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Kinsta Hosting Reviews

Overall Score
★★★★★
★★★★★

Review Summary

Updated: January 7, 2023

Kinsta is an incredibly scalable and developer-friendly managed WordPress hosting service. They’re different from most of their competitors for two reasons: centralization over the Google Cloud Platform and unlimited features across their pricing tiers. By focusing on the Cloud Platform, Kinsta provides lightning-fast and secure managed WordPress hosting services for a variety of needs.

Pros

Cons

Product Reviews

Hosting Plans

    • Product
    • Disk Storage
    • Visitors A similar metric to Bandwidth, each-time a visitor views your website they use bandwidth.
      – General rule of thumb:
      Visitor Limit = Bandwidth x 3
    • Control Panel This is the interface/dashboard where you’ll manage servers and other hosted services.
    • CDN? A Content Delivery Network (CDN) saves copies of your website on servers across various regions. This allows your website to be accessed from the closest possible server to the user trying to view your site.
    • Free Migration Transfer If you’re migrating your website from another company or plan, you might need support migrating your website to the new servers.
    • Price The monthly cost for this plan, including discounts
    • View Product
    • Pro
    • 20 GB SSD
    • 40000
    • Mykinsta
    • $60/mo
    • View

Kinsta Starter

Right off the bat, Kinsta provides you with all the same features and functions on the ‘Starter’ plan, that you would find on the Pro or Business solutions. These great features include a staging site, SSL certificate, backups and malware removal, and even CDN access. At $30 a month, this package is excellent, whether you’re creating a new site or migrating one over. Moreover, with up to 20k monthly traffic and 10GB SSD storage, the plan would be suitable for a range of websites from business sites or blogs, to small eCommerce stores.

Performance-wise, Kinsta’s ‘Starter’ plan is one of the best entry-level, managed WordPress hosting plans on the market. If your goal is to create a new site in an optimal hosting environment, this package could be the choice for you. However, for absolute beginners, you may be better of creating your website for less on a Shared Hosting environment.

Kinsta Pro

The second offering from Kinsta is their Pro Plan; it comes with all the same features as ‘Starter’ and doubles the number of WordPress sites, visitors, and disk space that is allocated. Including up to two websites, 40,000 monthly visitors, and 20 GB of SSD storage, you could easily host a medium size eCommerce site or blog, leaving enough room for growth. What’s more, your CDN storage and number of premium migrations are also double on this plan. It’s a great included bonus for customers that not a lot of hosts bother to offer.

While the package might seem like a straight forward upgrade, doubling the price and resources, however, you do get a few more features for your money. To start, the Pro and all plans above come with multisite support and domain mapping. This makes sense since it’s the first Kinsta plan to primarily be developed for WordPress users that have more than one website which warrants their attention. With the Pro plan, you’ll be able to manage several WordPress sites relatively easily and be able to enact multisite installations of certain plug-ins. This kind of convenience could be useful if you have a single main website and several subsidiary blogs that all need to be the same as the parent blog in some function or form.

MyKinsta creating sites
Creating or Cloning websites in MyKinsta

You’ll also have access to Kinsta’s Site Cloning feature on Pro plans and above. It allows you to clone any of your live WordPress websites or staging environments (which you create using the staging area feature) with one click. Once cloned, you can easily import it to a new website as a template. It’s an excellent feature for those who regularly create and manage sites for clients, as it can optimize the way you work.

Overall, Pro can be considered a flat upgrade to the services and features provided by the Starter plan. It’s a better idea if you already have a sizable WordPress operation and need a little more storage space and fluidity than someone with a single high-quality site.

MyKinsta Backup Dashboard
MyKinsta Backup Dashboard

Kinsta Business

Kinsta’s Business Plan’s is where things really start to get interesting. Firstly, the Business plans are split up into four different packages, each with varying amounts of storage, WordPress installs, and visitor limits. Priced between $100 a month up to $400 per month, on ‘Business 4’ you’ll get a whopping amount of resources for your money. That’s 40 WordPress installs 600k visitors per month, 60 GB disk space, and a Free SSL & CDN.

As the name suggests, ‘Business’ plans are best utilized by companies or individuals looking to host multiple WordPress sites either for their network, or pool of clients. Free site migrations are increased to 3 (4 on ‘Business 4’) across most plans. Plus, backup retention and CDN storage are increased as well. You’ll also get an additional four or six PHP workers for each of your websites, depending on which service you choose.

If you’re looking for a plan that provides more resources for a single web-app, blog, or store, we can’t recommend this plan. Primarily because, there are other dedicated solutions on the market that would be a better fit, at a better price. However, Kinsta’s great site management tools and workflow optimizations do make these plans a great choice for businesses or agencies. With 60 GB of storage shared across sites, you’d be looking at a few small to medium-sized hosted sites and as much as $10 per site on ‘Business 4’ if you were to use all 40 included WordPress installs.

Kinsta CDN Data Centres

Kinsta Enterprise

Kinsta’s premium tier of hosting is the Enterprise Plans. These range between $600 per month up to $1500 per month and are best for large scale blog networks or agencies looking to host up to 150 client sites.

SSD storage ranges from 100 GB to 250 GB depending on the tier you select. Interestingly, you get the same amount of free CDN space no matter which Enterprise tier you go for: 1000 GB is the limit. The Enterprise plans also provide support for between 1 million and 3 million monthly visitors. As before, Kinsta is different from any other managed WordPress hosting providers in that they keep the services and features that they provide across their plans ubiquitous (with the small exception of site cloning).

Kinsta Server Architecture

The Enterprise plans have a slightly higher backup retention limit than the other plans, which caps out at 30 days. You get an entire month for all of your manual or automatic site backups to be stored before they face potential deletion. It’s useful if you have a site that updates regularly. With such a long retention period, you’ll be able to easily roll back to the previous month’s version if you run into any issues.

