Kinsta Review: Is the WordPress Hosting Service a Worthy Investment?

When it comes to managed WordPress hosting services, Kinsta is a top contender. They have an excellent reputation for providing feature-rich and user-friendly WordPress hosting powered by Google Cloud’s premium network, which makes their hosting lightning-fast.  However, just because Kinsta has worked exceptionally well for my clients doesn’t mean it will work for you.

That’s why I have written my honest review below covering the advantages and disadvantages of their hosting services. I also discuss areas in which Kinsta can improve.

Why Kinsta has the edge over its Competitors

Guaranteed Uptime

Kinsta comes with an impressive guaranteed uptime of 99.9%, thanks to its high-tech cloud infrastructure backed by its SLA. As a business, you will benefit massively from the continuous monitoring and uptime checks from Kinsta.  If Kinsta can’t fix your error response codes in under half an hour, your account will be credited.

Effortless setup and migration

One of the things that impressed me the most about Kinsta was how easy it was to set up an account. Whether you are a total beginner or a seasoned developer, all it takes is a few seconds for you to create an account and get the ball rolling.  When you create your account, your business will have a dashboard and tons of resources at your disposal.

The follow-up emails showing the steps to connect a website and answering my questions were quite helpful.  Kinsta offers free site migration, which you can request from the dashboard area of your account. Their team of experts will take care of everything without any downtime.  Even though you have the option of manual migration, I recommend leaving it to the pros. You will thank me later.

Lightning-fast WordPress Hosting

Website speed is a search engine ranking factor, and it also plays a huge role in customer experience. As a result, with a faster page loading time, you can achieve higher conversions, decreased bounce rates, better SEO, and lower average site visit duration.  Using Kinsta’s servers, you can achieve impassive response times in the range of 117 ms to 179.5 ms even without any optimization, leading to unmatched loading performance (1.072s).  Kinsta offers the fastest loading speeds in the industry, which helps businesses improve their site’s visual stability, interactivity, and loading.

Highly Secure

Kinsta allows for automatic external backups to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage for a small fee. Additionally, Kinsta provides automatic backups daily, allows up to 5 manual backups per week, and makes event-based backups during instances, such as staging to production.

Unlike other hosting services, the backups are excluded from the permitted disk space usage, meaning that you get as much space as possible.  Further security features include SSL support and hardware firewalls, daily spyware scanning that helps to block code injection & DDoS attacks.

Kinsta also offers free hack fixes, which is great because there are often vulnerabilities with WordPress plugins. Also, their 4 name servers, each having a different website suffix (.org, .net) ensure that your site remains online even if one of the name servers is down.

Built for Growing WordPress Websites

Given Kinsta’s cloud-based architecture, businesses can enjoy the benefit of high scalability. If site traffic surges suddenly, Kinsta’s integration with the Google Compute Engine will ensure that your WordPress will not crash- regardless of the load.  If you exceed the monthly visitor cap of your plan, you will be charged an extra 1$ per every 1000 visits.

Although the support team will notify you when you are at 80% and 100% of the usage. That is a small price to pay to protect your site from crashing when you have a spike through paid traffic or some of your content finally goes viral.  Businesses can further benefit from the Exponential Traffic Spikes and Surge Upgrade if you know your website/ blog will have a massive traffic event.

Technical Support

Kinsta has the best support in the market. This is primarily due to the expert team of WordPress developers and Linux hosting engineers available to its customers throughout the day through live chat and a ticketing solution. I found that in pretty much every query I sent, I got a response within three minutes. Besides, customers can derive a lot of value from the Kinsta blog and Knowledge Base.

Cloud Infrastructure for Maximum Speed

Kinsta’s reliance on Google cloud server hosting means that businesses have super speed, flexibility, scalability, and reliability. As a Kinsta user, you can choose from 24 Google Cloud data center locations. Selecting a data center closest to your audience will ensure maximum site speed. For even more speed, Kinsta users can leverage the premium DNS via Amazon Route 53.

Advanced site management

One of Kinsta’s main advantages has been that it allows businesses to focus on growing their site rather than worrying about technical issues. In addition, they recently added site labeling and renaming features that will help businesses rebrand or run multiple sites.

Site management features, including performance reviews & caching, update management, and simple staging, make testing new WordPress code, plugins, and features super simple.  Businesses can further save time with the array of developer-friendly tools and the user-friendly MyKinsta dashboard.

Disadvantages of Kinsta

Over the years, I have found a few areas where Kinsta can be better, especially when it comes to its premium price tag. While it does come with a starting price of $30 per month, making plan upgrades can end up being a huge overhead for smaller businesses.  Another disadvantage is that Kinsta doesn’t provide email hosting because the company prefers to leave that service to third parties.

Although this is usually the case with managed WordPress hosting, it is worth letting you know.  Another thing that sucks is that Kinsta doesn’t offer telephone support. This is a disadvantage for me because I like to pick up the phone if there is an issue and hear a human voice, especially during a crisis. Although, Kinsta has fairly good chat support that you can rely on. Maybe that’s just a preference thing for me.

Kinsta Pricing 

Kinsta offers 10 plans and the option to get a customized quote if you are an agency or an enterprise client. The pricing for these vary based on,

• The number of WordPress sites/ blogs you want to host
• The number of site visitors to your blog/ website
• The number of PHP workers required
• The amount of disk space you need

Notably, businesses can benefit from free migrations and SSL, CDN, and staging no matter what package they choose. Kinsta partners with KeyCDN and employs technology, such as PHP 7, LXD software containers, MariaDB, and Nginx, to give its users unmatched performance across plans.

Since pricing starts at $30 per month for the Starter pack with 25,000 visits and goes all the way to $1,500 per month for the Enterprise 4 pack with 3,000,000 site visits, it can be a bit daunting for businesses to choose one.

Hosting Plans

• If you run a new website, go with the Pro package that offers 2 WordPress installs for $60 per month.
• If you run a high-traffic website, contact the Kinsta team, and they’ll provide you with a yearly plan for a substantial discount. However, I recommend starting with a monthly plan and moving to an annual package once you understand your requirements.
• If you are moving to Kinsta from another hosting package, make sure you filter out the bot traffic using DNS-level filtering to get an accurate quote based on your monthly page views.

Pros and Cons Summary

My Final Thoughts – is Kinsta WordPress Hosting Worth the Money and Hype?

Kinsta is a value-packed service that can effortlessly fill the hosting needs of every business. The advantages significantly outweigh the disadvantages. They have won me over with the top-notch performance of the server and remarkable customer support.   Your business doesn’t have to spend time worrying about downtime or any other hosting-related technical issues.

Another striking aspect of Kinsta that makes it a must-have is scalability. I found that it effortlessly could handle any level of traffic or website load.   If you are considering managed WordPress hosting services that will provide your website or blog with the optimal hosting environment for growth,  Kinsta is a strong leader in the WordPress hosting arena.