Yay! I am glad to review one of the most popular WordPress hosting companies out there, called Kinsta. Kinsta is a premium WordPress hosting provider. They offer various plans, starting from $30 to a whopping $1650 monthly fee for very large plans.
If you’re not familiar with hosting, let me explain some of the basic terms. Hosting equals renting a space on the internet to run a website. You’re renting a small part of a computer, connected to the internet. And this computer can run websites. There are many kinds of hosting, such as shared hosting, cloud hosting, and virtual private servers.
In short: Kinsta’s Managed WordPress Hosting is on steroids, powered by Google Cloud Platform’s premium tier network, C2 virtual machines, and enterprise-level Cloudflare integration! You can sign up for Kinsta here.
Kinsta is a cloud provider with Application, Database, and WordPress hosting. They have specialized in WordPress for over 10 years now and have introduced new hosting options to provide even more flexibility to their clients. On top of that, they built their hosting platform. In this Kinsta review (we’ll be focusing on the WordPress offering of Kinsta), you’ll discover this results in a great performance.
ps. Do you know these reviews started my quest to find the best WordPress hosting? I did not find the information I needed in many reviews, and that’s why I started to do some serious research! But without further ado, let’s start the review!
TL;DR
- Kinsta is nailing it. It is one of the best WordPress hosting companies out there offering great features, support, and performance. But it is also, ahem, expensive!
- If you want better performance for a lower price, albeit slightly fewer features, consider Rocket.net!
- If you don’t bother to support quality and somewhat lower performance, Cloudways is a cheaper and good alternative.
Do you want to try Kinsta for free? Kinsta offers a 30 days money-back guarantee! Sign up for My Kinsta here.
About this Kinsta Review
In this review, I look at the following aspects, which I deem important for good WordPress hosting. These are:
- Features: the specific features offered for WordPress. What can you do with it?
- Performance: the performance of the plan. How many visitors can it handle?
- Usability: the way you can manage websites. How easy is this?
- Support: the level of professionalism for the support. Can they answer my question quickly?
- Price: is what I get in balance with the price?
In this review, I tested their Business 1 plan. So, is Kinsta among the best WordPress hosting providers? I do think so, and I will explain it in detail in this review.
- Looking for more WordPress Hosting reviews? Discover more WordPress hosting reviews in
the reviews database or look at more comparable managed hosts.
Kinsta plans
Kinsta has the following plans:
| Plan & Monthly Price | Installs | Visits | Disk Space | CDN |
| Starter ($35) | 1 | 25,000 | 10GB | 100GB |
| Pro ($70) | 2 | 50,000 | 20GB | 200GB |
| Business 1 ($115) | 5 | 100,000 | 30GB | 400GB |
| Business 2 ($225) | 10 | 250,000 | 40GB | 600GB |
| Business 3 ($340) | 20 | 400,000 | 50GB | 800GB |
| Business 4 ($450) | 40 | 600,000 | 60GB | 1200GB |
| Enterprise 1 ($675) | 60 | 1,000,000 | 100GB | 2000GB |
| Enterprise 2 ($1000) | 80 | 1,500,000 | 150GB | 3000GB |
| Enterprise 3 ($1350) | 120 | 2,000,000 | 200GB | 4000GB |
| Enterprise 4 ($1650) | 150 | 3,000,000 | 250GB | 6000GB |
For whom is Kinsta?
Kinsta is a cloud platform, that besides app and database hosting, offers managed WordPress hosting. Having said that, Kinsta aims at everyone and I think that is true:
- Kinsta is useful for developers with
its array of developer features. - Kinsta is great for corporates as it delivers stellar performance and stability.
- Kinsta is
user – friendly and great in support, thereby also suitable for beginners. Though it may be on the expensive side for low-traffic sites.
But with no further ado – let’s continue with this Kinsta hosting review!
Exactly the right features
To summarize this section: Kinsta offers exactly the right amount of features you’ll need. Whether you are a seasoned WordPress developer or a beginner, Kinsta offers it all. On a more advanced level, there are only a few features either missing or quite expensive.
General Features
The package we tested covered up to 5 WordPress installs, 100.000 visits, and 30GB of disk space. What else can you expect from Kinsta?
- An infrastructure running on Google Cloud Platform Premium Tier Network and C2 machines
- Back-ups (up to hourly)
- Free unlimited site migrations from any host
- Data centers in 35 places on five continents
- Uptime checks every 2 minutes
- A great dashboard and collection of (site) management tools
- A site manager for adding sites easily
- A very detailed analytics panel
- A user manager for collaboration
- WordPress support by WordPress experts
- Websites scale automatically, capable of handling traffic spikes
- Activity log for actions performed on Kinsta
- CDN with 275+ PoPs included in each plan
- Enterprise-level Cloudflare integration included in all plans
- Free APM tool
- Free SSL certificates with wildcard support
- Edge caching and early hints web standard
The most outstanding fact is how easy it is to use all these tools. As you may see in the video and screenshots, the manager of Kinsta is beautifully designed. Light-years ahead of cPanel!
Developer features
In this Kinsta review, I obviously can’t skip developers’ features. Kinsta offers most of the required features that developers need:
- An architecture built for speed (using NGINX, LXD, PHP8+, and MariaDB)
- WP-CLI for WordPress administration on the command line
- SSH access to servers
- Git is pre-installed on every application
- Staging areas for development
- Easily cloning WordPress websites
- phpMyAdmin access
- Performance Analytics
- Redirect manager
- Detailed application logs
- Possibility for application monitoring with New Relic
- Automatic optimization of MySQL
- Self-healing PHP
- Recently: Application Performance Monitoring
- Application hosting
- Database hosting
What I still miss is the possibility of selecting what to push and pull in staging environments, such as selecting certain tables. Also, an interface for setting up automatic git deployments would be a great add-on. These are all features that have been developed now, which is a clear indication that Kinsta listens to its customers.
Subsequently, Kinsta does not have an API, so some advanced automating is not yet possible. However, the API is in development – so stay tuned.
Safety Features
Kinsta itself takes pride in its safety features and it’s true. They offer a vast amount of features for safety:
- Monitoring of server and network events
- Regular server updates
- Hack free guarantee and free after hack fixes
- Up to hourly backups (for a fee)
- Uptime monitoring
- SSL certificates with wildcard support
- Hardware firewalls
- DDoS Detection
- Malware/file integrity scanning
- Plugin restrictions
- Enforcing strong passwords
- Brute force login protection for WordPress
- Automatic WordPress security patching
In my opinion, a great extra is that the enforcement of strong passwords and login protection are included within the package. At many other hosting providers, you have to manually add this yourself through plugins.
Other special features
The most distinctive element is the fact that Kinsta is being hosted on Google Cloud Engine. The performance of this, as we will see later in this review, is unbelievable. For this Kinsta review, I found out a few other perks:
- Transactional emails (150 per day up to Pro plans, 1000 daily for Business, and 3000 daily for Enterprise)
- Amazon Route 53 Premium DNS
- Redis (for $100 a month per site )
- Hourly back-ups ($60 monthly per site)
- External back-ups ($2 per month per site)
- Reverse proxy for NGINX ($50 monthly per site)
- Scale disk space (at $20 per 20GB increments)
- Premium staging environments ($20 per environment)
Unfortunately, many of these are paid add-ons. Fortunately, they are not required for running an already optimized website.
There is one feature in this list that stands out: The Amazon 53 Premium DNS. It allows connecting registered domains to the Amazon 53 DNS service. As you may know, a premium DNS service can have many benefits. The results: easily managed domains through Kinsta, improved security, and often better performance.
Furthermore, as Kinsta is a managed cloud platform, they do not provide email hosting. As you may know, it is a good practice to separate web hosting from e-mail hosting.
A big advantage is that transactional emails are supported out of the box. Transactional emails are messages sent from your website, such as form submissions.
Unbelievable performance
Now that we have looked into the features in this Kinsta review, it is time to look into the next chapter: Performance! In short: Kinsta’s WordPress performance is superb! Moreover, the performance scales very well with consistent response times.
Kinsta’s technology
So what makes your website scream on Kinsta? For the geeks out there: what technology does Kinsta use?
- Google Cloud Platform’s premium tier network & C2 machines
- LXD Containers with NGINX, PHP8+, and MariaDB.
- NGINX FastCGI for page caching
- Enterprise-level Cloudflare integration with features like Edge caching, early hints web standard, SSL certificates, HTTP/3 enabled CDN with 275+ PoPs
Kinsta WordPress Hosting Review Test-set Up
I use various metrics to test websites on performance. To start the test, I use a bloated theme with WooCommerce and use the default shopping demo. I always use the same version of the theme to ensure testing conditions are similar for each host.
Subsequently, I test various metrics using various tools:
- The number of concurrent visitors the hosting party can handle on a cached page before errors start popping up, or before the server starts responding slowly (over 2 seconds). These visitors constantly fire requests at the server, at least once a second.
- The number of visitors the hosting party can handle on an uncached page. This often indicates the real performance of a hosting provider.
- The loading time (both cached and uncached) from a location as close as possible to the website.
- A few other well-known testing metrics such as WebPageTest.
- And finally a few tests from the WordPress Performance Test plugin.
Since they also integrate Cloudflare now, they also have great international loading speeds.
Kinsta Performance results: Load Tests
But with no further ado: these are the performance results from this Kinsta review!
| Cached | Uncached | |
|---|---|---|
| Max Clients Per Second | 2265 | 32 |
Maximum clients: 2265
For the cached test, Kinsta could handle up to 2265 visitors per second before errors start popping up.
A cached webpage can handle much more visitors. But how will Kinsta perform for uncached pages?
Maximum Uncached clients: 32
This test is important for dynamic websites. Uncached pages often occur if visitors are logged in, for example with webshops or WooCommerce. Also, websites with a lot of dynamic user interactions can’t utilize caching that much. So what are the results of this Kinsta review?
Kinsta can handle up to 32 clients at the same time for uncached pages before errors start popping up. And yes, each of these visitors may fire a request each second. In one minute of load testing, 2395 requests
While this number may seem low, it is good! Often, the number of uncached visitors is a lot lower. For example, a competing server with 8GB of RAM and 4 cores from Vultr can just handle up to 26 concurrent clients.
Requests with H2Load
H2load is a benchmark tool that system engineers use to measure how many requests a server can handle. I run this benchmark with the WooCommerce test set-up, and these are the results:
| Cached | Uncached | |
|---|---|---|
| Requests / Second | 75.27 | 12.85 |
Loading Time: 0.5 seconds, uncached: 0.74 seconds
I tested the loading time using PingDom from a location as close as possible to the data center. The average load time for this bloated website was 0.5 seconds. Testing the uncached version of the homepage resulted in an average load time of 0.74 seconds. Still pretty fast, if you ask me.
Other performance metrics
In this Kinsta review, I also looked at some other performance metrics. Kinsta scored very well on the other performance metrics:
- A time to first byte (TTFB) of 39.00 milliseconds
- An average GTMetrix loading time of 2.6 seconds
- An average WebPageTest loading time of 3.51 seconds
Kinsta Server Benchmarks
At last, server benchmarks tell how well Kinsta’s servers are performing, and how well they optimized PHP and MySQL. It’s an important indicator of your back-end performance. I tested it with 3 plugins:
WP Performance Tester
The performance tests how many queries per second a server can handle, and gives a certain score for common operations.
- A WP Performance Test server score of 7.4
- 1763 queries per second with the WP Performance Test
WP Benchmark: 8.2
WP Benchmark is a server benchmark that can be run in WordPress. Kinsta scores a whopping 9.1 for the WP Benchmark score, which is great! These are the metrics associated with the test:
- Large Text Data Processing: 7.5 seconds
- Binary Data Processing: 7.1 seconds
- Large DB Import: 1.5 seconds
- Simply Query: 0.7 seconds
- Complex Query: 2.7 seconds
Post Insert / Query / Delete Test
In this test, 10.000 posts are inserted, queried, and deleted. The time for the tests is recorded:
| Query | Insert | Delete | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10.000 Posts | 0.168 seconds | 7.774 seconds | 14.607 seconds |
Again, Kinsta is very fast here.
Great global performance, averaging 278ms TTFB
More recently, Kinsta has added CDN and edge caching as an integral part of their hosting stack (What is a CDN?). Simply said, it means your website at Kinsta is saved on many data centers around the world. The effect? It will load fast from any location in the world (as opposed to if you’re website would only be hosted in a single location).
Stability results: 100% up-time
The up-time percentage indicates how much time you’re website has been online. During my four-week testing period, I did not have any seconds of downtime. Even during load testing. Perfect!
Comparing Kinsta to other providers
But how does Kinsta compare in terms of performance to other providers? Let’s have a look at some providers in a similar category:
With the above dropdown, you can select any metric and it will show a chart displaying the values for each competitor.
If you want to find the best WordPress hosting company, be sure to visit the filter page for all WordPress Hosting Reviews.
Fabulous usability
Kinsta uses a custom-designed interface to manage your WordPress websites. My conclusion for usability in this Kinsta review? Kinsta’s interface is very user-friendly!
Kinsta uses a proven interface layout with menu items on the left, detailed settings on the right, and major actions with a clear button on the upper right.
Managing WordPress Websites
Managing WordPress websites is done from a single location. At first, you have an overview of all your websites and a clear add site button.
When clicking a given site, a detailed screen opens where all necessary screens are present. It is also shown in the image below:
The first screen gives detailed access information. Managing the domains is done in the domains tab:
Moreover, there is a handy tab with all backup points. This tab has a very clear function for restoring backups. Subsequently, manual backups can also be made here.
There are a few other tabs such as a tab with common tools (such as enabling SSL, search and replace tool, and so forth), redirection settings, and more. It is also possible to block certain IPs from accessing your site, enable the Kinsta CDN, and view the application logs here.
User Manager
What I love about Kinsta is the way their user manager is set up. With the user manager, you can invite other users and give them certain permissions. Think of access to certain areas of the dashboard, but also limiting access to a single site.
Needless to say, this is very useful for collaboration with clients, employees or external parties.
Activity Log
Another quite useful feature is the activity log of Kinsta’s dashboard. It logs everything that is happening on Kinsta. Well, at your account at least :).
Application Performance Monitoring
Another great feature, which is beautifully designed, is the new application monitoring package of Kinsta.
This feature allows professionals and developers to have insight into how their WordPress website is performing, and actually what scripts are a drag on performance.
I listed it specifically because it’s also a very well-designed tool that gives quick insights into performance bottlenecks. Very useful if you are a professional developer! Read more about Kinsta’s Application Performance Monitoring Tool here.
Tools, Plugins & Themes
Kinsta has a tools section with some very useful tools for monitoring, improving, and securing sites.
It is also possible to manage plugins and themes straight from the dashboard.
Can usability be improved?
So did we miss something in terms of usability? What I would love to see is some integration for notifications. Now, you can be notified if one of your plans gets close to overusage.
However, other hosting providers also support notifications for important events happening, such as downtime or
Great support
When I executed this Kinsta review, I was impressed by the quality of the support. They know what they are talking about and they react very fast (within a couple of seconds, to be exact!).
Support channels: live chat
Kinsta uses a single support channel: live chat. That’s right, no telephone, no tickets. But this single support channel is executed perfectly.
I timed the response time for the live chat and it averaged a whopping 3.4 seconds. I am not sure they are aware of the fact that I’m writing a Kinsta review, but this is just insane.
Also compared to other providers, it seemed that I had all the attention. At some providers, subsequent chat responses took some time. Kinsta’s agent however responded in an instant in all occasions.
Kinsta support is 24/7 available, in multiple languages.
Support knowledge and response
Now reacting fast is one thing, but if you talk garbage, it is still trash. For this Kinsta review, I asked around 10 questions. These questions were about general WordPress topics, hosting-related issues, and Kinsta-specific questions.
All but one of the questions were answered satisfactorily. And this was a question about a good alternative caching plugin. Not such a deal on Kinsta. So what can I say? The support I contacted
Knowledge base and blog
Besides good human support, a knowledge base is key. On Kinsta, most of the important topics are covered in their knowledge base. However, some of their knowledge base articles seem to be talking about WordPress in general. For example, an article mentioned how to set up cronjobs in cPanel, while Kinsta does not use cPanel.
That being said, they also have very good guides on learning WordPress. While writing this Kinsta review, I examined a couple of them. These guides are often quite elaborate containing thousands of words. Subsequently, they regularly write great blog articles. They are playing the content game, right?
But Kinsta even provides more resources – there is also a Kinsta Academy and a section called DevKinsta, specifically aimed at devs.
Pricing: A little expensive
As you may have read through the enthusiastic rave in this Kinsta hosting review, I still have to mention a downside. And that is the pricing model of Kinsta.
Now, you may not be aware, but hosting on Google Cloud Engine is quite expensive – which also may explain the current price of Kinsta’s plans.
For example, asking a 35-dollar monthly fee for 1 WordPress installation, just 20k visits and 10 GB of space is a hefty fee. Especially if you’re just starting with WordPress. If you want to save, you can opt for the yearly plans – which offer 2 months for free.
Now performance-wise the fee is great, as Kinsta can easily match equally expensive servers. Feature-wise, it’s a little off in my opinion – although the more recent addition of enterprise Cloudflare is amazing.
Add-ons such as Redis, and hourly back-ups are pretty expensive. You may have to pay up to $100 monthly for each add-on, while competitors such as Cloudways offer them for free.
Kinsta Alternatives
Kinsta is in my opinion leading the pack of Managed WordPress hosting providers, but that doesn’t mean they lack competition. Let’s list some Kinsta alternatives:
Kinsta beats many in their scores, but other providers such as Cloudways can compete in terms of features and especially pricing. If you don’t want to pay too much, consider one of the above alternatives.
Concluding this Review: Kinsta is nailing it!
In this Kinsta review, I have evaluated Kinsta on several aspects. I think Kinsta is on top of the game and is certainly one of the best WordPress hosting companies out there.
They offer exactly the right features needed for running WordPress websites. Subsequently, they have unbelievably fast performance and great usability. At last, their support is one of the best out there.
But this incredible quality comes with a price, and this is the major drawback of Kinsta. Like many other managed WordPress hosting parties, they are quite expensive. Especially their add-ons are too expensive in my opinion.
Like the physical world, quality comes with a price. But the quality you get is insane. So, if you are frugal and don’t bother to support quality so much, Cloudways is a great alternative. Otherwise, Kinsta it is!