Kinsta Review
Summary:
Kinsta has performed well in all of my annual speed tests and is my chosen host for this blog. Why? Because they have awesome features like one-click backups that take seconds, not minutes, an easy-to-use staging area and much more!
View More DetailsWhat Will I Learn?
Did you know that this blog is hosted on Kinsta?
In the past, I’ve ran tests to try and find the fastest Wordpress hosting provider.
Unfortunately, Kinsta didn’t come out on top in terms of raw speed.
But despite that:
Why?
Because I’m VERY HAPPY with their service and industry leading features.
So in this Kinsta Review, I’m going to show you why I’ve decided to stick with Kinsta as the current web host of this blog.
Use the table of contents to easily naviagte the page.
What Will I Learn?
Kinsta is a hosting provider (from the USA) who offers premium managed WordPress hosting powered by the Google Cloud platform with some fantastic features.
Their hosting services are designed for everyone, from startups to larger companies.
Before we jump into their hosting features, I’ll share with you the results of my case study (which I briefly mentioned above).
Kinsta is my current managed WordPress hosting platform.
So I thought they would come out on top in my fastest Wordpress hosting test.
But here’s what happened:
I tested 12 WordPress sites hosted with different hosting companies.
First Test:
When it came to loading speed using GT Metrix, the Kinsta test site came out in 3rd place…with an average page load times of 1.60 seconds.
And WP Engine’s hosting service sitting at the bottom with Siteground.
Second Test:
The second review focuses again on loading speed but this time using Pingdom. Again Kinsta came in 3rd place with an average loading time of 835 ms.
Third Test:
I then stress-tested the best WordPress web hosts with a load impact on each page of 500 simultaneous visitors. And Kinsta came in 4th…
Fourth Test:
Next, I wanted to see how these WordPress hosting packages would perform with WordPress plugins. I tested using the WordPress Performance Tester plugin.
Kinsta came out on top!
Fifth Test:
I wanted to see how fast and well each provider could respond to my problems. So I sent out an identical support ticket to each 24 7 support team…and Kinsta solved the problems successfully with a great response time.
Out of all these hosting companies, while WPX Hosting (see my full WPX Hosting review) ranked 1st…after review I’d give Kinsta 2nd place.
Kinsta provided a solid performance with their fantastic support staff and are ready to handle any traffic spikes coming your way.
As mentioned earlier, I moved my blog’s hosting from WPX Hosting to Kinsta 2 years ago.
I moved to the Kinsta WordPress platform because my blog had outgrown its previous environment. And Kinsta had new features that WPX Hosting didn’t offer at the time.
I needed:
I love the fact that Kinsta is always evolving.
Please note, Kinsta doesn’t offer domain registration and are not a shared hosting provider.
They’re one of the fastest WordPress hosting providers to offer new features and they’ve always offered great customer service from their individual support staff and customer support team.
They have an uptime guarantee of 99 9% and automatically install their caching plugin
Also, developers using clients like Sequel Pro will be pleased to know that Kinsta actually supports secure SSH tunnelling. They aren’t the cheapest but take a look at my A2 Hosting review if you’re on a budget.
Below, I’ll go into more detail regarding each of these features.
I first moved to a hosting Kinsta account because of their new features.
WPXHosting (previously TrafficPlanetHosting) was great, but I needed extra features. I noticed that my website speed was getting slower over time.
With Kinsta’s newer technologies, I found a
Kinsta is also the first in the industry to release the latest softwares like PHP versions 7.3.
And they moved all clients to Google’s next-generation compute-optimized virtual machines (C2) at no extra charge!
Which resulted in faster load times for their entire clientbase overnight.
If you want a first-hand example, here’s mine.
After I migrated my site, the average response time went from ~750ms down to ~385 ms…which is a 94.8% increase in performance.
While Kinsta wasn’t the fastest managed WordPress hosting in my test, it was one of the top contenders on the list.
The figures above are averages from speeds all around the world. And disproved many of the claims made by some WordPress hosting companies such as WP Engine.
Kinsta offers daily automatic backups. You can also create up to 5 manual backups that are stored for 14 days.
What I love about manual backups is they take around 15 seconds to complete which saves us a lot of time waiting around.
Kinsta also has six-hour or hourly backups add-on available for anyone who needs additional restore points.
