Kinsta is a comparatively young hosting service that offers managed WordPress hosting solutions. What makes kinsta different from others is that it uses Google Cloud Platform’s premium tier network which in turn gives a faster and more secure transfer of data.
In this article, we will review Kinsta and go through all its aspects and leave it up to you to decide if you should go for it or not.
Kinsta Web Hosting Overview
Before moving forward we would like to highlight the technical details of Kinsta web hosting service. They go like:
- Website caching: Four types of caching in place, including server-level caching and an in-house WordPress caching plugin.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN): 50 GB of KeyCDN usage per month on the entry-level Kinsta plan; more on the higher plans.
- PHP: Switch between PHP 5.6, 7, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4 at the touch of a button.
- HTTP/2.0: In use on the servers and the CDN.
- SSL: Get a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt, or install your own.
- SFTP: Secure FTP access to your webspace for uploading and editing files.
- Server file manager: No online file manager; just FTP access to the server space.
- Database access: phpMyAdmin is used to access the WordPress website database through a browser.
- Email service: No email service on any of the Kinsta plans; G Suite is the recommended option.
- WordPress website management: Ability to update plugins through the My Kinsta account dashboard, but no automatic plugin or WordPress core software updates.
- Plugin restrictions: There’s a list of banned plugins, including some caching, security, and optimization plugins that can affect website performance.
- Security measures: Lots of measures are in place to keep your site secure, including GeoIP blocking, DDoS scanning, proactively stopping malicious code entering the network, self-healing PHP, GCP firewall, plus more.
- Post-hack cleans up services: If your site is hacked while hosted by Kinsta, they’ll fix it for free.
- Datacenter locations: 21 server locations to choose from, including options in Australia and South America, as well as multiple locations in the USA, Europe and Asia.
- Staging sites: All plans include access to a staging site with one-click deployment to the live site.
- WordPress website migration: Available for free on all hosting plans.
- Visitor analytics: View data on your website traffic through the My Kinsta dashboard.
- Uptime checks: The status of your site is checked every five minutes to allow the support team to respond to any instances of downtime that are detected.
- Support channels: A 24/7 live chat channel and ticketing system, but no telephone support.
Kinsta Hosting Plans & Pricing Details
Kinsta offers you a wide range of hosting plans that are designed to suit needs for every user. Kinsta has Starter and Pro plans, as well as four Business plans and two Enterprise plans. The details for which are listed below:
- Starter: $30 per month for one WordPress install, 20,000 visits, and 10 GB disk space.
- Pro: $60 per month for two WordPress installs, 40,000 visits, and 20 GB disk space.
- Business plans: Starting from $100 per month for three WordPress installs, 100,000 visits, and 30 GB disk space.
- Enterprise plans: Starting from $600 per month for 60 WordPress installs, 1,000,000 visits, and 100 GB disk space.
Why Choose Kinsta?
If you are someone who is serious about scaling and securing their website, then kinsta should be the right choice for you. If your website receives or is likely to receive higher traffic then kinsta web hosting will be the right choice.
With its cloud-based architecture, obsession with speed, advanced management tools/systems and exceptionally great customer support, Kinsta will prove to be a good hosting service. For more, we’ll look at the pros and cons of Kinsta.
Great Uptime
Kinsta promises an average uptime of 99.9% with a guarantee. Although this is normal uptime in the hosting industry, kinsta makes it better by giving compensation if this Uptime falls below this.
The details of the compensation can be found in the Kinsta Service Agreement. According to the agreement, users will receive credits if downtime ever exceeds one hour. You also receive 5% off of your bill on the next invoice if downtime goes beyond one hour and 10% off the next bill if it goes beyond two hours.
Great Speed
As already mentioned, kinsta is obsessed with speed. It gives a speed of 420ms which is one of the fastest loading times that we have come across.
Slower websites increase bounce rates and decrease conversion rates. So if you don’t want that and you want to scale your website then Kinsta is the best.
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Kinsta offers great services as per our experience. Not only that it offers great services but also stands by its terms and hence, gives a money-back guarantee to all its users.
Kinsta offers a 30-day money-back guarantee and we think 30 days are enough to test a hosting service properly.
If you don’t like the service you can just cancel it within 30 days and get your refund.
Free Migration
Migration of an old website is an important service that customers look for and kinsta offers that as well. If you have an already established website and just want to migrate to another host then you can go for Kinsta.
Kinsta offers free premium migrations with all of their plans and the number of free migrations depends on the plan that you chose.
Besides premium migrations, they also offer unlimited free migrations from one of the following services: WPEngine, Flywheel, Siteground, Pagely, Pantheon, Cloudways, GoDaddy, DreamHost, Bluehost, HostGator, A2 Hosting, TsoHost, WPX Hosting. So you don’t add to the cost while migrating. Kinsta claims that there will be no downtime for your site during the migration period. So yes, Bang on!
Automatic Daily Backups
The biggest horror of any website holder is their data getting lost and that too, without any mistake of their own.
Kinsta knows this very well and backs up your site automatically every single day. So you never lose your data and will be able to bring it back to how it was just 24 hours prior.
Excellent Customer Support
Kinsta offers a 24/7 live chat support. As per studies, users always prefer to live chat support over other customer supports and kinsta has it best.
You will definitely get a detailed answer to all your queries and that too in less than a minute. Kinsta also has a vast knowledge base page with self-service articles. Moreover, they also have a contact form and email address for customer support.
Free SSL Security
Kinsta comes with free Lets Encrypt SSL integration. You can also add a custom SSL certificate from another provider that you’re working with. Additionally, you can even transfer an SSL certificate that you already own easily.
An SSL certificate is important as without it Google can label your website as insecure which can further develop trust issues among users.
User-friendly
Kinsta does not use cPanel but has its custom dashboard which is extremely user-friendly. Even a person who doesn’t know much can learn and access it.
The main dashboard has information about important metrics like unique visitors, data transfers, and more.
You will find all the main sections on the left side, including the knowledge base. Plus, you can access all of the information on your various sites including, migrations, analytics, users, activity log, and more.
Several Data Centers
Kinsta offers 24 data centres located in different parts of the US, Asia, Europe, and Australia.
As you might know, the physical location of your data centre can affect your site’s uptime and speed.
If a server is far away from its users then data has to travel longer distances and that can make your website page load time slower plus influence overall latency and user experience. Therefore, it’s better to have several data centers around the world than just a few in the same area and Kinsta has it.
Cons Of Kinsta Hosting
Expensive
Being on the higher spectrum of the price range could be the major reason people don’t go for Kinsta.
In comparison to other shared hosting services, kinsta is almost ten times the price. Kinsta’s cheapest plan is $30 per month while on average other services cost around $2-$3 per month.
Moreover, with the other plans and specifications, the prices can go up to as high as $1,500 per month which is not budget-friendly.
Limited Bandwidth and Storage
You’d be a little disappointed to know that none of Kinsta’s plans has unlimited storage or bandwidth.
Even the $1,500 per month option has limitations of 250 GB of storage and bandwidth of 3 million visitors in a month. Although it is high it is not unlimited.
No Free Email or Domain
Another additional cost will be of email and domain if you go for Kinsta as it doesn’t offer email and domains for free as a bonus for signing up.
Additionally, kinsta doesn’t even have an option to buy email accounts or a domain through Kinsta, so you would have to use a third-party service. This may shift the users to other hosting services.
Conclusion
We hope that this Kinsta review would have been insightful for you and has got all your questions solved.
We recommend Kinsta if you want to scale up your website and are ready to pay for it because although kinsta is one of the fastest hosting services it is the most expensive as well.