Kinsta Review: What makes it one of the best WordPress hosting platforms?

Kinsta Premium Managed WordPress Hosting

Once you decide on your site domain and other ground details, choosing WordPress the backend that fuels your website is already a great decision. The next big decision you have to make is about hosting.

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Kinsta – Managed WordPress Hosting

The ultimate next-gen hosting solution powered by Google Cloud’s Premium Tier network. Even the basic plans offer you automatic SSL certificates with wildcard support for security, regular daily backups, enterprise-level Cloudflare integrations, premium features like edge caching and early hints, and more. Kinsta offers a next-gen infrastructure for hosting high-performance websites to boost your business.

Kinsta logo

When you look up hosting, there are lots of options: Windows Hosting, Linux Hosting, for instance, and various specifications among them. As you might have guessed, each specification is useful for specific use cases. There are also managed WordPress hosting plans.

If you are a beginner with WordPress and need the majority of things related to WordPress managed for you, then managed WordPress hosting is better for you. In this article, we review one of such managed WordPress hosting providers – Kinsta Cloud Platform.

It can be said that it is one of the best-managed WordPress hosting platforms that provides high-end performance and security. But before we go on, it would be helpful if you understand exactly what is managed WordPress hosting and how it is different from general hosting.

Difference between General Hosting and Managed WordPress Hosting

Hosting typically involves setting a server to contain your files, and whenever the user (client) requires information, feed it to them. In Unmanaged hosting, which might involve shared hosting, VPS Hosting, or a dedicated server hosting of Windows or Linux operating system, you are responsible for most aspects of your page and are given complete control.

You must put effort into securing your website, updating software, managing backups, optimizing, etc.

While that may put you in control of the entirety of the system, you see the disadvantages right away. With Managed WordPress hosting, your hosting provider themselves would take care of all the important aspects of your site, including its security, backups, updating software, etc. You can mainly focus on creating content, improving your service, and growing your business.

Kinsta Features

Now, let us look at some of the prominent features of Kinsta Cloud Platform’s managed WordPress hosting:

Hosting on the Google Cloud:

Kinsta Data Centers
Kinsta managed WordPress hosting data centers in 2024

This is one of the aspects that separates Kinsta from other hosting providers. Many managed WordPress hosting providers host on their own infrastructure. Kinsta uses the infrastructure of Google Cloud’s premium tier network and C2 and C3D virtual machines to host your website.

What this means for you is a state of performance and security. Many companies such as Snapchat, Philips, Spotify, Paypal, and X, use Google’s infrastructure.

Google’s infrastructure lies worldwide, and you have the choice between 37+ Google locations. Using overdeveloped cloud technology, this infrastructure makes sure that your website can dynamically access resources in any situation.

For example, when your site traffic is lower, a moderate amount of resources would be used for running it. When your website’s traffic increases, resource allocation will automatically scale up, and you pay for the extra amount of resources only when you use it! This is not so easy for any static hosting plans.

Google cloud locations and regions.
Google Cloud locations and regions. Source: Google Cloud

Highly Secured Network:

Kinsta is positively obsessed with security and performance. On top of that, Kinsta puts many security measures in place, such as two-factor authentication, GeoIP blocking, auto-ban on multiple login attempts, self-healing PHP, DDoS scanning, 2 hardware firewalls, and more.

They also provide a Malware Security Pledge; in the event of a hack, Kinsta’s team will work with you to restore the site.

Re-imagined Dashboard:

MyKinsta Dashboard
MyKinsta Dashboard

The dashboard is the place where you centrally manage many things about your hosting. Kinsta provides you MyKinsta Dashboard, which is a re-imagined way of working with your applications, databases, static sites, and WordPress sites, all in one place. It is a unified management dashboard, and you can view detailed information about all of your web projects and manage them with powerful tools.

WordPress Website Staging:

Kinsta WordPress - create new environment
Kinsta WordPress – create new environment

Testing is a natural process of development. In MyKinsta, you would get a website staging area where you can perform various tests related to new plugins or virtually anything, and be assured that your leading site wouldn’t break down!

WordPress standard environment clone - Kinsta
WordPress standard environment clone – Kinsta

You also have the ability to switch between different PHP versions, which can be handy at times. Kinsta always rolls out support of the latest PHP versions but they also have EOL support (currently for 7.4 and 8.0 versions). You can easily restart the PHP engine and a built-in Application Performance Monitoring tool to help discover PHP bottlenecks.

You can also use ew Relic’s PHP monitoring tool but you’ll need a license and need to make sure you’re not using both tools at the same time). After you have finished all of your customizations, you can push your live site changes with just a click.

Additionally, you have the option to choose what you’d like to push live; files only, database only, or everything. Furthermore, if you need additional staging environments, Kinsta has you covered; the premium staging add-on allows up to 5 staging environments.

Automatic Backups:

Kinsta WordPress backups
Kinsta WordPress backups

A lot of times, when you develop a WordPress site, you mess things up. In such cases, it would be very convenient if there is a backup of a recent working version of the site using which you can restore the site within moments. You can either deploy the restored backup right away to a test environment where you can make changes depending on your needs.

Kinsta WordPress download backups backup
Kinsta WordPress download backups backup

Kinsta’s managed WordPress hosting includes automatic backups, which are kept for up to 14 days for entry-level plans. As the plan goes up, so does time! The frequency ranges from daily backups to six-hour and even hourly backups – these options are available as add-ons. However, you can also create a manual backup and download any of the backups to your device.

Kinsta is known for its dedication to continuously enhancing its hosting services. Their significant additions from the past years include Kinsta API, a powerful tool that allows you to engage with all your Kinsta projects and automate workflows.

With Kinsta’s API, you can automate tasks such as cache clearing, PHP restarts, or WordPress site deployment. Since this tool has been released recently, we’re expecting many more features to be introduced and help fellow developers.  

Kinsta has also added a smart theme and plugin management to its dashboard, allowing users to review and update themes and plugins across all their WP installs. A PHP performance tool in MyKinsta’s Analytics dashboard is a unique and particularly helpful feature.

With this tool, users can review their sites’ PHP resource usage, manage PHP memory and PHP threads (widely known as “workers”) with just a few clicks, and enhance these resources as needed – this helps customize PHP needs without a significant increase in hosting costs.

Free Site Migration:

If you already have your WordPress site running in a different hosting environment, you are covered too. Kinsta also has seasoned site migration experts who would migrate all of your existing content from your present hosting environment to Kinsta’s.

While they are doing this, a temporary domain will be linked, and after the migration process is completely done and your satisfaction is ensured, they will set it live in the main domain.

Kinsta provides unlimited free migrations from any WordPress host to move WordPress installs to the platform. The service includes free malware cleanup, and users can include their preferred migration schedule.

Migrations are conducted within 2 business days. Expedited migrations are available on demand (costs $49) and are conducted within 8 hours.

Great Customer Support:

Great Customer support is the cornerstone for the success of any business. Kinsta reputably has helpful customer service who is there for you for all your troubles.

They have 24/7/365 live chat support, and not only would they solve any technical errors but also they would advise on matters such as the selection of plugins for your unique requirement and things you can do on your site to improve the performance even more!

They also maintain a list of rejected plugins for quick reference so that you can get an optimized website from the beginning!

Kinsta Pricing

As with any other site, Kinsta has different and incremental pricing plans that cater to people with different needs.

If your requirement is still not satisfied in all the platforms, well, you can talk to Kinsta and make yourself a custom plan or choose from various add-ons based on your site’s setup or requirements!

Kinsta Managed WordPress hosting plans
Kinsta Pricing – Kinsta Managed WordPress hosting plans

Whatever the plan you choose, certain base premium features would be contained in all plans, including Google Cloud’s infrastructure, enterprise-level Cloudflare integration, security features, performance boost, staging areas, and administration systems. Every WordPress hosting plan comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

As your website would be backed by Google Cloud’s Premium Tier network and enterprise-level Cloudflare integration, your site’s performance and security will be unmatchable. Kinsta’s infrastructure and architecture are available even on their lowest hosting plan.

However, their higher hosting plans have numerous benefits, like a higher number of WordPress installations, more storage, higher traffic allowance, etc.

You can either choose to pay monthly or yearly. Kinsta has an offer in which, if you pay for a year, you get two months free! Also, please note that the Kinsta prices are excluding taxes. So now, let us jump into their plans!

Kinsta Single-site plans:

The Single 35k is the most basic single-site plan Kinsta offers. It allows you to have one WordPress install, 35000 site visits, 10 GB disk space, and a free SSL and CDN of 125 GB.

This plan includes all the premium features, including the Cloudflare integration, one-click staging, free wildcard SSL, automatic backups with a 14-day backup retention.

Also, the plan is not suitable for accommodating multisite networks.

As the Single 35k plans have limited disk space and other features, it is not recommended for eCommerce/membership sites with lots of products and concurrent users.

The first month of the Single 35k plan is free, from the second month, it costs you $35 per month.

As Kinsta’s single-site plans scale based on the allocated resources; accordingly, if you have a more resource-intensive WordPress or WooCommerce project that does not require multiple installs, you can select a plan with more visits and disc space allocated. Each plan’s name marks the monthly visit allocation.

The single-site plans go up to 1M+ monthly visits, 15GB+ disc space, and 2500GB+ free CDN bandwidth.

