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 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.
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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 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. 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:
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 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 Twitter use Google’s infrastructure.
Google’s infrastructure lies worldwide, and you have the choice between 35+ 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 would 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.
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 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 with the highest priority.
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 applications, databases, 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:
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!
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 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. However, you can also create a manual backup and download any of the backups to your device.
Kinsta is known for the dedication to continuously enhancing their hosting services. Their most recent addition is the 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.
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 set it live in 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 is 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 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. They are Starter, Pro, Business Range, and Enterprise Range. The Business Range of plans containing business 1 up to 4 and the 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 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 20-day money-back guarantee.
Every plan consists of free premium migrations, too. However, the exact number of free premium migrations you can perform varies from plan to plan. You also have unlimited basic migrations from any host, no matter the plan you’re using.
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 PHP workers, 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 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 100 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 $35 per month.
Kinsta Pro plan:
Next to the starter plan is the Pro plan. The Pro plan includes basically double in resources compared to the starter plan, which gives you 2 WordPress installs, 50,000 monthly visits, 20 GB of SSD storage, and 200 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.
The pro plan costs you $70 per month.
Kinsta Business plans:
The business plans series consists of 4 distinct plans with incremental features. Business 1 plan gives you 5 WordPress installs, and the subsequent plans give you 10,20,40, respectively.
Monthly visits go from 100,000, to 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 these plans that Kinsta recommends building eCommerce sites.
Business plan pricing per month is:
- Business plan 1 — $115
- Business plan 2 — $225
- Business plan 3 — $340
- Business plan 4 — $450
Kinsta Enterprise plans:
If you have higher needs and need more resources, 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 2,500,000 in 4, respectively. They give you 5 free premium migrations and build up on all the benefits of other plans. The PHP workers per site increased from 8 to 16.
Enterprise plan pricing per month is:
- Enterprise plan 1 — $675
- Enterprise plan 2 — $1000
- Enterprise plan 3 — $1350
- Business plan 4 — $1650
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. Kinsta also offers single-site plans in case you have only one website, but you’re in need of more resources.
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.
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 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 275+ 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.
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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