You also get between 8 to 16 PHP workers for each of your websites. With so many workers at your disposal, broader WordPress website networks and blog connections will be able to adapt more quickly to potential issues.

All in all, the Enterprise Kinsta plans are an excellent choice if you have a much broader company that relies on WordPress sites for revenue and high visitor counts. The plans here have the storage and capacity necessary to support extensive growth and consistent high traffic rates, as well as additional PHP workers to make sure that everything continues to run smoothly and minimize potential downtime.

Top Features

Google Cloud Platform

High performance, high-security network with 22 regional data center options for each of your sites.

Free Premium CDN

No ‘freemium’ features with this CDN offer, you’ll get at least 50GB CDN Storage with your plan.

One-Click Site Cloning

A great feature that helps streamline your business workflow.

Expert Support

WordPress Developers on-hand 24/7 via chat and ticket support.

Kinsta Server Performance

Average Review Score
★★★★★
★★★★★

To test Kinsta’s hosting performance we used a few Pingdom reports. Over the span of a year, Pingdom’s probes (located across North America) performed daily checks, on a basic website (less than 100KBs) hosted on Kinsta’s shared server environment. Additionally, there was no throttling added to these checks, so slower response times can be expected for 3G or 4G connections. 

Yearly Server Performance:

  • Average Uptime

    100.00%

  • Average Response Time

    0.00ms

  • Monthly Downtime

    No Downtime

Data shown as monthly Uptime averages for a basic Godaady website

Server performance can affect all aspects of your site. Case studies have consistently found that customer wait times (page load and response times) directly affect everything from SEM, revenue, and traffic growth. By a lot too, here’s just one example: 

For Mobify, every 100ms decrease in homepage load speed worked out to a 1.11% increase in session-based conversion, yielding an average annual revenue increase of nearly $380,000.

Security

Kinsta doesn’t slack when it comes to the security of your website. There’s no disparaging between plans either, with the Starter plan including the same level of protection as the Enterprise tier.

Firstly, all plans come with support for two-factor authentication, which is becoming more and more critical as cybersecurity changes in the new digital environment. Especially with the rise of automated bots and botnets, having multiple ways with your members or users can authenticate their identity is going to be crucial going forward. You’ll also be able to use this for your own security needs and prevent people from getting into your blog controls without two-factor authentication.

MyKinsta Tools Dashboard
MyKinsta Tools Dashboard

What’s more, Kinsta also allows you to automatically ban IPs that try to log in and fail more than six times in a single minute. Bots are ruthless and automatic, so having an automated banning procedure like this will go a long way to protecting your site from malicious traffic. On top of that, Kinsta also includes hardware firewalls for each of its service plans. These hardware firewalls serve to protect the network at large and work well given Kinsta’s dependence on Cloud server processing.

Even if you do have some kind of malware attack at one point, Kinsta will fix your site for free in the event of an issue. This is excellent value for money given how expensive some of the latter plans can be. Finally, Kinsta doesn’t support any WordPress sites that run on an unsupported version of PHP. This prevents vulnerable sites from joining the network and ensures that your WordPress site will always be updated to patch PHP versions – 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4, specifically.

Customer Support Review

Many managed WordPress hosting sites have so-so customer support, even if they advertise 24/7 coverage. While Kinsta offers the same, their customer support is relatively dependable and reliable. They provide access to live chat 24 hours a day and seven days a week. The live chat is reasonably responsive, and you shouldn’t need to work too hard to get connected to a human. Most customers only wait for a few minutes or so.

If you ever have an issue, Kinsta’s highly professional team of customer service agents bring their extensive WordPress knowledge to bear on whatever problem you might be experiencing. Having a full team of experts on hand for whatever bug or a technical issue you find is great for new and experienced users.

Kinsta Live Chat Panel

You can also submit queries via email, and Kinsta doesn’t prioritize live chat or email differently; they handle whatever tickets come first. Naturally, this does cause some lag in response times if you happen to submit a ticket during an accidentally high traffic period of time. That said, because Kinsta is a WordPress specific service, you’ll find all customer support channels to be less crowded.

They also have a very extensive knowledge base you can take advantage of to learn the ins and outs of WordPress and your Kinsta dashboard. These tutorials are excellent for many of the fundamental questions that beginners might run into as they set things up and hit the ground running. Overall, Kinsta provides impressive customer service.

Finally, Kinsta also offers multi-language customer support, however, this isn’t 24/7. Nonetheless, this is a great feature many international customers will appreciate. As outlined on their site, customer support can be contacted Monday to Friday  in the following languages:

  • French – 06:00 – 17:00 UTC
  • Dutch – 06:00 – 14:00 UTC
  • German – 06:00 – 14:00 UTC
  • Italian – 07:00 – 15:00 UTC
  • Portuguese – 09:00 – 17:00 UTC
  • Spanish – 14:00 – 24:00 UTC

Support Tickets

Kinsta advertises an average initial ticket response time of just a few minutes.

Live Chat

Kinsta’s ticket and live chat support are one and the same.

Tutorials & Guides

Kinsta has a rich knowledge base full of useful tutorials and guides.

Website Migration

One of their best features, Kinsta offers unlimited basic site migrations.

Multilingual Support

Kinsta supports most languages and is available during each regions regular working hours.

Phone Support

Kinsta does not offer technical customer support via phone. All support channels are via their dashboard live chat / tickets.

Community Forums

Kinsta does not have a dedicated community forum for customer support and troubleshooting.

Premium Support

There is no additional premium or paid support options with Kinsta.

Customer Reviews

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