Founded in 2013, Kinsta’s goal was and continues to be to provide the best WordPress hosting platform in the world—particularly for those website owners dissatisfied with the status quo WordPress hosting offerings.
Kinsta has separate hosting plan packages for single sites, multiple sites, and agencies. They also have custom enterprise hosting plans available.
Single Site Plans start at $30 mo., while Multiple Site Plans start at $59 mo. Agency hosting starts at $284 mo.
Click Here to See Current Pricing for all Kinsta Hosting
While Kinsta’s prices may seem high at first glance, keep in mind that they offer premium managed WordPress hosting that is designed for critical website applications that require more than what a general shared hosting plan provides. You should also consider that Kinsta includes many premium features that you would have to pay extra for with other WordPress hosts. See the Features section below for more details.
I am very impressed with the features that Kinsta includes with their hosting plans—quite possibly the best overall collection of features for a premium WordPress hosting plan. All of the features you would expect and need from premium managed WordPress hosting are there—and more.
It starts with being able to choose your data center locations—and we’re not just talking about 2 or 3 choices here! Kinsta has data centers around the world in 27 different locations. So, whether you’re in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, or South America, you can choose a server location that is closer to your own location.
Having your website on a server closer to your area can help speed up your site. And, while we’re on the subject of website speed, Kinsta is powered by Google Cloud Platform and includes their Kinsta CDN to help speed up your websites even more. Currently, Kinsta’s CDN has 275 locations. See the Website Speed and Performance section below for more details.
Edge Caching is definitely one of Kinsta’s best features. Kinsta’s Edge Caching technology allows your website content to be served from multiple data centers—greatly reducing your page load times and speeding up your website performance. Edge Caching reduces your sites TTFB (Time to First Byte) and complete page transfer times by an average of 50% or more.
What’s also great about Kinsta’s Edge Caching is that it’s super easy to implement, and it eliminates the need to install plugins for caching and performance.
Another Kinsta feature that deserves mentioning is their DevKinsta local WordPress development environment that is free to use. WordPress developers will really appreciate the ability to easily create sites and test changes out in a safe environment. DevKinsta includes an SMTP server for testing out email messages, and a built-in database manager tool.
So, let’s get started with our Kinsta test results.
I found the signup process at Kinsta to be very easy. Just enter your website information and select your data center location. You’ll see that the CDN and Edge Caching options are enabled by default for better performance. Website propagation time is very good. I really like how Kinsta displays a popup checklist on the right side of your screen to guide you through the process of testing your site adding and pointing your domain to Kinsta, etc.
The Kinsta dashboard is very intuitive and easy to use, with easy access to your domains, data backups, CDN, analytics, and your other tools. It was easy for me to find any functionality I needed right away.
Kinsta produced excellent speed and performance results in our testing. Kinsta utilizes their high performance cloud infrastructure and full page caching at the server level together with Kinsta’s CDN and optimized environment. Add in their Edge Caching technology and the results are fast loading websites that run very efficiently.
What’s also impressive about Kinsta is that you can choose your server location from 27 different data center locations. It makes it very easy to select a server located closer to you for faster website performance.
Here are some sample speed test results from GTmetrix:
As you can see from the above data, when it comes to website speed and performance, Kinsta is one of the very best WordPress hosts! The Performance Metrics are particularly impressive.
Security is always one of the most important parts of maintaining a successful website. And, Kinsta is definitely on top of things here. With Kinsta’s hosting plans, you get advanced security that includes Wildcard SSL certificates, DDoS protection, Two-Factor Authentication, hack and malware removal, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
With Kinsta, you get automatic daily data backups of your website environment. You can restore your data from the last 14 backups. Additionally, you can also create up to 5 manual data backups whenever you need to.
And, if you want to download an archive copy of your website, you can create a downloadable backup once per week.
More frequent backups or a longer backup retention period are available for additional fees. For most WordPress users, the default backup features are fine.
I found Kinsta’s Backup and Restore functionality very quick and easy to use.
Kinsta includes easy to use website staging with your hosting plan. I found the process very intuitive and was able to create my staging environment then push my changes back to my live website quickly and easily. Kinsta has done a great job here, and staging is one of their best features.
Another premium feature Kinsta has included their Managed WordPress Hosting is true automatic plugin and theme updates. This is not your standard out of the box type of auto-updating either! Kinsta provides customized features with their automatic updates so you not only get the convenience and timeliness of your plugin and theme updates, but you also have safeguards to make sure your website isn’t broken or disrupted by your updates.
For example, you can schedule when your updates take place to avoid heavy traffic times. You can enable maintenance mode during updates to prevent your visitors from encountering broken or incomplete websites. And, you can select specific pages from your site to test out after updating. You’re also notified when your updates are run or if a rollback does occur.
Kinsta’s automatic plugin and theme updating can definitely be a time saver—particularly for agencies and developers working on multiple WordPress sites.
Kinsta continues to innovate with the release of their Kinsta API. Although it’s currently in beta, it is available to all Kinsta customers, and is particularly useful for WordPress agencies. For example, with the Kinsta API you can create reports on your client’s sites and databases. You can also create applications to perform scheduled tasks to improve site performance. And, you could use the Kinsta API to automatically create WordPress and WooCommerce sites (without having to log in to your Kinsta account) as well as create WordPress Multisite installations.
Customer support at Kinsta is outstanding. Kinsta provides 24/7 expert WordPress customer support. I’ve found the live chat response times to be excellent and the support staff to be very courteous and helpful in answering questions and resolving any issues. Here is a snippet of a recent live chat support conversation:
So, how does Kinsta rate against some of the other top WordPress hosting providers? Here are links to our comparisons matching Kinsta with their competition.
Kinsta vs Bluehost
Kinsta vs DreamHost
Kinsta vs Liquid Web
Kinsta vs SiteGround
Kinsta vs WP Engine
Kinsta vs WPX Hosting
Kinsta is definitely one of the best managed WordPress hosting providers. In fact, I would put them at the top of the list for those that need WordPress hosting for websites that require premium features and support. In addition to hosting for your vital websites, Kinsta is also an outstanding choice for WordPress developers and agencies. While Kinsta may not be the best fit for beginners with a lesser budget, I would definitely recommend Kinsta to experienced WordPress site owners looking for better WordPress hosting.
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