Kinsta Review: Your Next WordPress Hosting in 2024

Kinsta is a Managed WordPress Website Hosting Provider for websites created on the WordPress Content Management system.  Kinsta web hosting provides high-performance hosting on Google Apps servers – this means that the sites run on the same infrastructure as Google. 

Kinsta has data centers at 24 different locations across the world giving wide options to its customers to choose a server.

On a more precise level, Kinsta is faster with impressive uptime availability. Its features are attractive and are adapted by several clients across the globe

Let’s look at Kinsta features and reviews and find out if Kinsta is worth it?

Kinsta Features for Managed WordPress Hosting 

All Kinsta Hosting plan comes with the following features –

Kinsta hosting platform is built on Google Cloud Platform makes it efficient from Shared, Dedicated, or VPS infrastructure

Free Kinsta CDN, Free SSL, Staging Environments, and Automatic daily backups with an option for manual backups

Full-page caching ( No need for Additional Caching Plugins) by server-side. Kinsta Handles WordPress caching so you don’t have to worry about it!

Kinsta provides a range of as big as 24 server locations across the globe to facilitate the better speed of the websites. 

Kinsta offers a custom dashboard named  MyKinsta dashboard as an alternative to cPanel (Control Dashboard). MyKinsta dashboard is easy to use and comprises more features than the cPanel

Kinsta Analytics reports for data analysis and performance-related insights.

Multi-user access making it very easy for adding users and allotting them various roles like developer or admin to a subset of your sites

Kinsta allows the virtual machines to allocate CPU and RAM to each site as needed to respond to the traffic surges making sure the loading speed is not compromised and users have a pleasant website browsing experience.

Kinsta Premium Migration service is available to all Kinsta users. Kinsta offers Free Basic Site migrations from other hosting providers to Kinsta-managed WordPress hosting.

Migrating large and multiple sites at once may cause data losses or failure. To take care of this problem, Kinsta offers a team of experts who take care of all the migration-related problems the users are facing

At Kinsta, every website is run by a single Linux container which consumes very few system resources as compared to other services. Thus, Kisnta can offer an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Let’s now look at the Kinsta dashboard and find out how MyKinsta dashboard is better than the regular cPanel dashboard

MyKinsta Dashboard – Why is it better than cPanel?

Kinsta’s custom-built dashboard known as MyKinsta Dashboard simplifies the site management as it is very easy to use and navigate.

Unlike cPanel, MyKinsta dashboard allows you to manage various functions from one single interface like adding a new site, deploying staging, cloning a WordPress site, measuring the site analytics performance, requesting migrations, or chat support

Tools like phpMyAdmin, redirects, logs, Site Cache, SSL, HTTPS, and Backups are just one click away to users.

MyKinsta dashboard also contains a lot of useful tools such as cache management, free SSLs, search and replace, and many more. 

I like the Sites section in the myKinsta dashboard, at one single place, you have all the right information handy for you like

1. Basic Info on Datacenter, SSH details along with Database details
2. Domain Info 
3. Backups, Tools and Redirects information
4. WP Plugins along with CDN and Logs.  

Kinsta eliminates the need to have a backup plugin like UpdraftPlus as it has Backup options with all Kinsta Plans.

There is an option for daily backups, Hourly backups, or Manual Backups.

In case of a website crash, you can easily restore the backup and get the site up and running in no time.

While dealing with bot traffic or spammers or a hacker who is constantly hitting you, Kinsta allows you to instantly block them by adding the IP address in the IP Deny section!

While the MyKinsta dashboard certainly is very easy to use, the beauty of the Mykinsta dashboard is that it eliminates the need to even logging into your WordPress website and helps you manage the website operations from one single place.

Imagine you have a portfolio of three websites, if you host your website on Kinsta, using the MyKinsta dash, you can keep an eye on the website performance of all three websites from one single place

MyKinsta dashboard has detailed site analytics and performance monitoring features that support the users to view and analyze the performance of the website.

Let’s look at the analytics features now.

Kinsta Analytics Managed Hosting Features

The all-new revamped MyKinsta Analytics section helps to gather data insights that can be used to self-troubleshoot performance and security issues on the user’s site. 

Kinsta Analytics gives an overview of Resources like Visits, Disk Space consumed, Bandwidth of data transferred, etc. Visitor Analysis helps you analyze unique visits from humans or bots

CDN Usage section displays the bandwidth consumed while the dispersion section helps you analyze traffic from desktop vs handheld devices ( You do not need to use Google Analytics to get these insights!)

For more technical users, using the Kinsta Analytics section of myKinsta Dashboard, one can easily look at Performance metrics like Average PHP + MySQL response time, PHP Throughput, and AJAX usages

What we love about the Analytics feature of Kinsta Managed WordPress Website Hosting is that it lists the various response codes a visitor encounters while visiting your website.

For example, you can check how many visitors have encountered for 404 responses, Kinsta redirects, and others. This helps you to take quick actions and also eliminates a need to have analytics plugins like Monster Insights

Digital Marketing Lane

Kinsta Analytics provides Geo Analytics information and displays the traffic breakdown from geo wise and IP wise so that you can easily identify between genuine traffic and bot traffic.

In case you get bot traffic, then do not worry as all Kinsta Hosting plans promise to safeguard your site for FREE!

Technical Features of Kinsta – Fastest WordPress Hosting

Kinsta uses Google Cloud Platform’s deployment regional wise – allowing you to choose a data center from the list of 24 locations throughout the USA, Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America

All of Kinsta WordPress Hosting servers are fast with premium SSD storage and are built on Google Cloud Platform. Owing to the SSD disk, Kinsta provides its users with faster data transfer speed along with a low buffer rate on the website.

Backups and staging environments are excluded from total disk calculation.

Kinsta offers high-speed loading of the website with the help of the latest technologies like Nginx, PHP 7.4, LXD, and Maria DB.

Kinsta has partnered up with KeyCDN around 34 locations across the globe which helps to turbocharge the assets and media on the websites. Depending upon the various kinds of plans it offers, Kinsta offers CDN ranging from 50GB to 1000 GB at NO Additional Cost!

Kinsta servers allow full-page caching that means Kinsta servers store the entire HTML of the WordPress web page so that subsequent page views can be generated without the need of WordPress to generate the page. 

This results in faster page loads and reduces the server loads. This again eliminates the need for Caching Plugins. There is a debugging tool to help you see warnings, errors, and notices on your website. 

Just create a wordpress blog on Kinsta and page caching will start happening!

All of Kinsta Plans come with Auto Scaling features which means Kinsta servers can respond to a sudden surge in traffic.

Security Feature in Kinsta 

Kinsta Web Hosting monitors your website day and night to protect it from unwanted attacks and malicious activities. They also have the SSL support.

Kinsta also provides ‘Daily Backups’ options allowing users to save their data and prevent data loss. This is one of the prime features of the Kinsta hosting service. 

Kinsta also offers each of the sites hosted on its managed WordPress platform to have a staging environment. 

With a single click, the user can push your staging environment to your live environment. This allows you to test changes first on the staging website before pushing to production

Kinsta offers CDN (Content Delivery Network) feature that helps improve the speed performance of the website

Kinsta provides some of the fabulous security guarantees to its users like-

• It offers a deep scan of the site’s content for the identification of malware. 
• It later repairs the WordPress core by installing a clean copy of the core files and also the removal of infected plugins and themes. 

Furthermore, Kinsta gives a Hack Fix Guarantee – Kinsta promises if a WordPress site is hacked while hosted at Kinsta, they will work for free to try and undo the damage

Kinsta does a Website uptime check every two minutes and the support staff responds to any downtime as soon as they spot it. Additionally, Kinsta has internal monitoring jobs that monitor the servers

Kinsta provides SSH access on its hosting platform for a secure login on insecure networks, It also lets you enable a free SSL certificate to add HTTPS to your site to reap the benefits of a secure HTTPS connection

Kinsta replaces paid WordPress Plugins and Tools

1. Backup WordPress plugins like UpdraftPlus – No need to use Updraft plus to back up your site as all Kinsta plan comes with daily backups or hourly backup options
2. Caching WordPress Plugins like WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache – Kinsta allows server-side caching thus enabling faster page load speed
3. Analytics Plugins like Monster Insights – As MyKinsta dashboard gives your audience behavior and segregates data based on Geo, Country, device, etc.  
4. CDN Plugins  – as Kinsta has inbuilt CDN functionality and you do not have to use nameservers of a third-party service like Cloudflare
5. Uptime Check plugins like Jetpack or manage WP Worker and the third party paid tools like Pingdom as Kinsta has a security feature where it checks the status of websites it hosts every 2 minutes and fixes it as soon as they spot a gap
6. User roles plugin like User Role Editor as Kinsta has a powerful user management feature that allows you to add multiple users and grant them roles

Kinsta Pricing Plans

Kinsta Offers the following four pricing plans for hosting WordPress website-

Starter plan – Starts from $30 per month and offers 1 WordPress install, 1 Free premium site migrations, and unlimited basic migrations from other WordPress hosting providers, 20,000 monthly visits, 10 GB of SSD storage, 50 GB of FREE CDN storage, and Free SSL certificate.

Pro Plan – Starts from $60 per month and offers 2 WordPress install, Free site migrations, 40,000 monthly visits, 20 GB of SSD storage, FREE 100 GB CDN storage, and SSL certificates

Business Plan – has four WordPress Business plans of Kinsta Hosting

• Business 1 – Starts from $100 per month with 5 WordPress installs, 30 GB SSD disk space, 100,000 monthly visits with Free SSL and CDN
• Business 2 – Starts from $200 per month with 10 WordPress installs, 40 GB SSD disk space, Up to 250,000 monthly visits with Free SSL and CDN
• Business 3 – Starts from $300 per month with 20 WordPress installs, 40 GB SSD disk space, 400,000 monthly visits with Free SSL and CDN
• Business 4 – Starts from $400 per month with 40 WordPress installs, 50 GB SSD disk space, 600,000 monthly visits with Free SSL and CDN

Enterprise plan – has following Kinsta Hosting offerings

• Enterprise 1 – Starts from $600 per month with 60 WordPress installs, 100 GB SSD disk space, 1,000,000 monthly visits with Free SSL and CDN
• Enterprise 2 – Starts from $900 per month with 800 WordPress installs, 150 GB SSD disk space, Up to 1,500,000 monthly visits with Free SSL and CDN
• Enterprise 3  – Starts from $1200 per month with120 WordPress installs, 200 GB SSD disk space, 2,000,000 monthly visits with Free SSL and CDN
• Enterprise 4 – Starts from $1500 per month with 150 WordPress installs, 250 GB SSD disk space, 3,000,000 monthly visits with Free SSL and CDN

*Visits are measured by the total monthly unique traffic (IPs) to your site on the server

Coming to overage fees, there are two main types – Visit overage fees are $1 per 1,000 visits, while CDN overages are charged at $0.10 per GB. 

The charges are immediately applied to the user’s account, and the website is kept online.

A user can judiciously decide on the plans provided by Kinsta matching with his needs

Kinsta Support

Kinsta provides world-class support 24*7*365. When we created tickets, we got responses for almost under 2 minutes. Our experience was great while interacting with their support executives.  

It appoints a team of service engineers who have experience in troubleshooting, server maintenance, theme and plugin building, and maintenance, contributing to WordPress core and addressing any type of support to its user-base.  

The service engineer is available in real-time. Kinsta doesn’t pile up its service requests, instead of providing the best support-aid to the user through email or call service available on the website. 

Billing and Payment Options with Money Back Guarantee

Billing procedures include payments through credit and debit cards with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express logos. Also, they accept wire transfers and ACH for annual subscriptions. Kinsta does not accept Paypal

The user’s card will be charged for the amount of his monthly subscription each month on the same date that the user signed up for the service. 

During the signup, the user has to add a card to the company’s detail section.  

Kinsta offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on all of their projects (including add-ons). 

If a user cancels his hosting account during the first 30 days of service, Kinsta promises to issue a full refund. This facilitates the user for a 30-day Kinsta risk-free trial.

Conclusion – Is Kinsta worth it?

Kinsta, as a platform for WordPress hosting in the present day, offers an impressive list of features that ensure faster load times, fast caching, and 99.99% uptime for your visitors. 

Features like a Staging area, Daily backups, and secure connection makes it one of the best Managed WordPress Website Hosting provider

MyKinsta dashboard has easy to use with no learning curve. In case you want to migrate, you have a FREE premium migration as credit. 

Excellent support, knowledgeable support experts make Kinsta website management very easy for you. It allows you to focus on your website without worrying about your WordPress website security

Kinsta lacks email hosting.

You may find the pricing on a higher side as compared to cheap shared hosting plans but again, Kinsta is not for beginner websites.

Kinsta is for ultimate managed WordPress websites 🙂

Check out this video we have created to help you decide if you should buy Kinsta managed Hosting or not!

FAQs – Kinsta WordPress Website Hosting