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.
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 sites — Kinsta hosting.
It can be said one of the best-managed WordPress hosting platforms that provide 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.
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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 yourself 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. In 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 and improving your service.
Kinsta Features:
Now, let us look at some of the prominent features of Kinsta Managed web hosting:
Hosting on the Google Cloud:
This is one of the aspects that separate Kinsta from other hosting providers. Many managed WordPress hosting providers host on their own infrastructure. Kinsta uses the infrastructure of Google Cloud to host your website. What this means for you is a state of performance security and performance. Many companies such as Snapchat, Philips, Spotify, Paypal, Twitter use Google’s infrastructure.
Google’s infrastructure lies worldwide, and you have the choice in between 24 google locations. Using overdeveloped cloud technology, this infrastructure makes sure that your website can dynamically access resources in any situation.
For example, when visitors to your website are not so high, a moderate amount of resources would be used for running it. When your website got viral, resource allocation would automatically scale up, and you pay for the extra amount of resources only when you use it! This is not so easy with any static hosting plans.
Highly Secured Network:
Kinsta is positively obsessed with Security and performance. Hosting on Google cloud provides much security as Google puts a lot of effort into protecting its infrastructure. On top of that, Kinsta puts many security measures in places, such as GeoIP blocking, DDoS scanning, self-healing PHP, firewalls, and more. They also provide hack and malware removal, and in any worse cases where your site is hacked while hosted on the platform, they remove it for free.
Re-imagined 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 sites. It is a unified management dashboard, and you can view detailed information about all of your sites and manage them with powerful tools.
WordPress Website Staging:
Testing is a natural process of development. In Kinsta, 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!
You also have the ability to switch between different PHP versions, which can be handy at times. You can easily restart the PHP engine, and there is a new Relic PHP monitoring tool. After you have finished all of your customizations, you can push your live site changes with just a click.
Automatic 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 could make changes depending on your need.
Kinsta’s managed WordPress includes automatic backups, which are kept 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. However, you can also create a manual backup and download any of the backups to your device.
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 would be linked, and after the migration process is completely done and your satisfaction is ensured, they would make it live on the main domain.
Great Customer Support:
Great Customer support is the cornerstone for the success of any business. Kinsta reputably has helpful customer service who are there for you for all your troubles. They have 24/7 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 more! They also maintain a list of rejected plugins for a 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. They are Starter, Pro, Business Range, Enterprise Range. Business Range of plans containing business 1 up to 4 and Enterprise range contains plans from 1 to 4. If your requirement is still not satisfied in all the platforms, well, you can talk to Kinsta and make yourself a custom plan!
Whatever the plan you choose, certain base features would be contained in all plans, including hosting your site on Google Cloud, security features, performance boost, staging areas, and administration systems, and provides a 30-day money-back guarantee.
You also do not need to stick to a single plan, though. Every plan consists of free premium migrations too. However, the exact number of free premium migrations you can perform varies from plan to plan.
As your website would be hosted on Google cloud in all the plans, you get the higher performance right away without increasing plans like certain hosting providers. However, higher plans have good benefits, like a higher number of WordPress installations, more PHP workers, 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, note that the prices Kinsta shows are exclusive of taxes. So now, let us jump into their plans!
Kinsta Starter plan:
The starter is the most basic plan Kinsta offers. It allows you to have one WordPress install, 25000 site visits, 10 GB disk space, and a free SSL and CDN of 50 GB.
A starter plan allows you to migrate to a premium plan free for one time. You would have two PHP workers per site. Having more PHP workers allows you to execute more PHP tasks simultaneously. Site cloning is disabled here.
As Starter plans have limited disk space and other features, it is not recommended for eCommerce/membership sites.
The starter plan costs you $30 per month.
Kinsta Pro plan:
Next to the starter plan is the Pro plan. The Pro plan is basically double of the starter plan, which gives you 2 WordPress installs, 50,000 monthly visits, 20 GB of SSD storage, and 100 GB of Free CDN.
Within the Pro plan, you would have 2 free premium migrations. Unlike the Starter plan, site cloning is enabled here. However, Kinsta stays that this too is not recommended for eCommerce or membership sites.
Pro plan costs you $60 per month.
Kinsta Business plans:
The business series of plans consist of 4 distinct plans with incremental features. Business 1 plan gives you 5 WordPress install, and the subsequent plans give you 10,20,40, respectively.
Monthly visits go from 100,000,upto 600,000 respectively and SSD storage includes 30 GB, 40 GB, 50 GB and 60 GB respectively.
Automatic Backup retention is 14 days for Business 1 and 2 plans but is 20 days for 3 and 4. PHP Workers are 4 for 1 and 2, 6 for 3 and 4. It is from this plan that Kinsta recommends building eCommerce sites.
Business plan pricing per month are:
- Business plan 1 — $100
- Business plan 2 — $200
- Business plan 3 — $300
- Business plan 4 — $400
Kinsta Enterprise plans:
If your needs are high, the Enterprise Series of plans might suit you well. Starting from Enterprise 1 and up to 4, they allow you to have WordPress installs starting from 60 well up to 150!
Site visits are also at a high of 1,000,000 visitors in the Enterprise 1 profile and 1,500,000 in 2, 2,000,000 visits in 3 and 3,000,000 in 4 respectively. They give you 5 free premium migrations and builds up on all the benefits of other plans. The PHP workers per site increase from 8 to 16.
Enterprise plan pricing per month are:
- Enterprise plan 1 — $600
- Enterprise plan 2 — $900
- Enterprise plan 3 — $1200
- Business plan 4 — $1500
Upon that, as we said before, you can create a specification for a new plan if these plans do not suit you, and Kinsta would cater to your results. They also have dedicated VMs as well for you.
Refer to this for more detailed information on each hosting plan and the individual features you get.
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.
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.
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:
As Kinsta is specially designed with WordPress in mind, all of its features are tailored for WordPress. They would make sure that all of the WordPress developers’ needs are in place and are compatible and geared to working with WordPress.
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 in such an amount. 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 managed hosting is one of the best WordPress hosting platforms out there. 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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