Disclaimer: This Kinsta review is based on our actual experiences after purchasing a plan, launching a website, and actually using Kinsta (which now extends to web applications, databases, and static sites – not an expert on that.) I have affiliate links in this post. Reading and clicking on links within means that you accept the terms and conditions and that you are willing to support my efforts.
Ever felt the pain you feel when years of your work (on a website, for a website) gets wiped off the face of earth? Can you imagine the brutal loss accrued when a business-critical website goes belly up?
Would you like to sit down and calculate the total losses (in man-hours, resources, opportunity costs, and more) when you (or teams) have to sit down and put out relentless fires related to bad database calls, trying to non-existing critical files, or weeding out vulnerable scripts?
For a business (or any brand that’s serious enough to build a serious web presence), none of the above are non-negotiable. This also includes app developers and database managers looking for fast, easy, stable, and secure homes to build and deploy applications and databases.
If you ask me, even a hobby website with a deluge of poems (never intended to be shown to the world) should never go down.
Your website hosting choice lays the foundation for your website. You’d want your website to be built, managed, and run on a web host who is solid, reliable, fast, secure, and a dependable hosting provider.
You can’t ask for all that paying $1 (or $6?) per month for a hosting provider. Since more than 60% of websites are on WordPress (including this one), you’d probably be using WordPress already.
It’s usually rare to find good managed WordPress hosting solutions (I only know of 3 such providers), and Kinsta is one of them.
Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting: This is How You Host!
Kinsta Cloud Hosting: Application Hosting and Database Hosting
Kinsta Architecture & Technology
Hosting with Kinsta: The Need for Speed
Kinsta Hosting with Automatic Scaling
Kinsta Active Plugin Management
More Hosting Benefits with Kinsta
Kinsta Backups (& Additional Backups)
Kinsta Support: Deal With Experts
Kinsta Dashbord (MyKinsta) & Platform
The Dashingly Handsome MyKinsta (Kinsta Dashboard)
Critical Staging Area (with Premium Add-ons)
Other Fantastic Kinsta Features
Host Sites, Web Applications, & Databases Like a Pro
Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting: This is How You Host!
In a previous blog post on Managed WordPress hosting, I wrote:
“The hosting service you choose will determine just how successful your digital marketing efforts are going to be.”
When you want to start a blog or set up a website on WordPress, you’d normally think of trying to spend as little as possible and get up and running as soon as possible.
Normally, when you look at your options for web hosting, most people only look at the price (we are all so used to it, aren’t we?) and don’t consider absolutely anything else beyond those $$$ signs.
For a moment, stop obsessing about the price.
Instead, look at it this way: Your Managed WordPress hosting provider is directly responsible for how much money your business makes.
Plus, not all WordPress hosting solutions are built the same.
In a nutshell (we’ll get into specifics below), this is what Kinsta gets to the table:
- The architecture: This isn’t the same as Godaddy’s with its traditional “We’ll host any site” architecture which is now also used for “Wordpress hosting”. Built on Google Cloud’s premium network and Integrated with enterprise-level Cloudflare, their infrastructure is solid.
- Speed: Is it fast enough or not? Kinsta did the unthinkable. Kinsta moved to Google Cloud’s new compute-optimized VMs. Performance gains so fast you’re going to feel them! 🚀 . The new C3D Machines and C2 Machines over at Kinsta will give you the following: Simply moving your sites to the new architecture is going to result in faster load times, without any work or testing required on your part. Due to the way the C3D and C2 machines work, heavier sites will see greater performance increases than those of already optimized sites. But as we saw above, even optimized sites are noticing a difference. This change doesn’t only impact the frontend of your sites. You’ll see faster load times on the backend, when working in your WordPress admin dashboard.
- Security: DDoS protection? Proactive prevention from Malware and Hacking? Enterprise-level firewall and DDoS protection included for free on all plans. Say hello to Proactive prevention from Malware and Hacking.
- SSL certificates: No site without SSL? Don’t even get online. Trying to get an SSL certificate and make it work for you? Good luck with that. But you don’t have to: Kinsta makes SSL management a breeze by offering free, automatic SSL certificates with wildcard support.
- CDN: Making what’s fast, even faster with HTTP/3-enabled CDN and 260+ PoPs worldwide (also helps greatly with Image rendering).
