Kinsta WordPress Hosting Review

When it comes to website hosting, it’s important to choose a proper hosting provider, to avoid beating your head when your website goes down. Kinsta is a premium WordPress hosting company that every website owner knows of. And it’s not strange, as Kinsta offers high-performance hosting on Google Cloud Platform, providing the users with great performance, as well as tons of other features we are going to talk about. Because Kinsta uses Google Cloud Platform, your website will run on the same infrastructure as Google, so you won’t have to blame your hosting provider if your website goes down, as this never happens here.

Some of the most popular websites are hosted by no other than Kinsta, but it doesn’t automatically mean that it’s all milk and honey. Let’s do this in-depth review, and then we’ll see is Kinsta worth your time and money.

Quick Overview

Feature	Kinsta WordPress Hosting
Hosting Provider	Kinsta
Plan Types	Managed WordPress Hosting
WordPress Support	Fully optimized for WordPress
Performance	Google Cloud Platform infrastructure
Uptime Guarantee	99.9%
Scalability	Auto-scaling as traffic increases
Security	DDoS detection, hardware firewalls
Backup	Automatic daily backups
Support	24/7 expert customer support
Control Panel	Custom MyKinsta dashboard
Migration Assistance	Free website migration
CDN Integration	Built-in KeyCDN integration
Developer Friendly	PHP 7/8, SSH access, WP-CLI, Git
Staging Environment	One-click staging environment
Pricing	Tiered pricing based on site visits
Money-Back Guarantee	30-day guarantee

Performance

Let’s start with the performance because this is the feature that makes it or breaks it. So, why is Kinsta so superior when it comes to the server availability? That’s because of the choice of web server, with the, most often being Apache. If you are a little bit in this business, you probably know that Apache is very good software, it’s free to use and there are tons of extensions that can expand its performance. But, Apache was created long ago when the web pages had no more than 50-60 kb of data, unlike today’s websites which go up to 2 MB of data. So, as Apache server can easily be overwhelmed, Kinsta came with a much better solution, and that’s Nginx.

Thanks to Nginx, Kinsta can handle hundreds and even thousands of simultaneous connections without a hitch. So, if you decide to host a website using Kinsta, or several websites, you can do that without a problem. The best thing here is that they configure the WordPress code tailored especially for you, making the job of using Nginx with WordPress much easier. When it comes to the performance, Kinsta is unmatched.

If you don’t believe me, let me tell you this. I’ve tested the speed of this thing, and the results blew me away. With the page-loading time of 523ms and a performance grade of 92, Kinsta is a serious contender for the best website hosting company. In my area of testing, it was faster than 93% of the tested websites, which is astonishing! On top of that, the scalability of their cloud servers is second to none, meaning that you can host your site with lots of page views and still not compromise its speed.

Dashboard

Kinsta’s dashboard is beautiful, intuitive, and smooth as the butter itself. Should you want to access its features, you can do it with a single click, as all of the options and features are literally in front of you. When you log into your account, you can see visitors, bandwidth usage, invoices, the list of your sites, and resource usage. On the left side, you can see your site list, where you can add another site or manage your pre-existing websites. Migrations are also here, and you can request one for yourself, plus it’s free.

Moving down, we have a Kinsta’s DNS service, website Analytics, Billing, Settings, Activity Log, and User Guide. The last two are for informative purposes, meaning that you can easily check your activities and read the user guide if you are a newbie to website hosting. Overall, the dashboard might seem overly simple, but it DOES offer everything you need for managing your Kinsta websites. If you ask me, I wouldn’t change a thing here. It’s all so swift, responsive, and eye-pleasing.

Free Migrations

Migrations are indeed possible with Kinsta, and guess what? They are free of charge! Fill in a form with a few minor details and the Kinsta team will be dispatched to solve your case. However, Free Migrations are available for Pro plan and above, and if you have a Starter plan, you’ll have to buy it separately. Be sure to leave this process to the professionals, as understanding the restore and backup process can be time and energy-consuming.

