articles, most of which are related to WordPress and software development. In addition to this, Kinsta offers a fresh and video-packed YouTube channel and relatively active presence on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

Kinsta Features

Kinsta offers high-end CPUs, as well as global availability, thanks to its infrastructure built on a powerful cloud network. By using these top-of-the-line CPUs, you are guaranteed that your website will be up and running faster than ever before.

To further improve your website’s speed, Kinsta also offers a global content delivery network with over 300 locations worldwide. This allows Kinsta to deliver fast pages and serve cached assets from your visitors’ closest location.

Kinsta also comes with built-in application performance monitoring (APM), a custom-designed tool specifically for WordPress sites. We used this feature to identify potential issues or bottlenecks slowing our site during our hosting service test.

Kinsta’s DevKinsta feature provides a comprehensive development environment that makes it easy to develop applications locally on your computer. DevKinsta includes many helpful features, such as version control that allows developers to roll back to previous versions of their code if needed, easy debugging with Xdebug integration, and deployments to production servers with just one click.

With the new Kinsta Cloudflare integration, we leveraged a wildcard SSL certificate to secure our subdomains with a single certificate. A wildcard SSL certificate secures both a root domain and its subdomains. This contrasts with other certificate types, which require listing each subdomain on the certificate.

As part of its Cloudflare integration, Kinsta offers customers a unique benefit – reserved IP addresses. Reserved IPs are unique IP addresses assigned to each Kinsta customer site. These IP addresses are reserved exclusively for that customer and ensure that other sites on Cloudflare’s network will not share the DNS A-record IP address. In some cases, this can cause problems if a service blocks a spam site that shares the same Cloudflare IP address as your site.

We were also impressed by the Kinsta Brotli Compression Tool (a lossless compression format supported by all major browsers that achieves higher compression ratios than gzip).

Kinsta also released a tool called Edge Caching. This is an incredibly powerful tool for WordPress websites that can significantly reduce the time it takes to serve cached HTML to site visitors. Edge Caching is included free with all Kinsta plans, and no additional plugins are required.

Kinsta’s Edge Caching works by saving your website/page cache to Cloudflare’s global network of over 260 data centers. When site visitors load your website, cached responses are delivered from the location closest to them, helping reduce latency and improve loading times.

With the help of the Early Hints, you can further enhance site speed. Early hints is a modern web standard that defines a new 103 HTTP status code. Enabling this web standard on your site gives your site visitors’ browsers the chance to download certain resources in advance or in parallel with others. This results in faster page rendering.

A curiosity of Kinsta’s hosting, but one that we found made sense, is the apparent lack of a temporary URL for checking that the site runs accurately. However, this feature can be easily turned on and off and lasts around 60 minutes when enabled. Given that a site doesn’t need to be seen by the public or crawlers before launch, this is useful.

For web hosting services in Australia, Kinsta CDN is available in six Australian cities, namely Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney.

Is Kinsta Easy to Use?

We find Kinsta easy to use – from signing up to navigating through the dashboard. The web host provides you with an intuitive dashboard that makes hosting your website easy. The dashboard let us quickly access all the features and settings in one place, which makes it simple to manage our website’s performance and security.

With Kinsta, you can set up and manage multiple websites from one account. Kinsta also has a number of helpful features that make managing your website easier. All these features are designed so that even those who aren’t tech-savvy can easily manage their website without too much hassle.

Kinsta Plans and Pricing

Kinsta offers plans ranging from $35/month to $1,700/month. All plans include free wildcard SSL, CDN, staging, and unlimited migrations. Kinsta offers two pricing models for its plans: visit-based and bandwidth-based. In visit-based plans, the plan is defined by the monthly sum of unique IP addresses seen each 24-hour period. While bandwidth-based plans are defined by the amount of data in gigabytes (does not include content served by CDN and Edge Cache, and does not count bandwidth used by staging sites)

But what do you get when you purchase one of these plans? The Single plan starts at $35/month and includes 1 WordPress site, 10 GB of storage, 125 GB of free CDN, and 35,000 visits per month or 20 GB server bandwidth. The Single plans scale with each step up, providing more site visits or server bandwidth, storage, and CDN bandwidth. Each Single site plan denotes the support amount of visits or bandwidth. The plans go up to 1,250,000+ visits or 500GB+ server bandwidth, 15 GB+ storage, and 1,000 GB CDN bandwidth.

