Pros:
- Super fast hosting
- Google cloud-based infrastructure
- 99.9% guaranteed uptime
- Best tech support (can solve almost all WP related problems)
- Optimised for traffic spikes and high traffic sites
- Provides very low TTFB
- Simple set up
- Free migrations and Hack-fix guarantee
Cons:
- Costly
- No email solution
This is a review of one of the best WordPress hosting which
To be clear:
I didn’t write this review just for the sake of reviewing and earning affiliate money.
I am using Kinsta (for heavy sites) and Cloudways (for small sites) from last two years…
…and so I decided to help you make the toughest choice of selecting the best hosting for WordPress sites.
The best part?
I will explain you all the pros, cons, and the features of Kinsta, perform a few tests to check whether Kinsta is worth the price or not and lastly, will help you with an in-depth tutorial as well.
So let’s get started…
Table of Contents:
Kinsta Introduction
If you are looking for the fastest and premium managed WordPress web hosting solution, then Kinsta is the one you want to choose.
Kinsta is built on cutting-edge technology of Google Cloud platform with a focus on speed, security, and user support.
Mark gavalda founded Kinsta in December 2013 and now have offices in Budapest, London, and Los Angeles.
Kinsta has some of the best WordPress engineers, and support staff, which makes it very easy to contact them and get a solution to any problem almost instantly.
Now, let’s look at some of the best features of the Kinsta…
Features (Reasons to Choose Kinsta web hosting)
Kinsta is entirely built on the premium tier network of Google Cloud Platform for exceptional high performance and reliability.
Premium tier of Google Cloud Platform delivers traffic over Google’s well-provisioned, low latency, and highly reliable global network.
Some other features of Kinsta are…
1. Kinsta’s speed-focused architecture
As we all know how important the speed of a website is to provide good user experience, get higher conversions, and lower bounce rates with higher average visitor duration.
And to achieve all of that, Kinsta uses only premium tier of Google Cloud Platform with technologies like Nginx, PHP, LXD software containers, and MariaDB to make all the sites load at incredible speeds.
I have also done some tests to show you how fast Kinsta hosting is. Click here to jump to the performance results of Kinsta.
2. Expert WordPress Support
Kinsta is especially famous for its fast and knowledgeable support staff who are WordPress experts and can solve almost all WordPress related issues without delay.
They offer 24/7 live chat support so you can talk to them whenever you want. And the support staff usually replies under 3 minutes.
3. Caching Optimized Servers
Kinsta uses
By default, the full page cache is set to 1 hour, but it can be adjusted by their support depending on the site type. The Kinsta caching is enough for the websites, and no third-party caching plugins are required.
4. High-Security Network
Kinsta has special methods such as firewalls, two-factor authentications, and GeoIP blocking in place to monitor and prevent sites from any hack or malicious codes.
They use Linux containers to completely isolate every WordPress site, which makes the sites more secure.
But even if somehow your site gets hacked, Kinsta will work for free to remove the hack and undo the damage.
5. Hack Fix Guarantee
One of the best thing about Kinsta is that they are fully confident about their hosting setups and that is why they give a hack fix guarantee in which they will fix a site for free if it gets compromised while on their network.
This I have experienced myself as one of my big sites having more than a Million of users every month got hacked two times, and Kinsta managed to remove the malicious code in just a few hours.
Note: Try Kinsta completely Risk-Free for 30 days. Sign up Now!
6. Automatic Full Backups
They have fully automatic daily backups and you can even backup your site manually any time you want. Both live and staging sites are separately backed-up to keep everything safe.
You can even increase the backup frequency from daily to every 6 hours or 1 hour, depending on your site needs. If you have an eCommerce site, then having more frequent backups will ensure you don’t lose any critical data should anything happen with your site.
7. Developer Friendly
Even developers love Kinsta as they have full control over the sites code, staging environments, cloning, and the ability to test everything first at staging sites. WP-CLI, SSH, and Git are also supported for developers.
8. Particularly Optimised for WordPress
The latest and the best WordPress stack is used at Kinsta optimized for maximum performance, high speed, and reliability.
From Ubuntu, PHP 7.4, Nginx, HTTP/2, and MariaDB, the servers are well optimized to handle any traffic spikes, hack attempts, and scalability with ease.
9. Free SSL Certificates
Kinsta offers free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates for all WordPress sites. The process is entirely automated, and you can install the certificate with just one-click.