Free SSL

Unlike Free Migrations which are limited to Pro plans (and above), Free SSL is here on every single plan that Kinsta offer. Your SSL can now be configured on your WordPress site in just a single click, thanks to Let’s Encrypt. Because of that, your HTTPS can be up and running in no time. Go to the Sites section and choose to Enable HTTPS and…well, that’s it!

Staging Environment

Staging Environment or Staging Area is a part of Kinsta devoted to trying different tweaks and options, to find what’s best for your website(s). This works by letting you clone your website to the Staging Area and perform various experiments without affecting the main site. You can try new themes, plugins, or change something else, to make sure it works smoothly.

Hosting Locations

One of the reasons why Kinsta is the greatest in the business is Hosting Locations. Although the internet has progressed quite a bit, the distance is still a barrier when it comes to performance. This means that the data still needs to travel through multiple networks to get to you, and of course, if that distance is long enough, the performance will degrade. Kinsta should leave you without worries as there are 13 data centers across the globe, including the UK, Brazil, Japan, India, Belgium, USA, Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia.

Automated Backups

Automated Backups are very important, at least for me. I’m very glad that this feature is more simplified here, yet deadly effective and accurate. It can keep up to 14 backups at once and by default, it’s set on a single backup per day. Kinsta allows you to increase this number, so you can easily restore your site from backup via Kinsta dashboard. If you do this, a new backup will be created, which is great if you still want to go back to the old settings.

Active Monitoring

Another great thing about Kinsta is its Active Monitoring. Thanks to this feature, you won’t need to blame your hosting provider if your website goes down even for a millisecond. Kinsta checks your website once per minute, hence the chance of going offline is beyond the minimum! Using HTTP to monitor your site remotely, Kinsta can detect DDoS attacks and even prevent the hackers, by installing backdoors. Furthermore, there is various scanning software built-in to the server and they allow for detecting even the slightest changes to the local files. Active Monitoring works like an antivirus for your site. Oh, did I forget to mention the uptime? Well, that’s probably because you won’t have to worry about it. With the uptime of 99%, Kinsta ensures that your website will work with minimum to no disruptions.

Plans and Pricing

If you’ve come this far into my review, you probably got the full picture of Kinsta. Kinsta is a high-end hosting provider, and as such, it offers numerous plans with varied pricing. They say that everything good is expensive, but I wouldn’t listen too much to the people, but look at the actual prices and offerings of Kinsta. Kinsta indeed offers far more options for large businesses and enterprise customers, but there are some plans for those that are starting their business. So, the cheapest, entry-level plan is $30 per month, and it’s a Starter Pack.

That means you won’t get free migrations. If you want them, you can switch to Pro plan which gives you double the SSD storage (6 GB), Site Cloning, and backup retention for 14 days. But, the Pro plan is also double the price. When it comes to Business plans, there are four of them, so you can choose what you need. Business 2 is my personal choice, offering 20 GB SSD Storage and 300 GB of Free CDN, costing $200 a month. Enterprise plans are the most expensive, coming at $600 and $900 per month. The latter offers 120 GB SSD storage and up to 10 PHP workers per site. Generally, I wouldn’t say Kinsta is the cheapest hosting provider, but you get what you pay for- nothing less and nothing more.

Pros

• Security is top-notch
• Intuitive and good-looking dashboard
• Free migrations for Pro plan and above
• Free SSL is a welcome addition
• Daily Backups give you additional security and keep your data intact
• Staging area allows for site improvement
• Lightning-fast page load speeds
• User-friendly tech support.

Cons

• Free migrations excluded from the Starter plan
• WordPress installations and visitors are limited
• Doesn’t allow for registering a domain, so a separate domain registrar is required
• For hobby sites, Kinsta isn’t a great option due to its pricing.

Conclusion

With more pros than cons, I think it’s all crystal-clear. Kinsta once again proved why they are the best in the business. However, Kinsta isn’t an ideal hosting provider for every audience, and the Starter plan isn’t that great, especially with some limitations that it comes with. Kinsta is a more valuable option for the business or enterprise, meaning that it’s a hosting provider aimed towards professional users. With that in mind, I would say that if you have a hobby website, you can pretty much avoid Kinsta. But, if you have a company and you want to develop business, Kinsta will do wonders for its price. It’s a smooth, eye-appealing, and pleasant experience.