Kinsta Review 2023: Experience, Pros, Cons, When to Avoid & When to Prefer

Kinsta Hosting

Product Name: Kinsta

5

Summary

I found Kinsta is a top choice for website migration or building a faster WordPress site. It’s great for those with a budget, prioritizing performance and security, and running complex eCommerce sites. Avoid Kinsta if you need a cPanel hosting environment or prefer shared plans.

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Are you searching for an unbiased Kinsta review?

Looking for perfect managed hosting for WordPress? Do you want a faster, more secure, and highly reliable web host? You’re in the right place.

Kinsta is a premium managed WordPress hosting provider, powered by Google Cloud. It offers everything from 24/7 monitoring to super-fast customer support to blazing-fast website speeds.

Here’s the ultimate Kinsta hosting review where you’ll discover:

• What is Kinsta?
• Kinst hosting performance
• Why should you switch to Kinsta (From my own experience)
• Its hosting features, pricing, pros, cons, customer reviews of Kinsta hosting, and more

So let’s jump into the details without much ado.

What is Kinsta Web Hosting?

Kinsta is a premium WordPress managed hosting platform that is powered by the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to offer high-speed website performance.

Kinsta currently has 35 data centers spanning 5 continents to lower your website’s latency and offer faster page loading times no matter where your visitors are coming from.

It also offers enterprise-level Cloudflare integration to provide faster and more secure WordPress sites. Kinsta’s pricing plans start at $35 per month and go all the way up to $1650 per month.

As a Kinsta user, If i have to tell you what awesome features you will get when you sign up for Kinsta hosting, here what I mention:

• Offers you fully managed WordPress hosting (which offers excellent website speeds)
• Free website migrations are performed by their expert team (so you can easily migrate from your existing web host to Kinsta hosting)
• Daily automatic backups
• Free SSL certificate, SSH for developers and SFTP
• Gives you access to a multi-user feature that allows you to add any number of users to your team
• Free global CDN solution for all your sites
• Access to Google Cloud Platform and Google’s global premium tier network
• Uses ultimate technology like Nginx, PHP 8 (the latest version), LXD software
• Easy to use dashboard where you can manage everything from bandwidth to installing SSL certificates
• Excellent analytics to easily track your website visitors, bandwidth usage, response times etc
• Acts as an incredible WordPress hosting tool to easily manage your sites in one place
• You can choose from 29 global data center locations
• A one-click staging environment is also provided (so you can make live changes without any hassle)
• No fixed-term contract (upgrade, downgrade or cancel your hosting plan anytime you want)
• 24/7 monitoring for uptime, DDoS attack detection, software-based restrictions, SSL support, self-healing PHP etc
• Secured behind Cloudflare firewall
• Automatic MySQL database optimizations to fine-tune your MySQL database based on the needs of your WP site
• Offers you 30 days money-back guarantee along with prorated refunds

Kinsta Review 2023

Why I Invested in a Kinsta Expensive Web Server

Kinsta’s lowest managed WordPress plan generally starts from $35/month. Yes, it was expensive if you compare other web hosting services plans with it such as Hostinger ($1.99) or even Bluehost ($2.75).

So why did I make such an expensive move? Let me tell you why:

Before Kinsta I was facing such problems:

1.) Lack of resources: 

When I started my blog, one of my sites was hosted on a shared hosting based server, but things are not the same now as it was 4-5 years ago. Now my site generates over 300k every month. 

So to handle that many visitors, I needed a high-performance web server.

2.) Poor Performance:

As I mentioned above, the performance issues were there with my earlier web host. Due to defaming reasons, I can’t reveal the name. 

But yes, the problems related to uptime, lower core web vital scores, and unwanted crashes were often faced. My site scored 70-76 in web testing tools which impacted my SEO efforts too.

How Kinsta Eliminated My Web Hosting Related Problems:

Automated Resources Handling:

I switched it to Kinsta because my previous web host failed to deliver the performance I expected and also I liked Kinsta’s feature of auto server scaling. Meaning even if my WordPress site traffic grows in the future, I don’t have to take on the technical hassle of server updation on my own.

Kinsta would automatically scale up my site RAM as well as storage demand if needed. This is also highly beneficial if you are running a high traffic eCommerce site. If I use a different web host, they would definitely shut down my server because of a sudden spike in traffic.

Kinsta is a truly WordPress managed hosting solution and that’s why I am getting these amazing advantages.

Performance Enhancement: 

Kinsta’s managed server performance is remarkable. Plus because of their every 2 minute uptime monitoring benefit, my site never hit a crash or downtime. 

Not just 100% uptime, Kinsta also ensures my core web vital metrics are scored green always. 

