A fully managed WordPress hosting platform. And I know that “managed” is a label that many hosts like to use, but with Kinsta, their focus on handling everything management-related for you is very apparent. For example, the admin mentioned above panel doesn’t even have any purely management-like options.
What is Kinsta? Why it is so expensive?
Kinsta is a leading WordPress hosting provider and stands out from the competition with its exceptional features and performance. In this comprehensive review, we will explore why Kinsta is considered the best WordPress hosting solution and how it can benefit your website. As a premium WordPress hosting provider, it offers various hosting solutions for websites of all sizes.
In this Kinsta review, we’ll look at what differentiates Kinsta from other hosting services and why it might be the best option for your WordPress website.
Features of Kinsta
Kinsta specializes in managed WordPress hosting, which means they take care of all the technical aspects of hosting, including server management, security, updates, and backups. With the backend infrastructure taken care of, website owners can concentrate on their content and company.
Kinsta offers a wide range of features that contribute to its position as the best WordPress hosting solution. Let’s explore some of the key features that set Kinsta apart from its competitors:
Unmatched Performance
One of the key features of Kinsta is its focus on performance. Kinsta uses cutting-edge technologies and the Google Cloud Platform to provide unrivaled speed and performance. Kinsta ensures that websites hosted on their platform load quickly, giving users a fantastic browsing experience, thanks to robust server infrastructure, innovative server-level caching, and a global CDN integration backed by Cloudflare.
Google Cloud Platform
Kinsta utilizes the highest-end C2 instances available on the Google Cloud Platform. These instances are powered by Intel Cascade Lake CPUs, which provide exceptional processing power and computational capabilities. By employing these high-performance instances, Kinsta assures that websites hosted on its platform can withstand big workloads and traffic spikes without sacrificing speed or performance.
They also take advantage of Google Cloud Platform’s Premium Tier network. This network infrastructure ensures that connections between hosting servers and visitors worldwide are faster and more dependable. The Premium Tier network, which consists of a huge network of data centers ideally located across the world, decreases latency, minimizes packet loss, and optimizes data routing, resulting in increased website performance and a seamless user experience.
LXD Containerization
Kinsta isolates and manages individual WordPress sites within their hosting environment using LXD containerization technology. LXD offers lightweight virtualization, allowing the managed wordpress hosting provider to commit resources to each website while maintaining optimum security and performance. The usage of LXD containers enables efficient resource allocation, eliminates the danger of resource contention among sites, and improves the hosting environment’s general stability and reliability.
Server-Level Caching
Kinsta leverages server-level caching technologies such as Nginx FastCGI caching to reduce server load while boosting response times for dynamic content. Kinsta reduces the need for resource-intensive database queries by caching frequently accessed material at the server level, resulting in faster page loads and increased performance.
HTTP/3 Protocol
Kinsta embraces the latest network protocol, HTTP/3, which is designed to enhance website performance by reducing latency and improving data transfer efficiency. By utilizing HTTP/3, Kinsta optimizes the communication between the hosting server and visitors’ browsers, resulting in faster and more reliable connections.
Latest Versions of PHP
Kinsta always stays up-to-date with the latest PHP versions, including PHP 8.2. In addition to benefiting from the performance improvements and security enhancements introduced in the latest PHP releases, Kinsta has implemented self-healing PHP technology to ensure the stability and reliability of PHP processes running on their hosting platform. It automatically detects the issue and restarts the PHP process, minimizing downtime and ensuring uninterrupted website performance.
It provides users with the ability to restart PHP and make changes as needed. This level of flexibility allows users to fine-tune their PHP configuration, adjust PHP settings, and troubleshoot issues that may arise due to specific PHP requirements or compatibility.
High-Performance Cloudflare CDN
Kinsta seamlessly integrates with Cloudflare’s Content Delivery Network (CDN), leveraging its extensive network of servers worldwide. This integration ensures that static content is cached and delivered efficiently from the nearest edge server, reducing latency and improving website performance across the globe.