Honestly, Kinsta offers the most robust backup system I have ever used and it is one of the key reasons I have stayed with them.
Kinsta WordPress hosting doesn’t offer telephone support.
But no phone support doesn’t mean they don’t deliver tech support well.
In fact, they have an incredible 24 7 support ticketing system and after the dreadful support channels of WP Engine, this website management was a breath of fresh air.
In the past, they’ve always created scripts to help me solve a complex problem.
Like when a plugin was adding bulk to the database, they created a script to automatically clean it. This reduced my database size by 73%.
Or when I needed to do a bulk update to thousands of URLs.
Kinsta put together a script to automate the entire task… which would have taken me days of manual labour!
They’re also proactive at monitoring emerging problems.
In my personal experience, the Google cloud platform with Kinsta WordPress web hosting provides incredible, dedicated support for even the more complex WordPress issues.
You don’t have to jump through multiple levels of support and every email address you can find to get to a true expert, because with this web host, they are all true experts!
Their email service provided by the team of support reps is equal to and in most cases better than a lot of the WP hosting companies out there as you saw in the hosting review.
Thought it’s not the cheapest host out there, the fully managed Kinsta Wordpress hosting experience is absolutely fantastic.
It’s the right choice for most small to medium sized business or if you’re a web developer that wants to provide high end hosting to their clients.
However, it might be too expensive for smaller personal projects.
Kinsta was initially one of the more expensive web hosts for starter plans.
But since May 2019, they’ve introduced new ‘entry-tier’ hosting plans starting at $30 00 per month and go all the way up to the enterprise plans from $600 00 per month.
And they have many price tag options to suit your business plans, just keep an eye on your monthly visitor limit and upgrade as needed:
Whether you have 1 000, 10 000, 20 000, 30 000, 40 000, 100 000 or 1 500 000 visits per month, Kinsta can help your small right up to your Fortune 500 business.
And all of their hosting plans have been given the average resources based on the disk space usage seen from other clients so SSD storage, server space and overage fees shouldn’t be a problem.
Below we’ll go through some of their newer technologies, as well as core features that make Kinsta a top premium managed WordPress hosting provider.
Remember how I said Kinsta is always pushing the boundaries?
In October 2019, they announced that they are moving to Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP) next-gen compute-optimized (C2) virtual machines.
I know I mentioned this above…
But what this means is…
But it’s not just the front-end. You’ll see faster site speed on the backend as well (when working in your WordPress admin dashboard.)
In the past month, Kinsta has been testing these new machines internally.
And while the performance varies based on the type of the site, they see performance improvements from 30% all the way to 200%.
They’re also NOT just moving a select few to their higher-tier plans, but making GCP machines available for all hosting plans at Kinsta! Even the starter plan.
In my test, it shows that WPX Hosting service was the fastest. BUT, Kinsta performed overall pretty well coming in 2nd.
They’ve made a lot of updates to help increase their global average speed.
They’ve recently added new data centres… and have over 20 different data centres everywhere around the world.
The United States is well covered and they spread far and wide so from Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Sao Paulo. You’re covered.
They also use state-of-the-art technology, including:
So when it comes to loading time and stability, I’m pretty confident in Kinsta. Especially since I still use them to host this blog today!
Unlike many other managed hosting, with the control panel, Kinsta provides a free CDN.
They’ve partnered with KeyCDN, an HTTP/2 and IPv6-enabled content delivery network with 34 locations! This way, you can turbocharge your assets and media around the globe.
So even though you’ll be hosting your website with a specific data center, your visitors can see your blog from fast and local server locations.
Login to the MyKinsta account dashboard.
Once in the Kinsta dashboard, click on ‘Sites’, and then click on the WordPress site that you want to enable the CDN.
Then, on the left-hand side, click on ‘Kinsta CDN’.
Then, click on ‘Enable Kinsta CDN’.
This action will deploy a CDN cache zone for your website. The process will take approximately 15 minutes, while a random CDN domain will be assigned to your site.
You will see an installation progress screen in which the following happens:
After the Kinsta creates the zone, MyKinsta will automatically enable the CDN on your site. Not bad for a free CDN.
Kinsta also has a Let’s Encrypt integration, which means free encrypt SSL hosting and certificates for all of your WordPress sites.