I wanted to switch to some high performance web hosting server, but as you know 9 out of 10 web hosting companies are just out there making money and fooling users through their upselling tricks.

However, I literally have not found a single hidden fee or upsell trick inside Kinsta plans. That’s why I opted for Kinsta. All plans are 100% transparent – meaning no matter which plan you choose all security features, performance features, etc are included. These days, This isn’t the case with the majority of web hosting companies.

When you look inside their tools dashboard, you will find so many pre-installed optimization features such as:

• Restart PHP – Solve PHP related issues that impacting on a site speed
• New Relic Monitoring – Give detailed performance statistics
• Site Cache – Inbuilt caching tool eliminates the need of WordPress caching plugins
• WordPress debugging – Give warnings, errors a site might be facing

I found all these optimization features valuable and easy to turn on. All you have to do is to toggle the switches situated on the tool’s dashboard.

Security & Hack Concerns Have Gone Forever:

As my blog grows, security concerns such as DDos attacks, firewall protection, etc have grown. Honestly, I didn’t trust my previous web host, especially in protecting a site from malicious traffic.

I didn’t know the exact reason for my site crashes…But hopefully with Kinsta, such types of concerns are not occurring till date.

Most cheap web hosts don’t care about how secure their hosting network or servers are, that’s the reason why you should avoid such hosts and pick premium hosts like Kinsta.

Along with 5 minutes uptime check, Kinsta offers:

• Free hack fix for your websites (Much needed if you are own a BIG website)
• Force HTTPS
• DDos Protection
• Free SSL certificates
• SSH Access
• Offers hardware firewalls for your websites (It restricts hackers from accessing site data. A much needed enterprise-level security feature for BIG sites)
• 2FA
• Geo Blocking
• IP Blocking

Read: How to Find And Fix Orphan Pages On Your Website

Kinsta Take My Site “REACH” to Next Level:

Unlike other managed web hosts, Kinsta doesn’t have its own data centers. Instead, they have tied up with “Google Data Centers” – Meaning your site pages will be delivered across the world from Google latest technology optimized servers.

Previous to Kinsta, I only had the option to choose from 7 or 8 data centers. But Kinsta literally changed the entire game. 35 data centers is huge. And the “count” is constantly evolving. 

Yes, Kinsta is one of the evolving web host services which is constantly upgrading their technology, features, data centers and almost everything for the betterment of their users.

When I saw Google support is there with Kinsta Cloud servers, I immediately signed up. Because you can blindly trust Google’s reliability.

Unlike other web hosting companies which usually rely on Cloudflare free CDN (giving 5-10% performance boost only), Kinsta has implemented its brand new CDN which is powered by Cloudflare’s global edge network. 

It is a high-performance content delivery network with 200+ PoPs which gives you up to 40% improved CDN performance. As a result, you don’t need to serve static assets via a secondary CDN domain.

Above all, this can be enabled on all Kinsta plans at no additional cost.

Free Migration Saved My Extra Money:

Back at switching times, I wanted to save money as much as possible. Migration cost is the additional unwanted expense nobody wanted to bear. 

Kinsta offered me a free migration facility along with technical agents. All I had to do was to fill out the migration request form and their customer support team moved my sites to their hosting servers for free.

Free website migrations are available for all of Kinsta’s hosting plans including Starter, Business, Pro and Enterprise and you can migrate unlimited sites for free. They also offer free premium migrations for sites with more complex requirements. 

The number of free premium migrations depends on your hosting plan.

Read: Using WordPress? Don’t Use Free WordPress Themes [Here’s Why]

Free Daily Backups & Staging Area 

My site hits hundreds of thousands of visitors every month and we used to update posts, and make changes at a developer level on a daily basis. 

Since Kinsta offers free daily backup & push staging facility in all their plans, handling these 2 tasks are no more trouble.

Backups:

Kinsta offers free backups & 14 days backup retention facility. And we have also discontinued using premium backup plugins which reduced our website operating cost directly and improved overall site performance (Backup plugins put an extra load on your site)

[At least once a day, they take a backup of your whole site so you can restore your files in case of loss. The great thing about their backup option is that they also offer separate backups on all environments including live and staging so your development efforts are also safe.

They also offer additional backups in case you need them at an additional fee (that means, you can increase the backup frequency of your sites to every 6 hours or even every hour instead of 24 hours).]

Push Staging:

Whenever I want to test new WordPress versions or plugins before updating or trying out new PHP versions on my site or making design related changes to your website, the staging feature comes in handy.

To put it simply, the staging feature helps you make any changes to your site by preventing your website from being broken or unavailable (due to technical issues or broken plugins, themes, etc).

Kinsta offers you a free staging feature with all the plans so you can test your website however you want and publish it once it’s ready.