The certificates are auto-renewed, which save time, and you can access all your certificates in the MyKinsta dashboard.
10. MyKinsta Dashboard
Kinsta’s custom dashboard is user-friendly yet packed with all the features you will need such as backup options, redirects, analytics, DNS management, site performance monitoring, 1-click free SSL integration, etc.
The dashboard is designed to improve the navigation and simplify site management tasks.
There are cache, SSL certificate, force HTTPS, PHP, and New Relic monitoring tools available in the tools section.
Many other things like activity log, site cloning, staging environments, redirect manager, billing, SSH keys, etc. are available in the MyKinsta dashboard.
Note: Try Kinsta completely Risk-Free for 30 days. Sign up Now!
11. Kinsta CDN
Kinsta CDN is powered by KeyCDN, which is one of the best CDN providers as they are HTTP/2 and IPv6-enabled content delivery network with 34 locations around the world.
This is a very useful thing provided by Kinsta as CDNd can reduce over 70% of bandwidth from the web host and can reduce the load time by over 50%.
12. Staging Environment
A one-click staging environment completely separate from the live site is provided with every site hosted on
This enables you to quickly test or implement anything without interfering with the live site. You can push the changes from staging to the live site with just one-click.
Also, whenever a staging site is made, an extra copy of the live site is created to ensure everything goes smoothly.
Kinsta also monitors every site uptime at an interval of 2 minutes, and if any downtime occurs, they get alerted and start solving the problem even before you can contact them.
They also provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee in their service level agreement.
They are very strict with security and automatically ban the IPs which have more than six failed login attempts in a minute.
Free migrations are also included with every plan…
Other than all the features mentioned above, Kinsta also offers…
Kinsta WooCommerce Hosting
E-commerce sites have special hosting needs, but Kinsta takes care of everything.
As eCommerce sites can be very demanding as to maintain the features, sites consume a lot of resources and generate a lot of user data which can sometimes cause problems.
So by ensuring the eCommerce site loads fast, SEO, ROI, user experience, and revenue can be easily increased.
Features such as auto-scaling and server-level caching are included with their hosting for eCommerce sites.
And sites like HonestBrew, Swagway, DARTDrones, and many more trust Kinsta for their hosting needs and handling hundreds and thousands of users every day.
Kinsta Enterprise Hosting
Sudden traffic surges, peak times, increased downloads or anything else, Kinsta servers can manage it all.
Kinsta’s Enterprise WordPress hosting solution is specially designed for sites having heavy traffic and which require extra resources.
The combination of the premium tier of Google Cloud Platform + HTTP/2 content delivery network helps in reducing site load times by over 50%. Their CDN (powered by KeyCDN) provides 34 POPs around the world which speed up delivery of the content of the site.
Companies like General Electric, Intuit, Ubisoft, ASOS, Ricoh, etc. are hosted with Kinsta enterprise solution.
The 24 server locations by Google Cloud platform are…
▪ Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA (us-central1)
▪ St. Ghislain, Belgium (
▪ Changhua County, Taiwan (
▪ Sydney, Australia (
▪ 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 (
▪ London, UK (
▪ Frankfurt, Germany (
▪ Jurong West, Singapore (
▪ Tokyo, Japan (
▪ Mumbai, India (
▪ Montréal (
▪ Eemshaven, Netherlands (
▪ Hamina, Finland (
▪ Los Angeles, California (us-west2)
▪ Hong Kong (
▪ Zürich, Switzerland (
▪ Osaka, Japan (
▪ Seoul, South Korea (asia-northeast3)
▪ Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (us-west4)
▪ Jakarta, Indonesia (asia-southeast2)
Kinsta plans
The company offers multiple plans for everyone, and all the plans have the same features … as the plans are limited by the number of WordPress installs, storage space, and monthly visits.
Kinsta pricing starts from $30/month for the Starter plan and goes up to $1,500/month for the Enterprise plans.
Starter Plan: This plan starts at $30/month and includes 20,000 monthly visits, one WordPress install, 10GB of SSD storage, 50 GB of free CDN, daily free backups, and free SSL certificates.
Pro Plan: In this plan, you can have 40,000 monthly visits, up to 2 WordPress installs, 20GB of SSD storage, and 100 GB of free CDN. This plan costs $60/month.