- NEW Edge Caching: Edge caching stores static content, such as images, CSS files, and JavaScript files, in multiple edge locations worldwide. This approach significantly reduces latency and improves website speed by delivering cached content from the closest edge location to the visitor, regardless of their geographical location.
- Automatic Image Optimization: Kinsta integrates Cloudflare CDN to provide automatic image optimization behind the scene and deliver a compressed image directly to the user.
- Automatic File Optimization: In addition to image optimization, Kinsta utilizes Cloudflare CDN for file optimization as well. This includes optimizing CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript files to reduce their size and improve their delivery to visitors’ browsers.
By minimizing the file sizes of these assets, Kinsta enhances the website’s loading speed and ensures a smoother user experience. This optimization process is automated, eliminating the need for manual file optimization and streamlining the website optimization workflow.
NEW Continuous Database Optimization
Kinsta implements continuous database optimization techniques to ensure that database queries are executed efficiently. Continuous Database Optimization happens continuously for 24 hrs and allows WordPress to make its database operate more efficiently. By optimizing database performance and reducing query execution time, Kinsta enhances overall website speed and responsiveness.
These components work to optimize resource utilization, network connectivity, and website isolation, resulting in lightning-fast loading times, increased scalability, and a stable hosting environment for WordPress websites.
NEW Early Hints
Kinsta makes use of the Early Hints functionality, which allows web servers to transmit important resources to the browser before they are explicitly requested. It decreases observed page load time and enhances the overall browsing experience for users by proactively providing key assets such as CSS and JavaScript files.
Also Read: BunnyCDN Review in 2023: Simple, Fast, and Affordable CDN for WordPress
Security
When it comes to security, Kinsta has got you covered. Kinsta takes website security seriously, employing a multi-layered security strategy to safeguard sensitive data. They have implemented a range of features to keep your website safe from potential threats. The latter secures your website against potential threats with hardware firewalls, DDoS detection, uptime monitoring, and free SSL certificates.
Let’s take a closer look at Kinsta’s security measures in simple and easy-to-understand terms:
Cloudflare DDoS Detection
Kinsta has integrated Cloudflare’s DDoS detection technology into its hosting platform. This means that if your website is targeted by a DDoS attack (a type of cyber attack that overwhelms your site with a flood of traffic), Kinsta’s systems will be able to identify and mitigate the attack, ensuring that your website remains accessible to genuine visitors.
Uptime Monitoring
Kinsta closely monitors your website’s uptime, which refers to how often your site is up and running without any interruptions. With Kinsta, your website’s uptime is monitored continuously with 1440 daily checks. This ensures that if any downtime occurs, Kinsta’s team can promptly address the issue and get your website back online as quickly as possible.
Free SSL Certificates
Kinsta provides free SSL certificates for your website. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a security protocol that encrypts the data transmitted between your visitors’ browsers and your website. By enabling SSL, Kinsta ensures that sensitive information, such as login credentials or credit card details, is encrypted and protected from potential eavesdropping or tampering.
Malware Security Pledge & Free Hack Fix
Kinsta takes a proactive approach to protect your website from malware and malicious attacks. They have a dedicated team that constantly monitors their infrastructure and takes steps to prevent malware from infecting your website. In the unlikely event that your site does get infected, Kinsta pledges to clean it up for you, free of charge.
In the unfortunate event of a website hack, Kinsta offers a free hack fix service. Their team of experts will work diligently to identify and remove any malicious code or unauthorized access points. By providing this service at no additional cost, Kinsta ensures that your website is quickly restored to its secure and functional state.
Another significant advantage of Kinsta is its commitment to security. The company has several measures in place to protect your website from hacking and other security threats, including regular security audits, two-factor authentication, and automatic malware scanning.
With these security features in place, Kinsta provides peace of mind, allowing you to focus on running your website without worrying about potential security threats.
Also Read: Mastering WordPress SEO with Rank Math: An In-Depth Review of the Ultimate Plugin
Backup
In addition to their robust security measures, Kinsta understands the importance of backups in safeguarding your website’s data. They have implemented a comprehensive backup system to ensure that your website’s content and configurations are regularly backed up and can be easily restored if needed.
Kinsta’s backup system offers the following key features:
- Automatic Daily Backup: Kinsta automatically creates backups of your website daily. This means that you don’t have to worry about manually initiating backups or remembering to perform them regularly. Kinsta takes care of it for you, ensuring that your data is consistently protected.
- 14-Day Backup Retention: Kinsta retains your backup files for a generous period of 14 days. This allows you to access and restore multiple versions of your website if necessary. Whether you need to retrieve a deleted file or revert to a previous version of your site, Kinsta’s backup retention period gives you the flexibility to do so.
- One-Click Restore: Restoring your website from a backup is made effortless with Kinsta’s one-click restore feature. In case of any unexpected issues or data loss, you can easily navigate to your backup section in the Kinsta dashboard and initiate a full website restore with just a single click. This ensures that your website can quickly get back up and running without significant downtime. You can also restore your backup to staging or another website as well.
- Manual Backup: Alongside automatic daily backups, Kinsta allows you to create manual backup points whenever needed. This feature is particularly useful when you’re about to make significant changes to your website or perform updates. By creating a manual backup point, you can have a restore point that captures your website’s state at that specific moment, providing an extra layer of protection.
- Off-Site Backup Storage: Kinsta securely stores your backup files in an off-site location. This ensures that even in the rare event of a hardware failure or data center issue, your backups are safe and accessible for restoration. Storing backups off-site adds an extra layer of protection and ensures the integrity of your data.
With automatic daily backups, generous retention periods, one-click restore functionality, manual backup points, and off-site storage, Kinsta ensures that your website’s content and configurations are safeguarded against data loss and can be easily recovered in the event of an unforeseen incident.
Scalability
In addition to its security, performance, and backup features, Kinsta also offers scalability to accommodate the growth and changing needs of your website.
Scalability refers to the ability to easily scale your website’s resources as your traffic and demands increase and they provide a scalable hosting environment that ensures your website can handle high volumes of traffic without compromising performance or stability.
Kinsta makes it easy to adjust your hosting resources based on your website’s requirements. You can start with a lower-tier plan and upgrade to a higher-tier plan as your traffic increases or your website’s resource needs evolve. Kinsta’s scalability features provide the necessary infrastructure to handle increased resource requirements while maintaining optimal performance and user experience.v
Kinsta’s scalability features are designed to help you keep your website running smoothly, even as your traffic and resource requirements grow. If you’re looking for a hosting solution that can grow your business, Kinsta is a great option.
Advanced Developer Tools
Kinsta caters to the needs of developers by providing a range of developer-friendly features and tools. These features empower developers to have full control over their websites, streamline their development workflow, and optimize the performance of their WordPress projects. Here are some of the developer features offered by Kinsta:
Staging Environment
This allows developers to create a separate copy of their website for testing and development purposes. This is a great way to experiment with changes, test new features, or troubleshoot issues without affecting the live site. Kinsta offers multiple staging environments for additional costs.
Git Integration
Kinsta integrates with popular version control systems like Git, making it easy for developers to manage and deploy code changes. This helps to ensure that code changes are tracked and can be easily reverted if necessary.
SSH Access
Kinsta provides SSH access, which gives developers direct access to their website’s files and server configuration. This allows developers to perform advanced tasks that would not be possible through the Kinsta dashboard.
WP-CLI Support
Kinsta supports WP-CLI, a command-line tool that can be used to manage WordPress installations. This can be a great way to automate repetitive tasks and perform bulk operations.
Advanced caching options
Kinsta offers advanced caching options that can help to improve website performance. These options include object caching, page caching, and CDN integration.
