Kinsta is one of the best web hosts in the premium segment. Many users don’t prefer premium service, especially if they are newbies, as standard web hosts can get the work done.
This doesn’t mean that premium services don’t have a place in the industry. I’m glad to mention that Kinsta is one of the finest premium hosting services; you will soon learn why.
WordPress has a premium category, and Kinsta is in that category. If you have those extra bucks to spare, go ahead and try it out, I’m confident they won’t disappoint.
If you are currently looking for a Managed WordPress hosting service in the premium segment, Kinsta is your go-to host.
However, I would like to point out that the economical, standard hosts can match up to your requirements without shelling out loads of money.
So, how does a hosting service get premium?
You are looking for a good web host and find yourself reading up on the various hosts in the market. You must have also noticed that it is difficult to find a host that has it all.
Some don’t have good speeds, and some have bad service. Some of them may have a complex process of installing the SSL.
That’s where premium service steps in; they take away the painful process of trying to run things perfectly. They charge you that extra bit to tailor things according to your needs and give you an excellent infrastructure.
WordPress developers built Kinsta, so you know it will be the best as it is created by people currently using the service.
The main goal was to build a platform that is the best for WordPress, so they initiated it in 2013.
The team realized that the hosting market is competitive and everyone is offering a similar service, so they wanted to stand out; instead of focusing on reducing the price, they built Kinsta intending to offer the latest technology that will focus and boost stability, security and speed.
They created it on the Google Cloud Platform, using the top-notch technology and clubbing it with superior customer support and high-level security checks. Here are a few pros and cons;
| Pros | Cons |
| They offer superior customer service | The new dashboard has no Plesk or cPanel |
| They have strong security service | They are expensive |
| They offer daily backups | WordPress is the only specialization |
| They offer good speeds | |
| You can rely on their uptime | |
| They provide premium features |
Let’s dig deeper and learn more about their service.
Contents
Uptime
Kinsta has strategically placed their servers and is operated by a team of experts on the Google Cloud Platform; as you can imagine, they are very fast.
Well, considering the price, the speeds better be super-fast. Lucky for us, Kinsta delivers!
Let’s take a look at the numbers.
We ran all our tests in Canada, which helped us get a precise result of the tests conducted across the country.
For Toronto and Montreal, we used the server in Montreal. For Winnipeg and Vancouver, we used the server in Iowa.
Take a look at the results below;
| Locations | Uptime | Load Time |
| Montreal | 99.98% | 409 ms |
| Toronto | 99.98% | 468 ms |
| Vancouver | 99.97% | 416 ms |
| Winnipeg | 99.97% | 501 ms |
What does this result mean?
When we speak of uptime, we measure the host’s service in terms of them being consistent.
The total amount of time that the host is functioning normally online is reflected in the results as a percentage.
If you look at the uptime for Montreal, it is 99.98%; what does it mean? It means that the Montreal users experienced downtime of 0.02%.
Since this test was conducted over 12 months, it means that in 12 months, our Montreal users experience a downtime of fewer than two hours.
Remember, even a small percentage while gauging the performance of uptime can make a huge difference. Uptime of over 98% is considered strong; however, anything below 98% is considered to be weak.
The best of the best companies guarantees an uptime of 99%, and for some reason, if they fail, there would be a certain amount of penalty involved.
Load Times
When we talk about load times, we need to look away from availability to speed measurements. Over the months, we tested the Kinsta platform with multiple browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Fox, and Google Chrome.
You also need to know that the user of your site may see some variation as well. This could be because of the server traffic, browser behaviour, and local network speed.
The results we got were satisfying, and when compared to the multiple hosts in the market, Kinsta’s performance was way above average. But I must also add that our internet speed is faster than most.
If the load times have an average of 2000 ms or below, it is considered high performance.
That means the user will have less delay when the webpage is loading. If a host has a slow response time, I would say that host is very risky to consider.
You will notice these delays could annoy and frustrate your customers and leaders. They may choose to move on to a site with better speeds.
This can have a negative effect on your google rating and business too. A loss of a potential customer is very dangerous for any business. Always ensure to have a host that delivers in this segment.
Kinsta has outdone itself and truly offered a premium experience.
Servers
Many hosts upkeep their data centres or, in a data centre space, lease out an area. This used to be a very good technique; however, they soon learnt that the hardware wears out quickly.
In current times, many hosts are hosting on machines that are from either 2010 that’s the best-case scenario and the worst case being from the 2000s.
Just keep in mind, the hardware is almost 20 years old. This is probably the reason for the compromised service.
Keeping that in mind, most of these hosts have just two or three data centres like in the USA, Singapore and Netherlands. So the visitors at a distance will receive bad times and very slow speeds, which is terrible!
But that’s not the case with Kinsta. They don’t believe in owning their data centres and have opted for a wiser option, Cloud Data Centres by Google. They run the WordPress platform on this data centre.
So what does all this mean? It means that you get the newest and the best hardware that powers your project. You also get multiple options to choose the data centre closest to your preferred location.
Kinsta currently has 24 global data centres, of which seven are based in the US;
- Montreal, Canada
- Osaka, Japan
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Hongkong
- California, USA
- Hamina, Finland
- Netherlands
- Mumbai, India
- Tokyo, Japan
- Jurong, Singapore
- Frankfurt, Germany
- London, UK
- Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Carolina, USA
- Virginia, USA
- Oregon, USA
- Sydney, Australia
- Changhua County, Taiwan
- St. Ghislaine, Belgium
- Iowa, USA
If you are looking at hosting in Canada, you will find various data centres from the above list convenient for you especially, Montreal, Iowa.
Security
Security is vital, especially while managing a site. Your WordPress site can be secured by simply choosing from the various options made available.
You can either do it manually or install WordPress plugins to get it done. However, we have found a great way to handle WP security by getting a team of experts do all the heavy lifting.
Kinsta has a highly secured network and does all the work that a WP security plugin does for you. Premium service adds this value and makes your WordPress website very secure.
Kinsta specifically implements firewalls, SSL support, software-based restrictions, and detection of DDoS attacks.
This is not all, in a worst-case scenario, if your WordPress website is attacked, goes offline, and all your data is deleted, there is no need to fear or stress. You ask why?
Kinsta offers you a policy to back up all your data daily. So, no matter how bad the situation may seem, you can retrieve all your data, and your WordPress site will be fully operational in no time. Depending on the time of the attack, you could retrieve the present-day information too.
Kinsta uses a different staging and backup environment; this makes it possible to keep the latest progress.
If you are not comfortable with daily backup, then with a few added bucks, you can get Kinsta to update the site often.
If you find yourself in a situation constantly worrying about your site data, go ahead and get your site backed up every hour; yes, it will cost you that much more. But if you have the budget for it, why not? You won’t be judged.
Kinsta has a powerful monitoring policy that we will discuss soon. Kinsta updates its server regularly and is proactive at keeping your WordPress website hack-free.
Kinsta offers a guarantee of making your website a top priority if hacked. They have a WP team of experts that assure you of quickly getting your WordPress website live.
Pricing
Kinsta offers premium service, but I must say they are very expensive. If you are currently using a shared host anywhere in the monthly range of $1 to 10, then with Kinsta, you need to stretch your budget at least three to thirty times.
Kinsta is not in the business to compete with anyone, and they are way above it all. We haven’t seen any host offer services close to Kinsta, except for Liquid Web, and if you check them out, they aren’t cheap either.
Their pricing is not complex at all. They have yearly and monthly plans. If you go in for the yearly plan, you might get a slight discount.
All payments are to be made via credit card.; be it Mastercard or Visa. They don’t put their customers through the painful process of the fraud detection system.
But that’s not the case with Liquid Web, and they ask you to go through the entire process. We prefer PayPal; however, Kinsta is very keen on using credit cards only.
Kinsta doesn’t give their customers domains, neither paid nor for free. This is a clear indication that Kinsta is not looking at making some additional bucks by selling extras. You want premium service, pay for it, and you will get the best; the domain is not their concern.
They have no extra fees, no hidden upsells, and they offer you a 30-day refund policy. But I have to say, it is very expensive.
| Plan | Price Per Month | WP Install | Visits | Disk Space | CDN & SSL |
| Starter | $30 | 1 | 20,000 | 10 GB | Free |
| Pro | $60 | 2 | 40,000 | 20 GB | Free |
| Business 1 | $100 | 5 | 100,000 | 30 GB | Free |
| Business 2 | $200 | 10 | 250,000 | 40 GB | Free |
| Business 3 | $300 | 20 | 400,000 | 50 GB | Free |
| Business 4 | $400 | 40 | 600,000 | 60 GB | Free |
| Enterprise 1 | $600 | 60 | 1000,000 | 100 GB | Free |
| Enterprise 2 | $900 | 80 | 1500,000 | 150 GB | Free |
| Enterprise 3 | $1200 | 120 | 2000,000 | 200 GB | Free |
| Enterprise 4 | $1500 | 150 | 3000,000 | 250 GB | Free |
Just so that you know, the team at Kinsta checks your site every two minutes that amounts to 720 times in a day.
