Kinsta Hosting Review – New Generation Managed WordPress Hosting You Can Rely On

Recently, ThemeGrill blog team had completed research on managed WordPress hosting services. And, also published a comparative review of 10 best-managed WordPress hosting services. From the first day of the research, we were extremely excited to find how fast managed WordPress hosting providers were growing large and popular in a short span of time. Among the fastest-growing hosting services, Kinsta was a great performer.

Although Kinsta was founded just a few years ago (in 2013 to be exact), it has already earned a good deal of audience as well as trust from its customers. Backed up by Google cloud platform, Kinsta offers the latest and the finest managed WordPress hosting solution for all.

Inspired by its cutting-edge technology and fully dedicated customer support, it is our attempt to provide a detailed review of the hosting.

However, we have tried to put everything as it is in an honest manner rather than being professional. This is to make sure that it becomes useful for entrepreneurs planning to start a new website.

To give you a quick glimpse of the organization of the post, here is the table of contents. You can simply click on any topic of your interest to directly jump to that section.

1. Introduction – What’s Kinsta Hosting?   Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting Review - A Comprehensive Look #KinstaReview @kinsta Click To Tweet
2. How is Kinsta’s hosting environment?
3. Features
4. Pricing
5. Ease of Use
6. Support
7. Customer Reviews
8. Conclusion

1. Introduction – What’s Kinsta Hosting?

The tagline ‘Premium WordPress hosting for everyone, small or large‘ presents Kinsta hosting quite well that it offers high quality managed WordPress hosting plans suitable for both startups and big business companies.

Yes, Kinsta exclusively provides ‘fully managed hosting’ for WordPress i.e. they manage all the technical facets of running WordPress including security, website performance, WordPress updates, backups, caching, SSL, CDN and all. And, the pricing is cost-effective and diversified starting from $30 per month (Starter plan) to $900 per month (Enterprise 2 plan).

#Kinsta – Company and the team

Let’s take a while to discuss the company and the team. As mentioned above, it was started just in 2013 by a team of WordPress experts who have actually contributed to the WordPress core and overall community in a great deal. Actually, the team of innovative minds who wanted to push the hosting technology a step forward so they utilized a completely new infrastructure – Google Cloud platform, like nobody before.

Kinsta is actually a trendsetter in the whole WordPress hosting history. Next, let’s check out Kinsta’s hosting environment in details.

Go to Kinsta

2. How is the Kinsta’s Hosting environment?

Kinsta hosting platform is far away from the traditional hosting categories which utilize cPanel for hosting dashboard. The entire Kinsta hosting infrastructure is built on the Google Cloud Platform and is very different from traditional shared, VPS, or dedicated infrastructure. Thus, Kinsta is away from the traditional/ standard cPanel technology and rather utilizes the next generation technology ‘Google Cloud platform’.

In case you don’t know what Google Cloud Platform is, here is a brief description.

# What is Google Cloud Platform?

Google Cloud Platform is a suite of products and services including computing, storage, and databases, networking, data transfers, machine learning etc.

The platform runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses for its popular high-traffic and global-scale services including Gmail, Maps, YouTube and search.  With Google’s tireless effort into optimizing its infrastructure, Google cloud platform is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and highest-quality cloud infrastructures available on the planet.

Marketed as ‘Better software. Faster‘, Google Cloud platform is doubtlessly becoming more popular day by day. As an example, let’s consider how the search term ‘Google Cloud Platform’ in Google Trends over the 5 years.

As shown in the screenshot above, it has gained huge popularity in the past couple of years.

Following this trend, Kinsta hosting incorporates this technology for the WordPress users.

So, utilizing the virtual machines in one of Google Cloud Platform’s multiple data centers, Kinsta ensures fast and secure transport of your data. You have the option to choose from 13 data centers for your site. Each of your sites can have a different data center as it utilizes multi-regional deployment.  It allows you to place your website in the nearest geographical location to your visitors and therefore results in blazing fast load times.

Talking about Kinsta’s software stack, it utilizes LXD managed hosts and orchestrated LXC software containers for each site. Every WordPress site is housed in its own isolated container with all of the software resources required to run it (Linux, Nginx, PHP, MySQL). Thus, the resources are 100% private and are not shared with anyone else or even your own sites as in shared hosting. Therefore, the enhanced security and speed are guaranteed.

3. Features

Aimed at providing a perfect managed WordPress hosting solution, Kinsta guarantees top-quality features and resources. I have kept the main features of the hosting in the points below:

• Power of Google Cloud Platform – an easy and efficient way to utilize Google’s super fast and super powerful cloud services.
• Speed obsessive architecture – use of technology like Nginx, PHP 7, LXD containers, MariaDB.
• Bullet–proof security – DDoS detection, Uptime monitoring, Hardware firewalls, SSL support.
• Uptime checks and backups – automatic daily backups and the option to create manual backup points anytime.
• Free site migrations – Move your sites without downtime with the support of expert migration team.
• Hack guarantee – Free hack fix. If a client’s website is hacked they’ll fix it with immediate priority.
• Staging environment – Easily test new WordPress versions, code, plugin etc. separately in the well-managed staging area.
• Caching – Full page caching at the server-level to deliver content almost instantaneously to visitors with Kinsta cache plugin. It is developed in-house to provide even more granular control over caching.
• Ready for E-commerce – Server-level rules and optimizations for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Download sites to ensure a smoother checkout experience for customers.
• Free CDN (Content delivery network) integration
• Auto-scaling – It has a robust infrastructure (isolated software container technology) ready to handle sudden surges and traffic.