Business Plan: There are four Business plans from Business 1 to Business 4 which
Enterprise Plan: Similar to Business plans, there are four Enterprise plans ranging from $600 to $1,500/month for up to 3,000,000 monthly visits, 100GB to 250GB storage, 1000 GB free CDN and 150 WordPress installs.
All plans of Kinsta include expert 24/7 support, 20 global Google Cloud data centres, staging area for development and testing of sites, server-level speed optimisation, necessary firewalls to protect the servers and sites from hacks, automatic daily backups with a backup retention period of at least 14 days, and Kinsta custom-designed powerful admin packed with great features.
Free migrations and a hack fix guarantee
Overage Prices
If at anytime your site hit your plan’s visits cap then your site will still be running smoothly, but the overage limit will start to apply.
The overage prices at Kinsta start at $1/1000 visits. And the CDN overage starts at $0.10/GB.
Optional Add-ons
Kinsta also offers multiple add-ons like Cloudflare Railgun, which starts from $100/month/site, which is very useful to make sure the connection between the origin server and the Cloudflare network is as fast as possible.
Elasticsearch add-on which costs $100/month/site for RESTful search and analytics engine capable of solving a growing number of use cases.
Nginx reverse proxy add-on at $50/month/site which is very useful if you want to load a WordPress from a subdirectory while a separate site load at the root domain.
Extra backups for extra security are included at $50/month/site for backups at every 6 hours and $100/month/site for backups at every hour.
They also offer a 30 days money-back guarantee and there are no long-term contracts so you can cancel any time you want.
Performance with Kinsta
Now, for testing purposes, I set up three sites.
Site with…
- Stock WordPress install
- Generatepress free theme
- Newspaper theme and with demo content installed
I have included the third site with newspaper theme and demo content so that it can be compared with a typical news type of site having lots of content (text, images, videos, etc.).
In all the sites, everything is same except the themes and content. The location of the server and the test was the US.
And I used GTmetrix and Pingdom for testing all the sites.
GTmetrix results are…
| Site 1 | Site 2 | Site 3 | |
| TTFB | 89ms | 126ms | 99ms |
| Fully loaded time | 422ms | 482ms | 2.3s |
| Total page size | 48.8 KB | 29.2 KB | 1.20 MB |
| Requests | 8 | 9 | 57 |
Pingdom results are…
| Site 1 | Site 2 | Site 3 | |
| TTFB | 86ms | 125ms | 155ms |
| Performance grade | 96 | 96 | 89 |
| Fully loaded time | 242ms | 246ms | 832ms |
| Total page size | 46.8 KB | 26.3 KB | 1.30 MB |
| Requests | 8 | 9 | 60 |
Note: As none of the tested sites were optimized, the performance can be improved a lot still, all the results were really impressive with very low TTFB and A-rated metrics.
So as you can see in the test results, Kinsta is definitely a fast WordPress cloud-based hosting solution. The speed of your site will depend on how well you have optimized it, but even with zero optimization, Kinsta delivers a site with amazing speeds.
Getting Started with Kinsta WordPress Hosting
So we’ve seen how fast Kinsta is … now I will answer your next question.
How to start with Kinsta?
Setting up Kinsta is very easy and straightforward. The overall process from creating an account to set up a site is very streamlined.
So let me show you how you can launch your first site with Kinsta in a few minutes…
If you are looking to migrate your existing WordPress site, click here.
1. Visit their pricing page and select the plan according to your needs. If you’re just starting out, then you can go with the STARTER plan.
2. Fill in the details such as your email, name, and password and complete the signup process.
3. Once your sign up is complete, you will be redirected to the Kinsta dashboard. Then click on the “Add your first site” button in the top right corner.
4. Now fill up the details like your site name, preferred location, and whether you want a brand new WordPress install or not.
5. If you need a brand new WordPress install, then fill up the details like site title, username, password, URL, and admin email.
Once you submit all the details, click on “Add Site” and your site will be ready in a few minutes.
The site info will look like this with all the necessary details like the server location, IP address, SFTP, and database access details.
To connect your domain, you can go to the Domain tab and click on “Add domains.” From there, you can then access your live site and the WordPress admin dashboard as well.
Now your site is completely ready.
If you encounter any problem during the setup of your site, you can immediately contact Kinsta using the live chat icon. They will assist you and will solve your problem.
You can also visit Kinsta knowledge base to get fast answers to your problems.
If you are looking to migrate your existing WordPress site, then go to the Migrations tab.
There you will find the option to start the migration. You can request the migration based on the hosting from which you will be migrating your site.
