Read further to learn more about Kinsta, in our review we will detail its features, pros and cons with our rating, and a conclusion about why you should use it.
Click on “open” if you want to see exactly what we will talk about in the rest of this article.
Quick Overview
What is Kinsta?
Kinsta, a premium WordPress hosting, is powered exclusively by Google Cloud Platform and utilize Google Cloud’s premium tier global network to ensure your site loads even faster. Kinsta is recommended by Google Cloud as a fully-managed WordPress hosting solution.
All of their support engineers are WordPress developers, they create WordPress themes, plugins and also contribute back to the core. Read a little more about Kinsta’s history in the Google Cloud case study.
Based on independent tests from Review Signal, Kinsta is the highest-performing WordPress hosts. For the fifth year in a row,they earned the Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance award.
Kinsta specifications
Features | Wordpress Hosting |
Best suited for | Individuals, Freelancers, Small businesses, Mid size businesses |
Website languages | Chinese / Deutsch / English / French / Italian / Portuguese |
Website URL | Visit official website |
Support link | Support page |
Live chat | Yes |
Company address | 8605 Santa Monica Blvd, Ste 92581, West Hollywood, California, 90069, United States |
Year founded | 2013 |
Pricing
Kinsta pricing: How much does Kinsta cost?
Kinsta Starter plan costs you $30 per month. You can save up to 10% of your money if you subscribe the yearly plan. Be very careful! If you want to host multiple WordPress sites, Kinsta can become expensive quickly! However, if you only want to host a few sites and want to get quality hosting Kinsta will more than do the trick.
Pricing range | From $30 to $1500 per month |
Pricing types | Annual subscription / Monthly subscription |
Free plan | No |
Free trial | No |
Money back guarantee | Yes, 30 days |
Pricing page link | See plans |
Kinsta pricing plans
There are several things in their price table that are difficult to understand. For example, the starter plan does not allow you to host a WordPress multisite, so be careful. Secondly, this plan does not allow you to host 2 WordPress sites. Besides, if you already have more than 1000 visitors on your site per day or your site has more than 10GB of storage, you will have to take the Pro plan twice as expensive. Also, if you want to host an Ecommerce or marketplace site, Kinsta does not recommend you to take their starter or pro plan but to directly take their Business plan at 100$/month. This can be very expensive for the launch of your ecommerce site.
All of the plans come with the following:
- Free Kinsta CDN, free Let’s Encrypt SSL, staging environments, automatic daily backups and the option to create manual backup points anytime.
- Full page caching at the server-level to deliver content almost instantaneously to visitors. They also pair that with the Kinsta MU plugin, developed in-house, to provide even more granular control over caching.
- PHP 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4.
- Free hack fixes. If a client’s WordPress website is hacked they’ll fix it with immediate priority.
- Server-level rules and optimizations for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Download sites to ensure a smoother checkout experience for customers.
- A custom-designed dashboard with lots of data that helps you improve further your site.
- MyKinsta analytics reports for data analysis and performance insights.
- Multi-user access with fine-grained permissions. Add any number of users to your team. Give them access to all your sites, just billing or add them as developers or administrators to a subset of your sites.
- SSH access, Git, and WP-CLI.
- All of the plans include one or more free premium migrations, completed by their expert support team. The number of migrations included depends on the plan you choose.
- They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee with no long-term contracts.
Elasticsearch
RESTful search and analytics engine capable of solving a growing number of use cases. $100 / month / site
Redis
Open source, in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker. $100 / month / site
Nginx reverse proxy
Support to load WordPress from a subdirectory while a separate website (WordPress or otherwise) loads at the root domain. $50 / month / site
External Backup
Automatically back up your WordPress site once per week or per month to either Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. $2 / month / site + $1 / GB bandwidth
Extra backups
For increased security and to recover even more stages of your website. Hourly backups are stored for 24 hours. Every 6 hours Every hour $50 / month / site $100 / month / site
Disk space add-on
For large sites with a lot of files or images, increase your plan’s disk space with our monthly add-on. +20 GB $20 / month / company
Overage Prices
Visits overage
If you reach your plan’s visits limit, we’ll keep your sites running but charge you a fee after a specific number of additional visits. $1 / 1,000 visits
Disk space overage
If you reach your disk space limit, we’ll keep your sites running but charge you a fee after each additional GB. $2 / GB
CDN overage
If you reach your CDN limit, we’ll keep your sites running but we’ll charge you a fee after each additional GB. $0.10 / GB
Features
Kinsta features: What can you do with it?