Multiple-site plans support multiple WordPress installs. Each plan name denotes the number of WordPress installs supported. Each multiple-site plan supports multisite network and site cloning. For WP 2 ($70/mo), you get 2 WordPress installs, 70,000 visits or 40 GB server bandwidth, 250 GB of CDN bandwidth, and 20 GB of storage. As the plans increase in price, so do the resources, site visits, and number of WordPress installs. The WP 40 plan ($450/mo) supports 40 WordPress installs, 60 GB of storage, 1,500 GB of CDN, and 75,000 monthly visits or 500 GB server bandwidth.

Kinsta also offers an Enterprise Plan for multiple sites, which starts at $675/month and includes 60+ WordPress installs, 100+ GB of space, 1,250,000+ visits or 750GB+ server bandwidth, and a 30-day backup retention.

All the above plans come with unlimited free migrations and a 30-day money-back guarantee, so if you are not satisfied with the service, you can request a refund. Select plans on Single and Multiple-site tiers also include a one-month free trial.

Agency Hosting

Kinsta’s Agency program is targeted, price-wise, at established digital agencies. The Agency 20 plan ($284/month with annual billing), which we tested, offers support for 20 WordPress installs, so potentially 20 clients. It also includes an extra site, for your agency. 500,000 visits or 250GB server bandwidth, 50GB of storage, and 1,000GB CDN storage make this an attractive starting point, but Agency 40 ($375/month with annual billing) and Agency 60 ($563/month under the same terms) are also available, with corresponding increases in installs.

These plans also include white labelling and access to beta tools. Backups, advanced caching, and migrations are also included with these packages, along with that all-important developer support. Several tools are available here, from easy site cloning to Git integration and access to the Kinsta API.

Kinsta Speed and Experience

Kinsta argues that users will almost certainly see “faster page load times, along with back-end (WordPress dashboard) speed” when hosting with them. Faster than what, we asked ourselves. Faster than the average speed, faster than lightning, or faster than Superman?

In any case, we ran tests on Kinsta’s Single plan and Agency 20. One test was to create a benchmark of core WordPress performance metrics, and the other was to measure their performance under load.

Latest Results

Kinsta performed well on its core benchmarks and maintained these scores across both its Single and Agency plans. We noted especially high scores in file and database performance, which bodes well for WordPress sites, especially those with high transaction rates, such as eCommerce stores, membership-based sites, or large-scale enterprise websites.

Under increasing load, Kinsta was a mixed bag in performance. However, we noted that although some transactions failed, Kinsta’s servers seemed to handle load balancing well. That means its servers should be well-optimized to ensure that your website visitors encounter more or less similar experiences, rather than facing wildly varying transaction times. This is highly crucial to high-performance websites and not something you fix on your own.

Kinsta Security

Kinsta is one provider that offers quality security measures (in our opinion), including SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates. An SSL certificate is a type of digital certificate that provides encryption and authentication for data sent over the internet. It helps protect user information, such as credit card numbers and passwords, from unauthorized access by malicious third parties.

More essentially, sites at Kinsta are containerized. That means everything required to run your site is within your container, including the entire tech stack. This isolation means that as long as you can secure your website, nothing else that’s happening to other sites on Kinsta can affect you.

Kinsta uses Cloudflare’s infrastructure to provide wildcard SSL certificates with 128-bit or higher encryption as well as 2048-bit RSA keys. Kinsta says its servers are also constantly monitored 24/7 for any signs of suspicious activity or hacking, which is good to know. Kinsta also offers a 99.9% SLA-backed uptime guarantee.

There’s also a Malware Security Pledge in which Kinsta’s dedicated Malware team will help restore a site in the event of an attack. The team monitors all sites, and its services are free for all Kinsta customers.

Customer Support

Kinsta offers knowledgeable sales representatives who can help you find the hosting plan that best fits your website or project.

If you want a deeper dive into all of Kinsta’s features, consider scheduling a personalized demo with one of its experts. This is an excellent way to get familiar with Kinsta’s powerful dashboard and hosting features, as well as ask any questions that come up during the process.