PHP engine options: Kinsta allows developers to choose their preferred PHP engine version. This is important because different PHP versions offer different features and performance characteristics.
Server-level redirects: Kinsta provides server-level redirect options, which makes it easy for developers to manage redirects. This can be useful for redirecting old URLs to new URLs, or for redirecting traffic from one domain to another.
DevKinsta
DevKinsta is a local development tool created by Kinsta specifically for WordPress developers. It provides a local development environment where developers can build and test their WordPress websites on their computers before deploying them to a live server. DevKinsta streamlines the development process by providing a simple and user-friendly interface along with powerful features.
24×7 Expert Support
One potential downside of Kinsta is its pricing. Kinsta is a premium hosting provider, so its plans are not as cheap as some other options on the market. However, the company does offer a 14-day free trial, so you can try out its services before committing to a plan.
Overall, Kinsta is a top-tier managed WordPress hosting provider that offers fast performance, security, and a range of other useful features. While its pricing may be higher than some alternatives, the company’s commitment to quality and support makes it a great choice for severe WordPress users.
Kinsta Datacenter Locations
As we already know Kinsta uses Google Cloud’s most powerful C2 Compute Engine VMs for our websites, we can deploy our websites in any region where Google Cloud is available directly from our Kinsta Dashboard. With the multi-regional deployment, we can easily launch our website closest to our visitors.
- Montréal, Canada
- Toronto, Canada
- Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA
- Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA
- Ashburn, Virginia, USA
- Columbus, Ohio, USA
- Dallas, Texas, USA
- The Dalles, Oregon, USA
- Los Angeles, California, USA
- Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
- Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
- São Paulo, Brazil
- Santiago, Chile
- Mumbai, India
- Delhi, India
- Changhua County, Taiwan
- Hong Kong
- Tokyo, Japan
- Osaka, Japan
- Seoul, South Korea
- Singapore
- Jakarta, Indonesia
- Warsaw, Poland
- Hamina, Finland
- Madrid, Spain
- St. Ghislain, Belgium
- London, United Kingdom
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Eemshaven, Netherlands
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Milan, Italy
- Paris, France
- Sydney, Australia
- Melbourne, Australia
- Doha, Qatar
- Mexico
Kinsta Pricing: Worth it or not?
Loaded with every needed feature for a WordPress website, the managed hosting provider is quite expensive compared to the competitors.
Kinsta offers a range of pricing plans designed to cater to the diverse needs of website owners, from small businesses and bloggers to large enterprises. Their pricing structure is based on several factors, including the number of WordPress installations, monthly visits, disk space, and most importantly “PHP Workers“
In addition to the previously mentioned pricing options, Kinsta provides Single Site plans for individuals or businesses who want to host a single WordPress website. These plans are intended to give a cost-effective solution while maintaining Kinsta’s performance and functionality. Here are some highlights of Kinsta’s Single Site plans:
With essential features, resource allocation specific to a single website, scalability options, and an easy-to-use management interface, Kinsta ensures that your single site receives top-notch performance, security, and support.
Kinsta’s pricing is transparent, with no additional costs or added costs for essential features. The pricing structure is graded based on the website’s specific needs and resources. They also give you the option to upgrade or downgrade your package as your website grows or your needs change.
Wrapping Up
Kinsta stands as the ultimate WordPress hosting solution, offering unparalleled performance, robust security measures, and seamless scalability. With advanced technologies like Google Cloud Platform, edge caching, and HTTP/3, Kinsta ensures lightning-fast page loads and exceptional user experience. Its comprehensive security features, including DDoS detection, uptime monitoring, and free SSL certificates, safeguard your website from potential threats.
Moreover, Kinsta’s developer-friendly tools and seamless integration with Cloudflare CDN empower developers to optimize their websites. Choose Kinsta today and unlock the full potential of your WordPress site with a hosting solution trusted by thousands of satisfied customers.
Hope you liked our review on Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting. Please feel free to post any doubts in the comments section below!