Kinsta hosting platform doesn’t fall into any of the traditional hosting categories. Their entire infrastructure is built on the Google Cloud Platform and is very different from traditional shared, VPS, or dedicated infrastructure. Furthermore, they make GCP’s compute-optimized C2 machines (Google’s fastest servers) and premium tier network available for all of their customers at no additional charge.
Server Technology
Kinsta utilizes LXD managed hosts and orchestrated LXC software containers for each site. What this means is that every WordPress site is housed in its own isolated container, which has all of the software resources required to run it (Linux, Nginx, PHP, MySQL). The resources are 100% private and are not shared between anyone else or even your own sites.
Speed obsessive architecture
They use state-of-the-art technology like Nginx, PHP 7.4, LXD software containers, MariaDB, and compute-optimized VMs to make sure your website loads in the blink of an eye. Featuring complete resource isolation, automatic scalability, and high availability.
Data Centers
You have the option to choose from 24 data centers for your WordPress website. Each of your sites can have a different data center because they utilize multi-regional deployments.
The list and location of the Kinsta Datacenters :
- Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA (us-central1)
- St. Ghislain, Belgium (europe-west1)
- Changhua County, Taiwan (asia-east1)
- Sydney, Australia (australia-southeast1)
- The Dalles, Oregon, USA (us-west1)
- Salt Lake City, USA (us-west3)
- Ashburn, Virginia, USA (us-east4)
- Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA (us-east1)
- São Paulo, Brazil (southamerica-east1)
- London, UK (europe-west2)
- Frankfurt, Germany (europe-west3)
- Jurong West, Singapore (asia-southeast1)
- Tokyo, Japan (asia-northeast1)
- Mumbai, India (asia-south1)
- Montréal, Canada (northamerica-northeast1)
- Eemshaven, Netherlands (europe-west4)
- Hamina, Finland (europe-north1)
- Los Angeles, California (us-west2)
- Hong Kong (asia-east2)
- Zürich, Switzerland (europe-west6)
- Osaka, Japan (asia-northeast2)
- Seoul, South Korea (asia-northeast3)
- Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (us-west4)
- Jakarta, Indonesia (asia-southeast2)
Kinsta Platform
MyKinsta Admin
Simplified site management
Whether you want to add a new site, deploy a staging server, clone a WordPress site, view detailed site analytics or request a migration – it’s all there in one easy-to-use interface.
Tools you need
For those of you coming from cPanel or Plesk, you’ll have access to all the tools you’re used to, but with a fresh approach. phpMyAdmin, redirects, logs, SFTP, and backups are all one click away.
Staging Areas
Test before pushing to production
Each WordPress install can have its own staging environment, completely separate from your live production site. Easily test new WordPress versions, plugins, code, and share it with your team.
Push staging to live
No need to worry about wasted development time on staging. When you’re ready, you can one-click push changes you’ve made on your staging site to production in a matter of seconds.
Developer Friendly
WP-CLI, SSH, Git
We are WordPress developers ourselves, so you’ll be happy to find everything you need under the hood. Tools and software such as WP-CLI, SSH, and Git are supported and ready to go from the minute you sign up.
Change PHP versions
The latest supported versions of PHP 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4 can easily be enabled with a single-click from within the MyKinsta dashboard. This allows you the freedom to run what your third-party plugins need to operate efficiently.
Kinsta optimizes for WooCommerce
WooCommerce sites are dynamic and very demanding as they generate a lot of data, as well as un-cachable requests. This means you need robust PHP, database, and caching solutions in place. It’s important when choosing WooCommerce hosting that you choose a container-based host that is built for automatic scaling to handle sudden surges in traffic and load.