That’s a tad much for me, but if that’s your thing, go for it; after all, it is premium service, right!
If they find anything wrong, they will fix it pronto. So, most of the time, you don’t even realize that something was wrong. Kinsta looks after their system and hardware with a similar dedication.
Customer Support
Their support is good, not amazing. We had opened the chatbox used by prospects, the chat gets sent as an email, and we filled it up as a form. However, I did get a quick reply, rescheduling an appropriate time to call.
All said and done, I was looking forward to chatting, and no one answered about the chat, so that’s that!
Once I signed up, I had a better experience. Kinsta has a 24×7 customer support team that you can connect with via phone and live chat too.
When I reached out to them via live chat, I didn’t have to wait for over a minute, and someone always attended to me within a minute.
There were a few times when only upon refreshing the screen I have seen their response, so be sure to refresh your screen if the wait time exceeds a minute.
The best part about the live chat is, it saves all your conversation, so if you are dealing with a concern, then all the previous chats come in handy, so you don’t need to keep explaining the matter to every new agent your issue is passed on to.
It’s a well-designed system, a combination of the live chat and the ticketing system, making it very convenient.
The executives that I interacted with were always very prompt, courteous and extremely knowledgeable. I’ve never had to wait for a solution for more than five minutes.
We wanted to put their team to the test. So we began with asking the question on web development in terms of WP.
The executive was very attentive and promptly guided me, explaining every step. I also inquired about the CDN and security tools, and the executive immediately gave me details about the tools they offered and explained all the essentials regarding it.
Kinsta mainly focuses on hosting, so when I asked for assistance with optimization, I was told, “Activate Kinsta CDN,” and they gave me a guide.
I was disappointed, especially after the amazing support I have received from GreenGeeks. Yet, the servers from Kinsta outperformed the servers from GreenGeeks by a big margin.
This only goes to show, you don’t need super dedicated agents if your system is optimized to perform in the best way possible.
Pay for What You Need
Kinsta is a managed WordPress host. The focus word is managed, which means the server set-up and hosting are managed by them. So I don’t have to stress about it and continue to focus on my business.
Their service is cloud-based, built on the cloud platform by Google. The servers have built-in redundancy and are super-fast.
They also have a well-trained support team available to assist you with any concerns related to WordPress.
It does good, but it is expensive as well. If WordPress were to have a Holy Grail, then this would be it. It’s pretty, it is fast, and it will compel your wallet to rethink its life goals.
Of course, you will get competitive value for the money you spend, but know that they cater to only WordPress.
Features
You can expect loads of features from Kinsta’s premium service. Kinsta will go on and beyond to match all your needs.
If there is something you require and presently don’t have it, they will ask you to contact them, and they will then begin to work on it to make it happen for you. I am not aware of a single host who will do that.
Kinsta takes their part to manage very earnestly. Kinsta is like that over-bearing parent to your website.
This sort of management doesn’t seem to work well with people; however, it’s amazing for websites. They check the uptime of your website once in every two minutes and fix any error immediately.
Kinsta offers various WP-specific tools; you can manage multiple WordPress sites from a single Kinsta dashboard, you will also receive detailed site analytics and statistics, but they don’t have cPanel.
If we look at the resources, the Starter plan offers; one website, disk space of 10 GB, plenty of bandwidth to support a monthly visit of 20,000 visitors. It is a good start, and Kinsta will assist you in optimizing your resources.
As you upgrade, your package would include more WordPress sites, resources with an upper limit of 20 sites, visits of 400,000 and space of 50 GB. All other features remain the same.
They have no extra boost at additional charges or a higher package. And no complex pricing system that will include features that are of no use to you.
We have reviewed too many shared hosts, and all of them offer the best features that are hidden behind upgrades and paywalls; I’m not a fan of this marketing strategy.
As I mentioned earlier, Kinsta is not a shared host; they are cloud-based and work on their latest server technology. Along with their premium prices, they offer all you need. They don’t try to siphon any more money for additional service.
As I expected, they offered an auto SSL certificate. SSL certificates encrypt everything your user does, which is very strong security, excellent to keep lawsuits at bay, and gives your Google SEO a good bump. There are no downsides.
By default, your data gets backed up automatically daily; you can also request additional backups, depending on your need.
This feature should be offered by every host. They also include caching options that improve the performance, so static sites can be minimized from being heavy very quickly, it consumes fewer resources, and your visitors experience faster loading.