With the Let’s Encrypt Program, anyone can get a free SSL Certificate.
But here’s the thing… They require implementing (and that’s the hard part!)
Kinsta makes this process super quick and easy by literally clicking 2 buttons.
To begin, log in to your MyKinsta dashboard.
Click on the website you want to manage.
Click on ‘Tools’.
Under ‘Enable HTTPS’, click on ‘Generate A Free HTTPS Certificate’.
You should see this:
Click on ‘Next’.
Then you can choose the domains that you want to install SSL Certificates.
When it comes to support… Kinsta has always had my back.
Like I mentioned above, they helped me solve complex problems and were also proactively monitoring any issues that would come my way.
Overall, through my personal experience
Kinsta’s support team are:
And it’s rare to find a host that offers this level of support for such a low price.
If you’re considering Kinsta WordPress hosting service, but you don’t want the hassle of moving your site. Don’t worry.
Kinsta is currently offering unlimited free site migration from:
But if you’re not using one of these hosts, Kinsta pricing plans still include one or more free premium site migrations and have a dedicated migration team.
So, how does it work?
Moving your site to Kinsta WordPress hosting usually won’t incur any downtime. Kinsta will also help you inspect your migrated site prior to going live.
On WordPress, things can go awry.
That’s why with Kinsta, you get daily automatic WordPress backups.
You also get system-generated backups for all sites on your Kinsta account. Both automatic and manual backups are available as restore points on the Kinsta Dashboard.
A backup contains a snapshot of your site’s:
You can find WordPress backups on the backup tab of each of your sites.
There are three sections:
And the best bit? Kinsta WordPress hosting has the fastest backup system I have ever used, it takes less than 15 seconds to take a complete snapshot of my site.
This is one of my favourite features that I could not live without anymore.
In ‘Backups’, click on the ‘Manual’ tab.
Click on ‘Backup Now’ to manually create an additional backup.
Give your WordPress backup a short name.
Then click on ‘Create backup’.
If you need additional restore points, you can purchase hourly backups.
You can find this under the ‘Backups’ tab under your site on Kinsta.
You can purchase a 6-hour backup, where backups are created every 6 hours and are available for 24 hours.
Or hourly backups, where backups are created every hour and available for 24 hours.
If you want to select one, click on ‘Choose’.
And hit ‘Enable’.
You can view and restore your backups at any time from the ‘Backups’ tab.
If your WordPress site gets infected by malware…
So how does Kinsta’s malware scanning work?
Kinsta monitors websites every minute for uptime with New Relic. They detect DDoS attacks as they happen and stop any malicious code from entering the network.
They have hardware firewalls and very tight software-based restrictions to protect your WordPress website.
But here’s the thing…
If you’re coming to Kinsta from another web provider and Kinsta detects you have malware,
You’ll be charged a one-time fee of $100 to remove it.
But once you’re with Kinsta, then all WordPress malware removal is free.
So if anything else comes up, they will handle everything! And if your WordPress site is hacked (under their watch), Kinsta will work with you for free to try and undo the damage.
Did you know that every site at Kinsta includes 720 daily uptime checks?
If you look at Kinsta’s Service Level Agreement, you can see here that they guarantee an uptime reliability rate of 99.9%.…
…and they’ll credit your account if they fail to correct error response codes.
Within 30 minutes!
When Kinsta said that they were always evolving, this includes the addition of their New Relic performance monitoring tool.
It’s a great tool that helps Kinsta instantly pinpoint issues that may cause some performance problems with:
Most WordPress Hosting Providers will tell you that they protect against DDoS Attacks.
But in Kinsta’s case, it’s a little different.
In this blog post, Kinsta stated that the only way you stand any chance is to use a huge network that can incur additional costs.
Cloudflare is one example of a company that has an extremely large network and offers advanced DDoS protection on their $200 per month plan.
Another alternative is Sucuri, which offers DDoS protection, starting at $20 per month.
Kinsta then stated that:
A host like Kinsta will not be able to protect you directly from all DDoS attacks but will fend off more than a low-quality host.
KinstaSo, it looks like Kinsta can protect you (to a certain extent). But they won’t be able to protect you directly from a DDOS attack.
This is definitely where other hosting services like WPX Hosting, which actually provide Enterprise-level DDoS Protection, win out.