Our WordPress team deals with optimizing high-traffic WooCommerce sites on a daily basis. We have seen it all. Here are just a few ways we go further to find the perfect balance between performance and functionality:
- Fast server-level caching in place with rules to ensure proper WooCommerce functionality.
- By default, certain WooCommerce pages like cart, my-account, and checkout, are excluded from caching.
- Users automatically bypass the cache when the “woocommerce_items_in_cart cookie” is detected to ensure a smooth and in-sync checkout process.
- Ability to programmatically purge individual URLs using the kinsta-cache/purge_list filter.
- Programmatic purging can also be done via cURL by calling a URL with a prefix provided by our support engineers.
Migrate your website
Moving your site to Kinsta won’t incur any downtime. Our expert migration team will take care of everything for you. We’ll assign a temporary domain to your migrated site and check everything before going live.
Kinsta DNS
Obtaining a premium DNS will allow you to improve the resolution speed of the domain name and thus get a faster loading time of your website. This can be seen in the TTFB (time to first byte). A premium DNS also makes it possible to reinforce its security, especially in the case of DDOS.
Kinsta CDN
Analytics
Stress-free Features
Backups
Full backups daily
We backup your sites at least once every day. Should the worst happen you’ll be able to reinstate a backup of your site with the push of a button. We offer separate backups on all environments – live and staging – so your development efforts are equally as safe.
Additional backups
For an additional fee, we can increase the backup frequency of your sites to every 6 hours or even every hour. If you make frequent changes or have a highly dynamic site, this may be a worthwhile addition to your site’s security arsenal.
Security
Active and passive measures to stop attacks and malicious intent in its tracks. Continuous monitoring for uptime, DDoS attack detection, software-based restrictions, SSL support, and hardware firewalls. Bottom line: your site is monitored and secured 24/7.
Uptime Monitoring
Uptime Frequency
We check the status of all websites we host every 2 minutes. That translates to 720 checks for each of your sites every day.
Outstanding reaction time
Our uptime checks allow us to react to issues before they affect lots of visitors. It allows us to be proactive in our support efforts.
Malware Removal Guarantee
Proactive prevention
We don’t just sit around waiting for hacks to happen. We keep all of our server software up to date and constantly monitor events network-wide. Suspicious activity is investigated and dealt with immediately.
Instant relief
If your website is hacked we guarantee that we’ll fix it for you with immediate priority. Our technicians have years upon years of experience dealing with all sorts of WordPress issues and will restore your site to perfect working condition.
Vertical scaling
Flexible architecture
Our infrastructure is built on Google Cloud Platform which puts the power of Google’s hardware at your fingertips. Your site can scale up to your needs, and the power is always there when you need it.
Ready for traffic surges
Most importantly, we are ready for unpredictable traffic surges. Sudden spikes from social media or being featured on national television is no match for our server’s power.
Outstanding Support
Expert WordPress Support
WordPress know-how
At Kinsta support WordPress knowledge is not an afterthought, it’s our number one priority. Our team speaks WordPress fluently, has experience in troubleshooting, server maintenance, theme and plugin building and maintenance, contributing to WordPress core, and more!
Sharing the knowledge
When an issue is solved we share the knowledge internally. If an issue happens more often we share what we’ve learned in our knowledgebase to help you get things done on your own.
Monitored everyday
Website status
We check your sites’ uptime every 2 minutes which means that our response time is almost immediate to any downtime that may occur. Our staff is alerted instantly and they’ll start resolving the issue well before you contact us.
Internal monitoring
We monitor the status of our other external and internal systems just as rigorously. This keeps our servers healthy, allowing us to focus on continuous improvements.
100% solved rate
Every issue solved
Whether your website is down, you’re getting attacked, you have SSL issues, it makes no difference. If it is a problem on our end we will take care of it swiftly and professionally.
Teamwork
We emphasize the sharing of knowledge within our support department which makes us a well-oiled machine. Complex issues may call for teamwork behind the scenes, something our team is more than ready for.
Domains management
Alternatives
Kinsta Alternatives
Before subscribing to Kinsta, it’s always a good idea to check out the competition and find the best wordpress hosting for your needs. You can find the Kinsta alternatives here.
Here are some versus to compare Kinsta with its competitors: