Today we explore why choosing Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting service, as opposed to a shared host or small VPS, can be one of the most important decisions you can make as it pertains to your website.
For your business to succeed online today you have to juggle things and wear multiple hats. You have to manage marketing, social media, content creation, etc. This can all be overwhelming and very stressful.
Your business deserves the best. If you are using Wordpress as a platform then a managed WordPress hosting service such as Kinsta gives you a competitive edge.
We will review the hosting provided by Kinsta today. But first, let's know more about Kinsta.
What is Kinsta?
Kinsta is a premium managed WordPress hosting company. It is for those obsessed with performance. Kinsta offers cloud-based hosting solutions on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Optimum site performance, security and excellent customer support are its key features.
Kinsta is hosted on Google Cloud - the infrastructure partner. It utilizes the GCP's premium tier global network to ensure your site loads faster. Kinsta is also recommended by Google Cloud as a fully-managed WordPress hosting solution.
Kinsta came into the industry with features that promise to solve the common challenges website owners face. The challenges were namely - downtime because of peak traffic, and high load time. Their support engineers are WordPress developers. They create WordPress themes, and plugins & contribute back to the core. 24/7 support is available for all of the customers 365 days a year.
Kinsta is a relatively new player in the managed WordPress hosting market. It was started by WordPress developers Mark, Anita, Peter, and Tom in 2013. It is a fully remote company based in the US and with an office in Budapest.
Why use Kinsta?
The complete Kinsta hosting review is here. We have done Kinsta's web hosting review so that you can take a well-informed decision and avoid any hassles. We have covered the features offered by Kinsta in depth. We have also focused on Kinsta's pricing to help you make the decision.
1. Robust Infrastructure
Kinsta is powered by Google’s Cloud Platform and has moved to GCP’s computer-optimized (C2) VM. It uses the same server and infrastructure that powers Google search and YouTube.
Imagine this - when you search for something on Google how fast is the result in front of you?
The same hardware that powers search queries powers your website on Kinsta. For reference, Google as a search engine returns billions of search results in milliseconds. And YouTube serves thousands of hours of video streaming each minute.
Here's the more technical part that you should understand. Kinsta uses the premium tier of Google Cloud and not the standard tier.
What is GCP's Premium Tier?
Premium Tier is designed to reduce the distance and hops of any query sent to the server. This results in the fastest global transport of your data. It features over 100 points of presence (POPs) across the globe. Inbound traffic enters Google’s network at the POP closest to your end-user, and the platform then serves your website over the private network.
With Google Cloud Platform’s premier tier, your site visitors get to your website quickly. Your website is delivered lightning-fast. Other hosting providers that utilize Google Cloud Platform opt for the less expensive “standard tier,” which means slower data delivery.
2. Lightning Fast Delivery Speed
Sites that load slowly aren’t likely to rise to the top in any niche. A study from Google found that a one-second delay in mobile page load times can impact conversion rates by up to 20%. Ensuring top speed levels is another one of their main goals.
To start, they offer 28 different data centres located throughout the world – USA, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and South America – and you can choose a separate one for each of your WordPress websites if you want.
They also offer Amazon Route 53 premium DNS for all customers. In other words, they offer reduced latency and geolocation routing to help online stability, speed, and performance at all times.
Lastly, they have partnered up with Cloudflare, a powerful content delivery network. It will deliver static content such as images, JavaScript, and CSS instantly. The user can be anywhere but the content shall be delivered instantly. Not to mention, all hosting plans come with free bandwidth.
3. Secured as a fortress
Kinsta's review is incomplete without its security. Security is a serious affair at Kinsta. The team of engineers take multiple measures to keep the servers secured. Kinsta has also implemented security measures. They are:
- Live site monitoring every 2 minutes
- DDoS attack detection
- Proactive prevention of malicious code from entering the network
- Daily backups of your site
- Built-in hardware firewalls
- 2-factor authentication to protect your account login
- IP banning after 6 failed login attempts
- Hack-free guarantee (with a free fix if something does get in)
- Free Let’s Encrypt certificates with one-click installation
- Automatic minor WordPress security patches applied
The GCP itself has firewalls built in to thwart and repel any kind of attack. Kinsta has additional firewalls built inside its systems. If someone has to hack your website hosted on Kinsta, they have to crack at least four firewalls.