If you’re like me, you know how valuable a test environment can be. In fact, it was one of the primary reasons why I migrated from WPX Hosting to Kinsta WordPress hosting.
Their staging area and production environments really helped me test:
Without living in the constant fear that my live website would go down.
First, click on ‘Sites’ in the left navigation.
Click on the website you’d like to add a staging area to.
Click on ‘Staging’ from the drop-down menu at the top right.
Then on the control panel, click on the ‘Create A Staging Environment’ button.
It’ll take around 10-15 minutes until the staging area is created and DNS propagates. Once that’s done, you will have a separate control panel with your connection information.
The URL will appear like this,
https://mysqleditor-staging-sitename.kinsta.cloud.
If you want to push your staging site to live, you can click ‘Push Staging to Live’.
And then read the information displayed in the popup.
Type your site’s name in the field.
Then click on the ‘Push to Live’ button.
…and that’s it!
Kinsta reviews and the admin will let you know once the process is complete. Your website will experience a couple of seconds of downtime at the final stages of the process and testing costs nothing.
I’m a big fan of Kinsta’s Google Cloud Data Center Locations.
With Kinsta, you can choose from the following 20 data centres (as seen in the image) for your WordPress Website.
With over 20 different options, it can be hard to choose. There’s no one best data centre over the other.
What you need to look at is your current visitors and make a decision based on that.
If most of your visitors are from a specific region, you need to choose the right data centre location to improve the performance of your WordPress site.
If you want to find the best data center for you, use this tool called GCP Ping.
Kinsta is one of the better providers when it comes to the site’s user experience.
As you can see on the dashboard, you can have a number of options to select from and can also manage all your personal and billing information.
You can access your:
It really is easy to use and it’s clear they have put a lot of thought into the design and layout of the admin area.
Let’s quickly go through what you can access on each of the pages.
The dashboard contains a quick summary of vital information. You have a list of your sites to the left and a circular graph of your resource usage.
You have a graph that represents your data transfer and unique visits over time.
Here, you can access information on your sites.
For example, after I click on ‘mspbnsample’ I will see this.
On this page, you can access your site’s:
Kinsta DNS
Here, you can add your domain and DNS records.
My plan allows for 3 domains, but you can add more with a larger plan.
To the right, there are two separate filters that let you organize by site and time.
The analytics section is then divided into six separate areas.
Users
You can find a list of users that can access your Kinsta account. Each user can have complete or limited access to specific sites.
If you want to view a record of all the changes you’ve made to your site, you’ll find it here.
The Activity log will tell you:
Knowledge Base
If you need help and you want to try and troubleshoot it yourself…
Look to the knowledge base:
It’s a column that will slide to the right. This way, you can stay on the existing page, while finding out more information to fix your problem.
When it comes to a web hosting platform, I always like to check the online user rating (and in this case other Kinsta reviews) to see what everyone else’s experiences are like too.
Trustpilot has high evaluation standards and enables you to see any performance issues.
You can see here that Kinsta web hosting reviews show a 4.5-star review (out of 456 reviews!).
This goes to show that my positive experience with Kinsta is not a one-off but one that the majority of user reviews are positive too!
Overall, Kinsta offers quick managed WordPress hosting with the capacity to control several visitors at the same time and outstanding levels of uptime.
Kinsta also offers you some great features like an intuitive staging environment, security monitoring, and automatic backups (among others!).
Plus, the support team is super helpful and available 24/7 via live chat service.
However, even though its pricing is in line with other managed WordPress hosting providers, Kinsta is not considered as a “cheap” hosting provider- especially if we compare it with entry-level shared hosting.
But for me, it definitely worths every dollar!
So, if you’re looking for a new hosting to speed up your site and improve core web vitals, I highly recommend this one!
Kinsta is one of the best managed WordPress hosts in the market.
I say this because I am using it right now. In fact, the blog you’re reading is hosted with Kinsta so feel free to use tools like GTMetrix and WebPageTest to test performance.
So from my point of view:
I would love to hear your experience with Kinsta, so leave your name email comment name of business and rating in the comments message box below.
Kinsta Review
Summary:
Kinsta has performed well in all of my annual speed tests and is my chosen host for this blog. Why? Because they have awesome features like one-click backups that take seconds, not minutes, an easy-to-use staging area and much more!
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