Did you know Kinsta also provides DevKinsta – A free local WordPress development suite (like WAMP) that allows you to design, develop, and deploy WordPress sites from the comfort of your local machine.

I haven’t used it yet, but this could be very useful if you receive complex website requirements from your clients.

As of now, it is available for macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu, currently used by more than 38,800+ developers, web designers, and freelancers.

Extremely Easy-to-use Interface

Kinsta has built its own control panel, which has a friendly UI and allows you to easily manage your WordPress sites, applications, and databases. The good thing about MyKinsta’s dashboard is that it is extremely easy to use even for WordPress newbies.

I considered myself as an intermediate and from my overall judgment, I feel the Kinsta dashboard can be easily manageable by all kinds of users (Beginners included).

From easy and quick backups to traffic analytics to CDN usage and more, you can find almost everything you need on their dashboard.

If you’re curious to know what the dashboard of Kinsta looks like, have a look.

Kinsta Customer Support Quality is a Top-Notch:

I researched a lot about Kinsta customer support agents on Reddit & other public review sites (TrustPilot, G2) and honestly, I hardly experienced any major concern regarding the customer support facility.

Kinsta charges you a higher bucks, so obviously you can expect a premium level of technical support. I am not overstating, but I found their issue-solving rate is 100%.

Their solutions might be hard to implement, but they worked for me for sure. They do offer live chat support, but to solve major technical concerns they never took more than 1-2 hours.

Kinsta offers expert WordPress support who knows the ins and outs of WordPress including troubleshooting, server maintenance, theme, and plugin building and maintenance, contributing to WordPress core, and so on.

Kinsta provides 24/7/365 customer support assistance with a 100% solve rate (it doesn’t matter whether your site gets hacked or has issues with SSL certificates, they’ll fix them all for you). They also offer a “live chat” option where you can get instant replies from their team.

Did I Get the Expected Performance Results from Kinsta?

For checking the performance of any web host, uptime and speed are two important yardsticks. Let us show you the results of some of the tests that we performed to check them.

Kinsta Uptime Test:

We pay a huge price to a premium web hosting company.

In most scenarios, premium hosting companies like Kinsta are charging almost 10x of what cheap hosting companies like Bluehost charge.

Should we expect even a single minute of downtime?

However, as we know, some technical updates and upgrades may cause some downtime in a year. For this, uptime of 99.9% upwards is pretty decent. If you are achieving 99.99%, we call it awesome.

Kinsta guarantees 99.9% uptime but let’s see what they delivered in the last two months.

We used the Pingdom tool and measured their performance for approx 60 days.

Result: We experienced 100% uptime and we call it superb. See the proof above.

Now, we decided to check the speed and core web vitals.

Kinsta Speed Test:

While we were convinced with the uptime test, we also decided to conduct a speed test by neutral lab test by Google itself.

Our Findings: Blazing Fast Speed!

The scores above are self-explanatory. We got 98 scores in Google’s Pagespeed Insights. There are no complaints at all as far as core web vitals are concerned. LCP was 2.2 seconds, TBT 40ms, and CLS .08.

We all know from recent studies that a slow website impacts your business as in most cases, users abandon them. A fast website is not only a visitor delight but also helps you in getting better conversions. Kinsta is a go-to solution if you are serious about your online business.

So what are you waiting for?

Get 4 Months FREE With Kinsta (When paid annually)

Kinsta Pricing Plans

So how much does Kinsta hosting cost you? Kinsta hosting offers 4 major types of WordPress hosting plans which are listed below.

1. Starter plan
2. Pro plan
3. Business plans
4. Enterprise plans

Let’s talk about each one of the above mentioned 4 hosting plans offered by Kinsta hosting so you can decide the right hosting plan that suits your WordPress website’s needs.

Quick Note: SSL, Migrations, Daily Backups are 100% free in all Kinsta Plans

1. Starter plan

• Price: Starts at $35 per month (get 4 months free if you pay annually)
• Suitable for: Small personal websites or blogs with low traffic and minimal resource requirements.
• Key features: 1 WordPress install, 10 GB disk space, suitable for up to 25,000 monthly visits, free SSL certificate, Staging area access, 14 days backup retention, Free CDN (100 GB Bandwidth), and basic caching.

2. Pro plan

• Price: Starts at $70 per month (4 months free when paid annually)
• Suitable for: Growing businesses and professional websites with moderate traffic and resource needs.
• Key features: 2 WordPress installs, 20 GB disk space, suitable for up to 50,000 monthly visits, free SSL certificate, advanced caching, and additional features like multisite support, CDN integration, and Site cloning support.