Incorporating the best and latest technology, the features of Kinsta hosting are undeniably fascinating.

Now, let’s discuss its pricing plans and the resources offered in the next section.

4. Pricing and Plans

Well, Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting service aimed at providing complete management services as well as ample resources. So it is certainly more expensive than shared hosting services. However, if you look at the overall package including its top-notch support, cutting-edge technology and resources, the pricing looks very justifiable, actually cheap (at least for me).

As shown above, in the image, it has multiple plans from small to large.  The most basic plan is named ‘Starter‘ which costs $30 per month if paid monthly. It has a discounted price of $300 per year if paid monthly.

The other plans are:

• Pro – $60/mo. or $600/yr., 2 WordPress Installs, 40,000 visits, 20 GB disk space.
• Business 1 – $100/mo. or 1000/yr., 5 WordPress installs, 100,000 visits, 30 GB disc space.
• Business 2 – $200/mo. or 2000/yr., 10 WordPress installs, 250,000 visits, 40 GB disc space.
• Business 3 – $300/mo. or 3000/yr., 20 WordPress installs, 400,000 visits, 50 GB disc space.
• Business 4 – $400/mo. or 4000/yr., 40 WordPress installs, 600,000 visits, 60 GB disc space.
• Enterprise 1 – $600/mo. or 6000/yr., 60 WordPress installs, 1,000,000 visits, 100 GB disc space.
• Enterprise 2 – $900/mo. or 9000/yr., 80 WordPress installs, 1,500,000 visits, 150 GB disc space.
• Enterprise 3 – $1200/mo. or 12,000/yr., 120 WordPress installs, 2,000,000 visits, 200 GB disk space.
• Enterprise 4 – $1500/mo. or 15,000/yr., 150 WordPress installs, 3,000,000 visits, 250 GB disk space.

Each of the plans comes with plentiful resources you need. Now, let’s check what you get with every Kinsta hosting plan. Here is what the most basic plan ‘Starter‘ gives you:

All the other bigger plans do have the resources available in the ‘Starter‘ plan and certainly, more is offered on those plans. So, you can go to the pricing page take a thorough look at all the pricing plans and choose the one that suits your purpose.

5. How user-friendly and simple is Kinsta’s interface?

If you have had experience with shared hosting platforms, you will surely find Kinsta’s hosting dashboard exceptionally simple and easy.

First, you don’t need to work in cPanel interface. For the professionals, working with cPanel may not be a problem but it is certainly not an easy pie. Second, the Kinsta dashboard interface is highly intuitive and user-friendly.  Even a beginner can easily explore all its features and administer the hosting platform entirely.

# Getting Started – Add a new Site

First things first, you need to add your own site. In order to add a site, go to ‘Sites‘ and click on it.

Now you need to enter your website details. Fill in the fields and click on Add link at the bottom of the page.

# Migrating a site to Kinsta

In case you want to migrate an existing site, all you have to do is go to ‘Migrations‘ and click on it. Next, you have to request migration.

Site migration to Kinsta managed WordPress hosting can be completed in 7 steps as shown in the screenshot below.

Well, the expert team will support you through the migration process, so there is nothing to panic about migrating site.

# Kinsta Analytics

Kinsta analytics is a very useful and important feature for tracking your website’s status and timely progress. It provides all the details about the resources usage, bandwidth usage, visitor dispersion over desktop and mobile, performance,  cache, etc.

With live analytics, you can utilize the resources really well and also enhance the website’s performance.

Besides, it has Kinsta DNS option which is a premium DNS service provided free for the hosting users. Billing details and activity log are also equally useful for a customer which all can be found in the Kinsta dashboard.

So I conclude that it has a really simple and well-managed dashboard that is both easy to use and sufficient with everything required.

6. Support

7. Customer Reviews

I think it’s very important to know what the customers as well as independent reviewers saying about a product before you purchase it. Well, reviews do have a great significance in the customers’ purchase decision. So, let’s take a while to discuss user reviews on Kinsta.

First and foremost, let’s discuss clients and case studies page from Kinsta’s own website.

Kinsta now hosts a remarkable number of big businesses and their reviews as a customer are fully positive and promising. Websites like Superluchas – a Mexican magazine, The Sport Review – British sports news website, aThemes – a WordPress development company etc. use Kinsta to host their website and they are happy with the Kinsta’s services.

Moreover, you can get more reviews on Kinsta’s services if you simply search them on Google/ search engines. Just search ‘Kinsta WordPress Hosting review’ and a number of articles will appear. You can read them before you switch in with Kinsta.

8. Conclusion

Similarly, support is genuinely dedicated at Kinsta. Their expert support is ready for service 24/7/365 days.

So, I conclude that Kinsta is a perfected hosting service, probably the best managed hosting platform for WordPress. It is surely a great option ahead of you if you are planning to start a new WP website or want to change your existing host.

In case you already have used Kinsta’s hosting, please do share your experience below in the comment box. 🙂

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