Kinsta Multiple-site plans:

Kinsta’s multiple-site plans start with WP 2. This plan includes basically double in resources compared to the Single 35k plan, which gives you 2 WordPress installs, 70,000 monthly visits, 20 GB of SSD storage, and 250 GB of Free CDN.

Unlike the single-site plans, site cloning is enabled here, and multisite is allowed. However, Kinsta says that this, too, may not be recommended for eCommerce or membership sites.

The first month of the WP 2 plan is free, from the second month, it costs you $70 per month.

Like single-site plans, multiple-site plans have different tiers based on the allocated resources; each plan’s name indicates the WordPress installs allocated. Multiple-site plans go up to 60+ installs.

Kinsta Agency plans:

Kinsta business plans
Kinsta WP Business Pricing

Kinsta’s Agency plans come with increased resources and are tailored to the needs of freelancers and design & development agencies managing multiple client sites. It is also a perfect solution for those looking to resell Kinsta’s hosting to their clients.

The Agency plans also offer perks that include early access to beta tools or free hosting for your agency’s site.

The Agency 20 plan offers 20 WordPress installs, 500k visits, and 50 GB disc space. The plans scale up to 60 WordPress installs and 1.25M visits, but if more resources are required, custom plans are also available.

Refer to this for more detailed information on each hosting plan and the individual features you get.

Kinsta launched FREE Static Site Hosting

Host up to 100 free static sites using pre-built static websites and modern static site generators using Node.js. Easy deployment directly from GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab repos.

You get blazing-fast performance and security with custom domains, SSL certificates, HTTP/3, QUIC support, and deployment to a global edge network powered by Cloudflare with 260+ global locations, all for free.

A static website is ideal for situations in which all users view identical content, and that content remains relatively unchanged. Some website examples suitable for Kinsta’s Static Site Hosting are:

  • Portfolio websites
  • Resume websites
  • Business brochure websites
  • Simple blogs
  • Landing pages

Advantages of Kinsta Hosting

There are numerous advantages of Kinsta Hosting for WordPress. Upon seeing the features, you may already understand some or all of these advantages:

Powerful site management:

As they have a powerful dashboard with the options of automatic backups and also site staging, managing your website is more powerful and easy, which relieves a lot of pain on your end.

You will have peace of mind knowing that your site’s infrastructure and technicalities are being taken care of. Kinsta’s expert support team is available 24/7/365 so whenever you’re in doubt about technical issues or optimization questions, you will be assisted in seconds.

More Speed:

Kinsta provides state-of-the-art performance. Many independent tests have confirmed their word of performance. They use Google’s Cloud infrastructure, which is a lot of performance boost in itself.

Also, with the employment of other performance-oriented tools, in addition to that, they employ a lot of different tools and plan their architecture geared for performance.

Through their enterprise-level Cloudflare, you get premium features like Edge Caching, early hints, or a CDN with 260+ PoPs that are set to improve load times by an average of 80%.

High Security:

The fact that they use Google’s Cloud infrastructure and many security protocols makes their servers very secure, which is very much needed on the internet today. It not only safeguards your website from external attacks and threats but also can save your users’ data too.

Tailored features for WordPress:

Kinsta was specially designed and dedicated to WordPress for over 10 years, and its features are well-designed and tailored specifically for WordPress. They continuously update and upgrade their features and keep introducing more and more developer-friendly services.

In fact, Kinsta recently launched Application Hosting and Database Hosting, and now Kinsta customers can host everything in one place, from WordPress sites to Node.js applications or other web projects.

PHP Performance Tool

Kinsta’s detailed analytics dashboard is enriched with a PHP performance tool. It helps you review the PHP resource usage of your sites and allows you to adjust the total PHP memory limit of your site and manage the allocation of it among PHP threads. (PHP threads at Kinsta is what other providers refer to as “workers”).

With the help of this tool you get an overview and better understanding of your PHP resource needs and can easily raise your PHP threads as needed through a PHP performance add-on – without the need to upgrade your hosting plan.

Cons of Kinsta

As good as they strive to make it, there are certain aspects where Kinsta needs to make choices. The outcome would be suitable for some while bad for others. The only disadvantage with Kinsta is that it is premium and costs more money than usual.

However, when you consider the service they give and the number of hassles it solves for you, you can understand why the price is at such a level. Ultimately, Kinsta makes you focus less on the hurdles and more on creating good quality sites with great user experience, so it is you who would benefit from an increase in revenue.

Final Words

Kinsta Cloud Platform is one of the best hosting providers for managed WordPress Hosting. They focused efforts on their architecture and Tech stack and gave you improved performance, security, and an efficient way of handling your site.

No wonder their clientele involves thousands of businesses, including Fortune 500 companies! With all the advantages they provide, the only disadvantage they might have is the price. However, if you consider all the work they do and remove burdens on you, that price is definitely worth it!

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