When it comes to performance WordPress hosting, two names come up – WPEngine and Kinsta. I have already reviewed WPEngine. In this post, I will review Kinsta and will show you what makes it stand apart from other web hosts.
Kinsta is based in LA and London. They have some major clients like Ubisoft, Intuit etc.
Hosting Plans
Kinsta has a wide range of plans for every budget. The best thing is the features remain same in every plan. Only the number of sites allowed, visitors allowed, disk space and CDN bandwidth differs. Some of the plans are shown below:
Their plans range from $30/month all the way upto $1,500/month. They also offer custom plans for enterprises.
What happens if you exceed your plan limits? Will they shut down your hosting account like some other budget hosts? No. They will never do that. But, you will be charged overage fees for that month. The overage fees are as follows:
| Product | Overage Fees |
| Visits | $1/1,000 visits |
| Disk Space | $2/GB |
| CDN Overage | $0.10/GB |
But, there is something which Kinsta calls as Extreme Overage. According to their site,
“An extreme overage occurs when the amount of your overage is as large or larger than the cost of your hosting plan, or $500, whichever is less.
For example, if you are on our Starter plan ($30 / month) an extreme overage would be an overage of $30 or more. On our Enterprise 2 plan ($900 / month) an extreme overage would be an overage of $500 or more.”
Hosting Infrastructure
Kinsta uses GCP as their hosting platform. Their tagline is “WordPress at the speed of Google”. You can choose from over 20 datacenters to host your website(s). They also use the premium tier of GCP network meaning your visitors will get the lowest latency possible. Kinsta uses containers to isolate customer sites and provide them with dedicated resources.
Here is the latest datacenter map of Kinsta:
Kinsta is continuously adding new locations every few months which is a really good thing. Also, their plan pricing don’t change with the datacenter choice.
What Makes Kinsta Stand Out?
Kinsta has many features which almost every other web hosts have. So, why should one choose Kinsta? Below I have listed some:
- Experienced WordPress Support Team
- WordPress Optimized Servers
- Free Site Migrations
- Great Security Measures
- No Bandwidth Limits
Let us look into each of them in details.
Experienced WordPress Support Team
Kinsta’s support team consists of WordPress and server experts who are really experienced in their fields. They will have yoour back 24x7x365 via live chat and tickets.
WordPress Optimized Servers
Kinsta keeps their servers up to date with the latest software those are required for WordPress.
As of now, the softwares used by them are PHP 8.0, Nginx, LXD containers and MariaDB.
Free Site Migrations
Kinsta offers free site migrations on their every plan. The size of the site to be migrated is not a limitation for them.
Great Security Measures
Kinsta has a dedicated team monitoring their servers for security breaches. They have a WAF and also they provide DDoS protection. You can rest easy knowing that your WordPress site is in safe hands.
Kinsta Performance
I expect a lot from Kinsta as they use GCP for hosting the sites. So, I performed some tests of my own.
First, I tested the uptime:
Here is a test by Bitcatcha. As you can see, maximum response time was from Singapore (the server is located in the US). This is really impressive. All of this was mads possible due to GCP and Kinsta’s optimization.
ALSO READ – Hostinger WordPress Hosting Review
Kinsta Support
Server performance is only half of the story. If the support is not good then no matter how good the performance is, no customer will stay. I am happy to say that Kinsta support is exceptional due to their WordPress and server experts.
Customer support can be accessed via live chat in the dashboard. It’s available 24/7. Unfortunately, there is no phone support.
Control Panel
Kinsta provides its users with an easy to use control panel. As Kinsta is a WordPress host, it’s control panel is designed by keeping WordPress in mind.
The UI is intuitive and overall, it is really easy to use. I would even go as far as to say that their control panel is better in usability than cPanel.
The control panel offers multiple features. The post would become way too long if I cover all of them but in short, here are some of the things that you can do:
- View Resource Usage
- Manage Migrations
- Manage DNS Records
- Site Analytics
- Manage Sites
Kinsta CDN
Kinsta offers free CDN in all of their plans. They offer this via KeyCDN. All of the plans have different CDN bandwidth allotments. The base plan comes with 50GB of CDN traffic per month.
Development Features
Kinsta offers many development features such as:
- SSH and FTP access
- Git
- And many more…
Security Features
Kinsta has extensive security options like WAF, DDoS protection, continuous monitoring by dedicated teams etc. They also check regularly for malwares. 2FA is also available. They also provide free HTTPS via Let’s Encrypt.
Kinsta also provides free daily backups. You can also create manual backups anytime from the control panel.
Pros and Cons of Kinsta
As with everything, Kinsta has pros and some cons. Here are they:
Pros
- Amazing performance thanks to GCP and WordPress optimized servers
- Experienced people in support
- Robust security features
- Free migrations
Cons
- It’s expensive for people who are just starting out
- No email service
- Banned plugins
Verdict
Kinsta is a good, reliable host based on GCP. They don’t have bandwidth limitations and they have a flat pricing for every datacenter. Their support is highly experienced in WordPress and servers.
It’s a great alternative to WPEngine and some other similarly priced hosts.
If you have any queries or suggestions, then please let me know in the comments down below.
ALSO READ – WPEngine Review