We had a few questions about our website and contacted Kinsta through its question form on the website. They got back to us the next day with answers tailored specifically to our hosting dilemma.

Kinsta’s support team is available 24/7/365 via live chat in the MyKinsta dashboard, so you can quickly get help. You can also open tickets here if you ever have any issues with your site. Additionally, Kinsta has beefed up localization in its customer support by making help available in 10 languages.

As noted, we also tried Kinsta’s Agency 20 plan, arranging for a site to be migrated via a backup. The support operative who took ownership of this task completed it within a couple of hours, a timescale that included not just scanning the ZIP file for potential issues, but also fully migrating it and testing the site.

We later ran into an issue trying to point a domain at the hosting. This requires a bit more clicking and settings configuration than with other hosts (switching nameservers is just one aspect of this), but while I found this baffling at first, the support team member who walked me through it helped me solve it within 15 minutes.

There are more than a few self-help options including regularly updated documentation, free e-books, free webinars, a newsletter and a blog we mentioned before, and everything is dedicated to bringing knowledge about WordPress to its users. In addition to this, Kinsta’s YouTube channel is filled with step-by-step guides and the new ones are coming out on a week-to-week basis at the very least.

As an alternative, you can reach Kinsta’s “timely and knowledgeable” support via email and chat.

Kinsta Alternatives

Much like Kinsta, Flywheel is a fellow US-based host specialized in “top-of-the-line” managed WordPress hosting solutions. Both of them strive to be beginner-friendly, offer well-rounded, feature-packed packages and are on the high-priced side of the spectrum. However, Kinsta’s least expensive solution starts at a whopping $30, half as much as what is offered by Flywheel. Therefore, if the price is the key criterion (since both hosts are competent) for you, you could save some bucks by going with Flywheel.

Bluehost is one of the most popular hosting options on the market today, even when it comes to managed WordPress hosting. In comparison with Kinsta, Bluehost has a myriad of hosting types and options besides WordPress and its WordPress plans are well-structured and suitable for newcomers. If you are, however, looking for premium managed WordPress options, you might find yourself at home with Kinsta.

DreamHost is a US-based provider supplying WordPress-optimized hosting solutions and related services, including a domain registration, which is something you won’t get with Kinsta. Another thing they don’t provide is a website builder and you’ll have that as an option with DreamHost. What is more, in addition to offering more hosting options, DreamHost has more pocket-friendly plans, so you’ll save some money as well.

Although HostGator does not specialize in WordPress hosting, it has a few rather attractive solutions on the offer. Nonetheless, if you are looking for a premium fully managed WordPress hosting (and you are ready to shell out the money) Kinsta might be a better pick. If you would rather have something simpler and more on the affordable side, HostGator is an excellent choice.

WP Engine is also a great alternative as it offers a wide range of services, from shared hosting to managed WordPress hosting and dedicated servers. WP Engine is known for its fast speeds and reliable uptime, as well as its excellent customer service and support team.

SiteGround is another great option if you’re looking for an alternative to Kinsta. This provider offers a variety of hosting plans that range from shared hosting to VPS and cloud solutions. SiteGround also has excellent customer service and support, which makes it a great choice if you need help getting started or have questions about how to use their services.

Is Kinsta Right for You?

Kinsta offers a range of features to help businesses get up and running quickly and easily, including easy scalability, managed updates, automated daily backups, and 24/7 support.

Kinsta offers a range of features to help businesses get up and running quickly and easily, including automatic scaling, managed updates, automated daily backups, SSH access, WP CLI, a powerful API, Application Performance Monitoring, and 24/7/365 support in 10 languages, with a response time within a minute and 98% client satisfaction.

Kinsta also prides itself on its performance and reliability – It’s caching technology ensures websites load faster than ever before; this helps keep visitors on your site longer which can lead to increased conversions.

Kinsta FAQs

Is Kinsta only for WordPress?
Kinsta is mainly known for managed WordPress hosting but also offers other types of hosting including static and database hosting

Do I need a security plugin with Kinsta?
Technically, you don’t need a security plugin at Kinsta. Their servers are robust, and they have proactive monitoring and malware removal services. However, we prefer to err on the side of caution and advise you to assess your site’s security requirements in case you need anything beyond what Kinsta covers.

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Kinsta review | TechRadar