3. Business plans

If you want to install multiple sites with higher monthly visits limit along with more storage space, you should go for business plans from Kinsta hosting. Suitable for: Larger websites, online stores, and businesses with higher traffic and resource requirements.

Kinsta offers you the following 4 plans in the Business category.

1. Business 1 (costs you $115 per month)
2. Business 2 (costs you $225 per month)
3. Business 3 (costs you $340 per month)
4. Business 4 (costs you $450 per month)

Here’s the list of features that you get with Business plans from Kinsta hosting.

• Install 5 to 40 websites (Depending on the plan)
• Handles sites from 100,000 to 600,000 monthly visits (depending on the plan)
• 30 GB to 60 GB of storage space (depending on the plan)
• 400 GB to 1200 GB of free CDN (depending on the plan)
• Free SSL with wildcard support 
• Free 3 to 4 premium website migration
• Backups are stored for a minimum of 14 days to 20 days (depending on the plan)
• Access to staging area
• Multisite support
• Site cloning
• Enterprise-level Cloudflare integration
• Recommended for eCommerce sites along with membership sites

4. Enterprise plans

• Price: Custom pricing based on specific requirements
• Suitable for: Large-scale enterprises, high-traffic websites, and mission-critical applications.

If you’re running a high-traffic website that is getting a huge number of monthly visitors (starting from million visits a month), you should prefer Enterprise plans from Kinsta hosting which are further divided into 4 plans that are mentioned below.

1. Enterprise 1 (costs you $675 per month)
2. Enterprise 2 (costs you $1000 per month)
3. Enterprise 3 (costs you $1350 per month)
4. Enterprise 4 (costs you $1650 per month)

Here’s the ultimate list of features that you’ll get with Enterprise plans from Kinsta hosting.

• Install 60 to 150 websites (depending on the plan)
• Handles sites from 1 million to 2.5 million monthly visits (depending on the plan)
• 100 GB to 250 GB of storage space (depending on the plan)
• 2000 GB to 6000 GB of free CDN (depending on the plan)
• Backups are stored for a minimum of 30 days (with all the Enterprise plans)
• Access to staging area
• Multisite support
• Site cloning
• Enterprise-level Cloudflare integration
• Recommended for eCommerce sites along with membership sites

Higher plans beyond Enterprise 4 are also available. In this case, just reach out to them and they will tailor a plan for your unique needs.

Pros And Cons of Kinsta Hosting

This review will be incomplete without listing Kinsta hosting pros and cons, so here they are.

Pros of Kinsta hosting:

Here’s the list of benefits you get with Kinsta hosting.

• Offers you free daily website backups (which is great just in case if you accidentally lose any of your website files as you can easily restore them instantly)
• Offers excellent security (along with a free hack fix guarantee which means, they’ll fix your site for you if it gets hacked)
• Free SSL certificates with wildcard support 
• Free CDN with 275+ PoPs and HTTP/3 enabled 
• Gives you access to 29 Google Cloud Platform data centers for each of your sites
• Offers a really simple dashboard where you can manage everything from bandwidth to space
• It also offers you monthly billing cycles (which is really great if you don’t want to pay for 12 months at once, although you get 4 months of free hosting when you go for their yearly billing cycle)
• You’ll have access to the staging area
• You’ll get excellent 24×7 customer support assistance from WordPress experts
• Free unlimited basic website migrations and free premium website migrations depending on the hosting plan
• Easily scalable (you can upgrade or downgrade your plans according to the number of visitors you are generating to your sites)
• WooCommerce optimized server environment
• Cloudflare integration with premium features available on all plans (edge caching, early hints, DDOS protection, etc)

Cons of Kinsta hosting:

Here are a few drawbacks of Kinsta hosting.

• Expensive when compared to shared hosting plans from web hosts like Bluehost, Hostinger, ChemiCloud, etc (that being said, Kinsta is a great managed hosting for WordPress, which is worth every penny)
• Limited number of WordPress installations are allowed for basic plans such as Starter (only 1 install) and Pro (only 2 installs)

Final Words: When to Avoid & When to Prefer Kinsta Web Hosting

If you’re looking to migrate your website from your existing host to a better-managed web host, Kinsta can be really a great choice. Or if you’re looking to build a WordPress site on a faster-managed hosting platform, you should definitely consider hosting from Kinsta.

Kinsta is great for everyone, from small business owners to eCommerce sites to large enterprise-level websites as they have suitable hosting plans for everyone.

So what are you waiting for? Did you find our Kinsta review helpful? Have any questions? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

FAQs

Here are a few interesting questions about the Kinsta review that you might want to know in 2023 before opting for their hosting plans.

Read: How to Reduce Bounce Rate for WordPress Sites Easily As A Beginner

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