Own CDN
A CDN is short for Content Delivery Network; they make cached copies of the site; it is delivered to various data centres. In this way, you don’t have to stick to just one server location.
Most sites permit the integration of your website with the third-party Content Delivery Network, and this third-party ends up being a free version of Cloudflare. They always have certain limits, and if you wish to have a better plan, then you need to put in some cash.
Kinsta has their own CDN that is fast, and the charges for it was already included. We love it!
Auto-scaling RAM and CPU
If your website seems to grow and if your resources need to be increased, no need to sweat it. It can be easily done on the Google Cloud platform; this is the best part of using this platform.
Kinsta will auto-scale your RAM and CPU; it doesn’t limit it. So if your site is in need of more power or the number of visitors increased due to the latest offers on your webpage, your website is well-equipped to handle the high-volume traffic.
Our experience with other hosts is, we have got an email request to pay more to enable your plan to manage traffic. With Kinsta, we haven’t had this issue.
Just for the sake of comparison, the RAM that Kinsta offers is 10x more than their competitors. And that, my friends, make a major difference when you have a WooCommerce store that can manage dozens of coinciding visitors, giving them a pleasing experience and enabling them to purchase multiple items keeping the entire process seamless.
This will mint you loads of cash, compared to a site that keeps crashing and earns you a few pity sales, with a high possibility of customers never returning.
Architecture
Architecture drives your car. They ensure to use the latest and the best technology that contributed to your fast load times, something we discussed earlier in this article.
They are able to establish this by staying focused on using the best automatic scalability, availability, resource isolation and technology.
For all the tech-buffs to specify the technology they use within the architecture is MariaDB, LXD Software Containers, PHP 7.4, and Nginx.
Other Features
Kinsta offers other features like; if you are moving from another host to Kinsta, they will transfer your site for free, Nginx reverse proxy, CDN, scale visits, Redis, Elasticsearch, Cloudflare Railgun, various PHP versions, developer support that’s advanced, development sites, test environment, proprietary dashboard, site analytics, and readiness for traffic surge.
As discussed earlier, if you don’t see what you need on your Kinsta dashboard, all you need to do is inform them, and they will try to work it out for you.
Various Hosting
The hosting that Kinsta offers is not yet labelled, and they don’t offer VPS hosting or shared hosting.
Instead of providing a VPS hosting or a dedicated server, they provide their users with options like the Starter and Pro. If they wish to upgrade, they also have the Business and the Enterprise packages too.
If you have one website, then the Starter plan is apt, but if you have two sites, then the Pro plan will work best.
They explain their managed WordPress hosting packages in a very simple format, so you don’t have to rack your brains. The plans specify the number of WordPress installs and monthly traffic too.
The moment you subscribe to the Business plan and the Enterprise plan, the best way for you to understand your need is by comparing them to your needs.
If you are an Enterprise or Agency with greater requirements than what they provide, you need to contact Kinsta, and someone will help you with it.
Conclusion
Kinsta has a diverse team, they have some local hubs, but their team is mostly remote. This gives them the opportunity to higher top talent, cream of the crop worldwide, and no boundary can stop them.
Their power lies in their diversity. They believe in having a team that comes from various walks of life, and this helps widen their unified perspective.
This infuses an understanding that they use on a day-to-day basis while they interact with their internal team or their clients.
Today in the market, Kinsta is considered the finest managed WordPress hosting providers for consumers. Kinsta built this service to be premium as many people, especially the ones just starting, need help with getting their site live.
For users looking for the best managed WordPress hosting service, we definitely suggest Kinsta. We also recommend it to people looking for the fastest speeds, WP experts support, and security -Fort Knox-esque.
It is also apt for people who already have a fully built WordPress website but can’t keep up with traffic. We suggest you switch to Kinsta.
Our Thoughts
To summarize our review, I would like to say Kinsta is a service provider you may want to consider. Yes, I do agree that their charges are high in comparison to the standard average host, but they offer a lot of support options and features.
If you want a comprehensive package that offers multiple tools and website management, then you must take a look at Kinsta; it will be worth your time.
There are multiple managed WordPress hosting providers in the market, and you can always compare rates and services too. You can also check our HostPapa review.
The way we look at it is, if you have the budget, and you want to invest your time in managing and running your business instead of your website, then we suggest to take the all-inclusive Kinsta WP providers and stay assured at all times that someone is watching out for you.
We hope you find what you are looking for and look forward to your comments and experience. Cheers!