If your current hosts are A2Hosting, Cloudways, DreamHost, Flywheel, Pagely, Pantheon, SiteGround, tsoHost, or WP Engine, you can request basic migration, else a premium one (which costs one credit/migration).
What others are Saying about Kinsta
If you’re still not convinced about Kinsta, then take a look at some of these reviews by their existing customers…
Source of reviews: Facebook
Now, let’s talk about some of the alternatives of Kinsta in the next section…
Kinsta Alternatives
Overall Kinsta is excellent and one of the best web host for WordPress but if you are looking for its alternatives then you can try either WP Engine or Cloudways.
Kinsta vs WP Engine
While WP Engine is one of the first company which started with managed hosting specifically for WordPress, they now have become too big to handle both small and big clients effectively.
Though WP Engine support is very good but unlike Kinsta where devs directly participate in live chat, at WP Engine you may have to talk a lot to get your problem solved.
Kinsta is designed for performance and scalability while WP Engine uses shared and dedicated hosting based on the pricing plans. So while every Kinsta user has access to the same resources even on the lowest plan of $30, WP Engine users will only get resources based on how much they are paying.
Though, WP Engine offers something which is not available with Kinsta, which is Genesis Framework and 35+ StudioPress themes.
WP Engine has all the necessary features like Devkit, simple migration plugin, one-click staging, automated backups, dedicated dev environments, free CDN and SSL certificates, SSH gateway, and 24/7 live support.
Kinsta vs. Cloudways
While Kinsta is a premium WordPress hosting, Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting provider, and Cloudways can host other platforms also like Magento, Laravel, Drupal, Joomla, and PrestaShop.
Their pricing structure is different from Kinsta as Cloudways offers five server providers, Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, and Google Cloud. So their pricing is based on the RAM, processor, and storage space.
Lowest plan of DO starts at $10/month for 1GB of RAM, 1 Core processor and 25 GB of SSD storage.
Unlike Kinsta, Cloudways is cheaper but provide almost the same performance as of Kinsta.
I have reviewed the Cloudways hosting already for you so you can visit the page for a details analysis.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Kinsta?
Kinsta is a premium managed WordPress hosting provider that runs on the premium tier of Google Cloud Platform, offering more than 20 locations worldwide. Kinsta is specifically famous for their amazing support, fast performance, and reliability.
What kind of control panel is used?
Kinsta uses a custom dashboard called MyKinsta specially designed for streamlined navigation and fast performance. MyKinsta control panel is much better than other control panels like cPanel, or Plesk.
Can I host an email account on Kinsta?
No, Kinsta does not offer to host of email accounts yet. They recommend GSuite for the same.
How to login to staging site in Kinsta?
In MyKinsta dashboard, you can go to the live site and then select the staging site from the top right corner and there all the details will be available.
How to install an SSL certificate with Kinsta?
Kinsta provides free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates which can be installed from right within the MyKinsta dashboard.
How do I access my WP files on Kinsta?
To access the WordPress files on Kinsta, you can either use an SFTP client or use any file manager plugin from within site.
How to get FTP access kinda?
For SFTP access, you can use an SFTP client like FileZilla or Cyberduck and then connect the SFTP client with details provided in the MyKinsta dashboard. Visit here for a detailed tutorial.
What are some alternatives to Kinsta?
WP Engine and Cloudways are some of the best alternatives to Kinsta. Cloudways plans start at $10/month, and WP Engine plans starts at $35/month.
Is Kinsta worth it?
Yes, Kinsta is totally worth it. They provide unmatched performance, scalability, security, support, and reliability.
Does Kinsta offer reseller plans?
No, they don’t have any reseller or
Conclusion – Kinsta Review
If you’re looking for a fast, reliable and secure WordPress cloud hosting, then Kinsta is the best you can get.
Their 24/7 support, Google Cloud premium tier-based architecture, and a hack fix guarantee make them best in the industry.
Features such as automatic backups, user-friendly admin dashboard, caching, etc. are same on each pricing tier and you can start for as low as $30 per month.
The best part?
If you’re not sure about them, then you can use their 30-day money-back guarantee and ask for a refund within 30 days. But I don’t think you’ll ever have to use that guarantee by Kinsta. 🙂
I hope this Kinsta review will be helpful to at least some of you.
Have Questions? Ask Me Anything About Kinsta in the comments or contact me directly.
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