- Global data centers: 35 data centers are available to all customers across 5 continents. Users have the freedom to select the data center of their choice which is most suitable and convenient for their website.
- Premium features: Kinsta provides enterprise-level Cloudflare integration at no extra costs. Features like Edge Caching and Early Hints web standard are available across all plans to ensure high web performance.
- Staging features: You don’t want to mess with your live website, do you? Isolate disaster (the potential ones) with Kinsta’s staging — each WordPress website install can have its own free WordPress staging environment. Plus, Kinsta offers premium staging environments as an add-on.
- Migrating your site: Who wants to DIY migrate when experienced folks behind managed WordPress hosting can do it for you? The new Compute-optimized C2 Machines are now available to every customer who migrates to Kinsta. As of January 2024, Kinsta started migrating their clients to the new C3D optimized machines. As Google makes them available in more regions, Kinsta is going to make them available in those regions too. The number of free premium migrations depends on the plan you choose. However, each Kinsta WordPress plan has at least one free premium migration and unlimited basic migrations. Just migrating to Kinsta gets you a 20% speed boost.
- Uptime checks: If a site is down, it doesn’t make money. Websites on shared hosts are down, down, down some more. Kinsta checks your site every 2 minutes to make sure your business is up and running. Every 2 minutes (that’s 720 times each day).
- Automated, Daily Backups: You can never be too sure. Just as my clients who had to start from scratch. The data storage is for a minimum of 14 days but goes up depending on the plan. View Kinsta pricing here
- Scalability: If your site starts to get popular and when you need more resources, you don’t want a way to scale up automatically. Kinsta is ready for any sudden traffic your website might experience.
- Kinsta API: helps with workload efficiency by simplifying tasks such as retrieving data analytics, scheduling PHP restarts, clearing cache, automating WordPress site launch, and installing plugins.
- Expert support: Their support team is made of actual engineers and is available 24/7/365 through Intercom chat directly in the MyKinsta dashboard.
- Custom-built dashboard: The MyKinsta dashboard provides a friendly experience for all users, especially the non-technical ones. You can easily host, manage, and optimizie all kinds of web projects in one place.
- Kinsta APM tool: Available in the MyKinsta dashboard, the free Application Performance Monitoring tool allows you to analyze your website performance and optimize accordingly.
- Optimized Costing for Multiple WordPress or Multi-site WordPress Installs (the more WordPress installs you make, the lower it should cost you per site install — not more).
- Non-wordPress Projects: Note that Kinsta isn’t just about WordPress managed hosting (while it’s terrific at that!). Users can host web applications, databases, and static sites too, all backed up by the same infrastructure and with a custom dashboard to manage all projects in one place.
Kinsta gives you all this, and much more.
Even the WordPress managed hosting providers who you (and I) thought were awesome aren’t always up to mark.
They miss the boat somewhere. The actual experience with a web host always comes to play much after you stay hosted with them.
Kinsta Cloud Hosting For Web Applications and Databases
Kinsta isn’t just about managed WordPress Hosting anymore; it’s also the best home for your web applications, databases, and free static sites
Kinsta uses a fair-pricing model allowing you to ship your app projects to the cloud faster (and more efficiently!)
No pricing per seats.
No Infrastructure to manage
No systems to update.
For application hosting, Connect your BitBucket, Gitlab Repository, or GitHub. Specify your build environment. Start command. Deploy manually (or automatically) on commit.
Or, bring your Dockerfile to host almost anything.
Your applications run on top CPU (Google C2 and C3D machines) enabling the highest performance per core. This is paired with low-latency premium tier network offered by Google Platform’s top-tier infrastructure
Kinsta’s integration with Cloudflare ensures Cloudflare’s firewall and DDoS protection and mitigation. Benefit from isolated container technology with private networks between each while you keep malicious hackers and other actors at bay.
Database hosting, free static site hosting, WordPress Specialist Hosting is all made easier as all you have to do is to:
- Select database type and version.
- Choose an appropriate location for your database
- Configure resources
- Deploy (and let Kinsta manage it)
Connect your database to kinsta-hosted apps for secure and blazing-fast connections (or set up external connections).
Application, free static site hosting and Database hosting with Kinsta also allows you:
- Scalability: Manually launch multiple pods of the same application. Or, give more muscle to complete resource-intensive tasks.
- Unlimited users: You can add unlimited users (no extra costs). On the fair-usage pricing model, you can assign administrators, developers, and others to keep your projects running smoothly.
- HTTPS/SSL: For each domain deployed, Kinsta uses Cloudflare to provide free HTTPS certificates. Of course, you can use your own SSL certificates as well.
- Deploy anywhere: More than 260+ CDN locations and 25+ data centers, select the region closest to your users. Deploy fast, safe, and with zero downtime.
- Dedicated Databases: Working with Redis? MariaDB? MySQL? PostgreSQL? Easily add one or multiple databases to each application. Dedicated databases come with internal connections for the best possible performance. No row count limits. No Query count limits.
Note: If you are just starting out, there’s also a Hobby Tier that you could use (instead of dealing with hosting right off the bat). Learn to build apps and scale on Kinsta’s infrastructure.
Kinsta Hosting For Free Static Sites
Kinsta has been busy in 2023, and they also launched free Static Site Hosting! The service is tailored for pre-built static websites and modern static site generators using Node.js.
It includes multi-user access, deployment to the edge, and integration with GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket. Now, you can run static sites, apps, databases, and WordPress sites all in one place at Kinsta.
A quick overview of Kinsta’s free Static Site Hosting:
- Deployment to the edge with 260+ locations available
- Custom domains
- SSL certificates automatically issued and updated
- 100 free static sites
- 600 build minutes and 100 GB bandwidth per month per account
- 1 GB build size and 1 concurrent build per site
Say Hello to Kinsta
Kinsta is powered by The Google Cloud Platform and its 35+ global data centers. Everything is interconnected over their premium tier network, designed to minimize distance and hops, resulting in fast and secure transport of your data.
Kinsta is obsessed with speed, security, and support. They feature We use state-of-the-art technology like Nginx, PHP 8.0+, LXD containers and MariaDB to make sure your website loads fast. I mean it when I say “fast”.
They also feature complete resource isolation, automatic scalability, and high availability.
What I really like about Kinsta is their attention to detail with speed and security. Featuring active and passive measures to stop attacks and malicious intent in its tracks. Plus, Kinsta is also SOC-2 Type II compliant.
All managed hosting plans on Kinsta also come with continuous monitoring for uptime, DDoS attack detection, malware scanning, SSL support, hardware firewalls and an enterprise-level Cloudflare integration.
Bottom line: your site is monitored and secured 24/7.
Further, Kinsta has a lot more for you when you come in (but still has everything you are used to).
Kinsta Vs WPEngine
WPEngine is a popular and well-known WordPress Hosting solution. That’s right.
Kinsta, however, is a lot more. Without talking (and boring you to death), learn how about the key differences between Kinsta Vs WPEngine — watch this video now:
Kinsta’s Architecture & Technology
Kinsta’s main USP is the infrastructure and the technology stack it uses on the backend to make your site perform the way it does. They use Google Cloud’s Premium-tier Network and enterprise-level Cloudflare integration, and all their hosted sites run on isolated software containers.
Kinsta predominantly uses Nginx, PHP 8.0, LXD containers and MariaDB to make sure your website loads fast. Really, astonishingly fast.
Now, let’s take all that apart without getting too technical. Nginx is way faster than traditional core server applications do (and it can scale up or down as required too).
PHP 8.0+ is the helping the entire web faster and heralds a new shift in how processor memory is consumed leading to drastic improvements in performance.
The LXD containers are, by design, more secure. LXD containers are scalable, intuitive, image-based, and feature advanced resource control, and much more.
MariaDB is next-gen database management that large companies and organizations like Google (obviously), Wikipedia, RedHat, CentOS, and others use ( now, you get to use it with Kinsta too).
Hosting With Kinsta: The Need for Speed
Thanks to the infrastructure & technology stack that Kinsta uses (and they are fanatical about keeping it that way), WordPress websites, web applications, databases and free static sites hosted on Kinsta are outrageously fast.
That’s pretty darned good considering we added tons of images to the site already. If you take nothing else from this Kinsta review, just take this.
Moving to Kinsta alone can help speed up your website by 200% or so.
Kinsta Hosting With Automatic Scaling
The way Kinsta’s architecture is (thanks to Nginx, LXD containers, and their Cloudflare integration), scaling is a part of the design.
Instead of you having to upgrade to larger servers to handle increasing bandwidth or space, every hosting plan on Kinsta is designed to grow with each of your projects and sites.
Active Kinsta Plugin Management
Normally, you’d have to manage plugins from inside your WordPress dashboard. With Kinsta, you can actually opt-in to upload a few plugins (like Yoast SEO, for instance) right at the time of installing WordPress.
Then, each of your uploaded plugins are monitored and the information is displayed for you to see.
If and when there are issues with any of the plugins, or if an update is die, you’ll know soon enough. When using Kinsta cloud for web applications, databases and free static sites, the dashboard lends itself appropriate to your use case.
More Hosting Benefits with Kinsta
When you are hosting your WordPress site or web project, the last thing you want is to deal with issues if and when they pop up. Kinsta has everything to help you (some of it when you ask, and some of it without you even asking)
Kinsta Backups (and Additional Backups)
Kinsta does backup for 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.
Kinsta does separate backups on all environments – live and staging – so your development efforts are never wasted.
All backups are stored for at least 14 days and the storage time goes up depending of the plan you’re on.
You can also opt for hourly backups, manual backups, and even external backups.
Uptime Checks With Kinsta
You and I know that WordPress websites need care, maintenance, and attention. But hello? Weren’t you supposed to run your business?
Who has the time to keep checking on your website, right?
Imagine this: Kinsta checks and monitors your websites every 2 minutes. That translates to 720 checks for each of your sites every day.
Go figure.
Outstanding reaction time
If you have an issue, how fast do you want to resolve it? I want resolutions yes’ day.
Traditionally, you’ll write out to customer support (or open a ticket and then wait). Not with Kinsta.
For one, their uptime checks allow Kinsta staff react to issues before they affect your site or your visitors.
Kinsta is proactive in support (and not reactive).
Kinsta’s Malware Security Pledge
Thanks to Kinsta’s proactive protection, they don’t just wait for shit to hit the fan and then for you to start writing to them. Thanks to their enterprise-level Cloudflare integration with IP-based and firewall protection, they keep their server software up to date, constantly monitor events network-wide, and any suspicious activity is investigated and dealt with even before you wake up to it.
Just in case your website is hacked (damn, I lost 3 websites 4 times only because I didn’t have this then), Kinsta has a guarantee that they’ll fix it with immediate priority. Kinsta’s staff has years of experience dealing with all sorts of WordPress related issues.
Just saying.
Kinsta Support: Deal with Experts (not outsourced support staff)
At Kinsta, WordPress is a priority. Your web projects and applications are high-priority as well. As such, everything they learn and execute is backed by years of experience — across the board.
The support staff you’ll end up talking to is experienced in troubleshooting applications, server maintenance, theme and plugin building and maintenance, managing and mitigating disasters waiting to happen, and contributing to WordPress core.
Kinsta’s support is available 365/24/7.
Also offering technical support in French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish (during select hours).
You don’t have to grab a separate membership for WPMUDEV, look for help on Fiverr, or even bother with WP Curve (If you know what I am saying?).
Just in case you are the DIY type, Kinsta keeps a record of what they’ve learned in their knowledge base to help you get things done on your own.
Super fast Response times (No waiting necessary)
Kinsta, at the time of writing this, has clients from all over the world which means that they’re available 24/7 no matter where you are. They get to your issue in less than 1 minute, giving you feedback and clear communication along the way.
The fact that they use intercom should put you at ease because their support staff — even when moving between shifts — will always be up-to-date on your issue, so you never have to repeat yourself.
Kinsta’s Dashboard (MyKinsta) & Platform
Kinsta’s dashboard is forever changing. Some inputs within my Kinsta review will be updated to reflect those changes.
Kinsta’s dashboard is a delight to use.
The Dashingly Handsome MyKinsta (Dashboard)
For all the years, in the beginning, there was only the plain old cPanel.
Now, of all the managed WordPress hosting solutions we’ve used, I am yet to see something more beautiful, elegant, and so inviting as the Kinsta Dashboard (they call it MyKinsta).
The best part is that it’s not just astonishingly beautiful to look at but it’s functional and uncluttered.
You get to see an overview of your WordPress sites, applications, databases, and free static sites on your dashboard including unique visits, resource usage, invoices, data transfers, and more.
To the left, you have a menu with all the necessary links to help you manage your all your web projects including WordPress website(s).
Some of them, you’ll probably only use when you first set up the site (such as Kinsta DNS and Migrations) and you’ll use some more frequently (such as analytics, billing, sites, and Dashboard).
Did I mention Kinsta’s free APM tool? Inside the MyKinsta dashboard, you also have access to their free APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tool that allows you to evaluate your website’s performance and speed so you can adjust for improvements.
Knowing is winning.
Choosing Your Data Center
While the other Managed WordPress hosting platforms that I am a huge fan of (like WPEngine and Flywheel) allow you to choose only from a restricted pool of servers (mostly located in the United States, United Kingdom, and some parts of Europe).
Kinsta works with Google Cloud Computing with about 35+ data centers located around the globe.
If your WordPress website is heavily biased for a particular location, you’ll do very well to choose a data center that’s closer to that location when setting up your WordPress site.
The Critical Staging Area
One of the best, most valuable, and really life-saving features that come with most modern managed WordPress hosts is the “staging” functionality. (WPEngine and Flywheel also provide you with this feature, just not the way Kinsta does).
With Kinsta, however, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how it’s done.
Note: Dealing with databases and applications? Consider using resource-intensive site testing or development premium staging Environment add-ons
When you are done, all you have to do is to push your WordPress site back to “live Environment”.
From live to staging and back to live, it’s just one-click and really quick.
Kinsta is Developer Friendly too, extending similar ease of management to application hosting and database hosting.
Other Fantastic Kinsta Features
When you host your website with Kinsta, you get a lot more than the standard features above. For instance, you also get:
- Self-healing PHP
- Edge Caching
- Application Hosting, Database Hosting, and free static site hosting.
- Built-in Application Performance Monitoring tool
- Automatic MySQL database optimizations
- Two-factor authentication
- GCP Firewall
- Google Cloud Managed Hosting
- MyKinsta dashboard
- Geographic content delivery
- Ability to change PHP versions
- A way to restart your PHP engine
- Cache & response analysis
- Error log viewer
- Ability to manage multiple companies
- Unlimited user access
- Resource and visitor analysis
- Activity log
- Cloning your sites and installs
- A redirect Manager
- “Search and replace” feature
- Easy way to manage DNS records, and more…
Kinsta WordPress Add-ons (If & When You Want More)
Just in case you need to, for your WordPress website, Kinsta has add-ons such as Cloudflare Railgun (only available on Cloudflare’s business and enterprise plans), Redis, Elasticsearch, Nginx reverse proxy that you could deploy.
Kinsta offers the following add-ons:
- Nginx Reverse Proxy
- Redis
- Premium Staging Environments
- Automatic External Backups
- Automatic Hourly and 6-Hour Backups
- Scale Disk Space
If you need something more specific, all you have to do is to reach out to them with an email or chat with them live on their website.
Migrate your Site to Kinsta (With White Glove Migration)
Do you want to migrate your WordPress site to Kinsta? You don’t even have to deal with it (because you have choices). Kinsta does Whiteglove Migrations for free
If you want to migrate to Kinsta, it’s just a matter of letting them know and they bring their “White glove Migration” to do it all for you. Moving your site to Kinsta won’t incur any downtime as their expert migration team will take care of everything for you.
Besides premium migrations, Kinsta offers unlimited basic free migrations from any host.
Note: Basic migrations are perfect for standard WordPress installations.
They’ll assign a temporary domain to your migrated site and check everything before going live.
Migrate your site now
Host Sites, Web Apps, & Databases Like a Pro
When it looks like most Managed WordPress hosting options were looking similar, Kinsta truly has fast, secure, and scalable WordPress hosting.
With its beautiful dashboard and a ton of features, it’s the best WordPress hosting you could invest in.
Even better is the fact that they have tiers of plans that make their hosting accessible to everyone — from bloggers to enterprises.
Plus, Kinsta offers the option to host and manage all your web projects in one place, including WordPress sites, applications, and databases.
Check out Kinsta and change the way you host your WordPress website.
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