If you’re looking for premium Managed Wordpress Hosting, you’ll want to read my Kinsta Review here. After testing out Kinsta’s hosting for myself, I have some definite thoughts on how it compares to other managed WordPress hosts as well as who exactly should be using Kinsta for their WordPress websites.
Kinsta Background
Founded in 2013, Kinsta’s goal was and continues to be to provide the best WordPress hosting platform in the world—particularly for those website owners dissatisfied with the status quo WordPress hosting offerings.
Kinsta Hosting Plans
Kinsta offers 10 different managed WordPress hosting plans:
- Starter (1 Install)
- Pro (2 Installs)
- Business 1 (5 Installs)
- Business 2 (10 Installs)
- Business 3 (20 Installs)
- Business 4 (40 Installs)
- Enterprise 1 (60 Installs)
- Enterprise 2 (80 Installs)
- Enterprise 3 (120 Installs)
- Enterprise 4 (150 Installs)
Prices range from $35 mo. (Starter) to $1650 mo. (Enterprise 4). Note that you can get two free months of hosting by signing up for an annual plan. All plans come with a 30 day money-back guarantee. And, you can get your website migrated to Kinsta for free.
While Kinsta’s prices are on the higher side, keep in mind that they offer premium managed WordPress hosting that is designed for critical website applications that require more than a general shared hosting plan provides.
Kinsta Features
- Choose From 34 Different Data Centers
- Data Centers in US, CAN, EUR, Asia, Australia, South America
- Powered by Google Cloud Platform
- 24/7/365 Expert Customer Support
- Free Kinsta CDN
- Cloudflare Integration Security
- Auto Wildcard SSL
- DDoS Protection
- Server-Level Full Page Caching
- Custom Designed Dashboard
- Analytics Reports
- Automatic Daily Backups
- Website Staging
- Free Hack Fixes
- Free Site Migration
- 30 Day Money Back Guarantee
I am impressed with the features that Kinsta includes with their hosting plan. All of the features you would expect and need from premium managed WordPress hosting are there—and more.
It starts with being able to choose your data center locations—and we’re not just talking about 2 or 3 choices here! Kinsta has data centers around the world in 34 different locations. So, whether you’re in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, or South America, you can choose a server location that is closer to your own location.
Having your website on a server closer to your area can help speed up your site. And, while we’re on the subject of website speed, Kinsta is powered by Google Cloud Platform and includes their Kinsta CDN to help speed up your websites even more. See the Website Speed and Performance section below for more details.
Some of the other notable features included are Cloudflare Security, website staging, daily automatic backups with manual backup options, and Kinsta’s custom dashboard with analytics.
Kinsta Signup and Website Propagation
I found the signup process at Kinsta to be very easy. And, website propagation time is very good. I really like how Kinsta displays a popup checklist on the right side of your screen to guide you through the process of testing your site adding and pointing your domain to Kinsta, etc.
Working within the Kinsta Dashboard
The Kinsta dashboard is very intuitive and easy to use, with easy access to your domains, data backups, CDN, analytics, and your other tools. It was easy for me to find any functionality I needed right away. The only slight exception is that if you want to actually view your website, you need to go to your sites and then click on Domains to get the link. It’s not a big deal once you know about it.
Website Speed and Performance
Kinsta produced excellent speed and performance results in our testing. Kinsta utilizes the Google Cloud Platform and full page caching at the server level together with Kinsta’s CDN and Cloudflare Infrastructure. The results are fast loading websites that run very efficiently.
What’s also impressive about Kinsta is that you can choose your server location from 34 different data center locations. It makes it very easy to select a server located closer to you for faster website performance.
Here are some sample speed test results from GTmetrix:
Website Security
Security is always one of the most important parts of maintaining a successful website. And, Kinsta is definitely on top of things here. With Kinsta’s hosting plans, you get Cloudflare Integration Security that includes Wildcard SSL certificates, DDoS protection, Two-Factor Authentication, hack and malware removal, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Automatic Data Backup
With Kinsta, you get automatic daily data backups of your website environment. You can restore your data from the last 14 backups. Additionally, you can also create up to 5 manual data backups whenever you need to.
And, if you want to download an archive copy of your website, you can create a downloadable backup once per week.
More frequent backups or a longer backup retention period are available for additional fees. For most WordPress users, the default backup features are fine.
I found Kinsta’s Backup and Restore functionality very quick and easy to use.
Website Staging
Kinsta includes easy to use website staging with your hosting plan. I found the process very intuitive and was able to create my staging environment then push my changes back to my live website quickly and easily. Kinsta has done a great job here, and staging is one of their best features.
Kinsta Customer Support
As mentioned previously, Kinsta provides 24/7 expert WordPress customer support. I’ve found the live chat response times to very good and the support staff to be very courteous and helpful in answering questions and issue resolution. Here is a snippet of a recent live chat support conversation:
Recommendation
Kinsta is definitely one of the top managed WordPress hosting providers—a worthy alternative to WP Engine, SiteGround, and DreamHost. While I would not necessarily recommend them to WordPress beginners, experienced WordPress users that need premium hosting for their mission-critical websites should certainly consider signing up for one of their managed hosting plans. And, I would also recommend that WordPress agencies put them on their list.