If anything happens to your website, you can restore it using a backup. You can access the restore option in your MyKinsta dashboard. With Kinsta you can always be in comfort.
4. Uptime Guarantee of 99.9%
Kinsta offers an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee. This is due to its cloud-hosting infrastructure. Cloud hosts by nature are much more reliable at keeping websites online.
Kinsta pairs this with continuous monitoring and uptime checks every 2 minutes as mentioned earlier. That's 720 times a day. In case of any issue, the team of engineers are informed right away. Since the monitoring is frequent and every 2 minutes they know when exactly the issue arose.
If they fail to correct error response codes within 30 minutes, your account will be credited. This guarantee holds, 24/7, every day of the year.
5. Always Present Customer Support
Kinsta’s strength is displayed by its support team. You do not need to go through a series of support reps. Kinsta users always have real experts directly at their beck and call. Their team is spread across time zones and continents.
The support team is comprised entirely of veteran WordPress developers and Linux hosting engineers. The technical level of support is one of the best on the market. Kinsta offers 24/7 support via the Intercom widget, a live chat, and a ticket solution.
6. Optimised for WordPress
Kinsta aims to optimize your WordPress site better than anyone else. They want your website to render properly, load fast, and your users to have the best experience possible.
They manage this by doing the following:
- Server-level Caching: Enjoy full page caching at the server level so data is delivered instantly to site visitors. Combine this with the exclusive Kinsta caching solution and clear your cache on your own terms.
- eCommerce Functionality: They understand that eCommerce sites demand a lot of resources and use up a lot of data to run. That’s why they’ve worked hard to balance performance and functionality so customers get what they need, and so do you.
- New Relic Monitoring: Every site that’s hosted on Kinsta includes 288 uptime checks a day thanks to the New Relic performance monitoring tool. This gives the support team time to react and inform you anytime something suspicious is detected. It also helps pinpoint the exact moment things went wrong so support can solve the issues right away.
- Kinsta APM: A tool developed by Kinsta. It is designed to identify WordPress performance issues, and it’s free for all sites hosted on Kinsta. It captures timestamped information about your WordPress site’s PHP processes, MySQL database queries and external HTTP calls. There’s no need to pay for additional licenses or any third-party services.
If you have a WordPress website and host your site with them, you can bet things will be optimized. Optimisation is especially useful for eCommerce websites to achieve instant loading of product and checkout pages. The server-level caching, balance performance and monitoring boost your website's performance. This gives an optimum eCommerce experience and also drives sales.
7. Good For Traffic Spikes
Another very attractive feature of Kinsta is its scalability. In case of an unexpected traffic surge, Kinsta lets your website scale. It lets you scale to as many CPUs as needed. This is due to integration with the Google Compute Engine. As the cloud auto-scales to manage the load, your WordPress site remains online. And the website works without crashing.
In contrast, many 3rd party hosts are constrained to 2-6 CPUs per Virtual Private Server. Do remember that if you exceed the monthly visits cap of your plan, you will need to pay an overage fee. This fee shall be approx ~$1 per 1,000 visits. You’ll be notified at 80% and 100% usage.
The important thing however is that your site will stay online. The last thing you want is - to invest in paid traffic, or finally go viral - and then suffer a site crash. This too exactly at your moment of glory. Nobody wants that to happen. Nobody wants to miss the opportunity.
Kinsta also offers an Exponential Traffic Spikes and Surges Upgrade specifically designed to address these sorts of massive traffic events if you know they are about to happen.
8. Value for Money
When you compare what Kinsta offers by default - GCP, CDN, SSL, Hackproof Guarantee, Automatic Backups, Malware removal, Background scanning and much more. If you try to gain these features individually then the license costs will set you back by a few $100 for each thing.
Kinsta offers not only managed hosting but a complete, secured solution. You host your website with Kinsta and focus on your business. You do not need to worry about the website's performance. You save money, time and resources with your website hosted securely on Kinsta.
Drawbacks of Kinsta
1. No Email Hosting
It’s good to have your hosting provider host your email accounts too. This way you can manage your emails and users. Sadly, they do not offer email hosting. Users will need to find a separate email hosting service provider for their needs.
Kinsta’s argument for this is that they wish to leave the email hosting to the experts. This seems logical since email hosting is altogether a different ball game. Running an email hosting service is an art that very few understand and master.
2. Steep Entry Price Point
Kinsta is a premium WordPress hosting solution. It also comes attached to a premium price tag. The monthly cost is steep compared to the competitors. Kinsta's pricing starts with the standard tier costing $30 a month.
You receive two months free if you purchase the yearly plan, but it’s still a monthly overhead. The price is high enough to discourage smaller businesses. But then why do we recommend it? More on it is below.
Who should use Kinsta?
Kinsta is one of the best-managed WordPress hosts. If you’re just starting, shared hosting may be enough for you. Who should use Kinsta then? Read on.
Kinsta should be used by the following websites and businesses:
- ECommerce Website: If you have a website with heavy traffic, or you operate an e-commerce store, Kinsta gives you the security you need to protect your website against hacking. Your website is also robust to withstand any spike in traffic. More traffic can be converted to customers and sales with a good website experience.
- Growing Blog: A blog that’s on the rise and has a good pace of growth month after month. You have a website with consistent, big traffic, and you simply don’t like surprises. Surely, you want to give your visitors and users a great experience.
- Publication Website: You are covering the world and you break news. You have exclusive footage and news to be shared. You will surely not like your website to crash when you go viral. Your increased cost can be set off by the increase in your advertising revenues.
- Global Firm: If you are running a business that has clientele from around the world then investing in Kinsta shall pay dividends. Kinsta has CDN built-in and the content is delivered in a jiffy. Your clients and leads from different countries will never have to wait for more than a second to view your website.
Who is using Kinsta?
Kinsta proudly hosts thousands of businesses all around the globe. It has a robust clientele with a churn rate of less than 5%. Some of the websites and businesses that run on Kinsta's platform are as below:
Intuit
Intuit started with Quicken in 1983 as a personal finance software for households and individuals. They quickly grew and now serve over 42 million customers, everyone from small businesses, consumers, and accounting professionals throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Brazil.
Many of their financial management solutions and flagship products – Quickbooks, TurboTax, and Mint, are now based in the cloud. They came to Kinsta in need of a host capable of handling large volumes of traffic and providing high availability.
Colorprinter
After they moved to Kinsta, they immediately noticed a remarkable upward trend in the growth of organic traffic. And as their primary source of new customers, this is a considerable growth almost every day. Thanks to Kinsta, Colorprinter is faster, more stable, and has gained higher rankings in SERPs.
Being able to take advantage of Kinsta’s CDN and caching technology eliminates the need to use third-party plugins for speed optimization.
WeWork
WeWork host their newsroom section on Kinsta making it easily available to the world. We Work has deployed a good customised look for their WordPress website.
Though we came to know about WeWork using Kinsta for its main website we were unable to verify it.
Enventys Partner's
Some of Enventys Partners’ sites experience huge traffic spikes due to the nature of their businesses, and those sites previously struggled with these spikes on WP Engine. After Enventys Partners made the switch, just by utilizing Kinsta CDN and utilizing data centres closer in proximity to each client’s location, they experienced a 50% decrease in page load times on average for their clients.
They found Kinsta’s servers to be incredibly reliable as a result of utilizing the Google Cloud Platform, and haven’t experienced any site downtime as a result of their hosting platform since moving to Kinsta. Being able to utilize Kinsta’s CDN also helped lower costs in general so Enventys Partners no longer had to pay for an external CDN service.
When all was said and done, Kinsta won out due to a better dashboard, better site performance, and overall better customer service.
Conclusion
Kinsta is the best value for money for WordPress websites. If you are serious about hosting and scaling the website then Kinsta is the best hosting provider you have out there.
We at Think Leaf Solutions believe Kinsta is the best Wordpress hosting. For further guidance on the matter, you can contact us and we will be happy to help.
