Is Kinsta WordPress Hosting worth the money?
TL;DR: After seven years of hosting multiple WordPress websites with Kinsta, ranging from 1,000 to 400,000 visits per month, I am still in love.
Kinsta's WordPress hosting is lightning fast and ideal for medium-large websites who want the absolute best hosting possible, with premium security and top-notch customer support.
It's not for someone looking for cheap hosting to get a website started.
When I started my first ever website over 14 years ago, I picked the cheapest hosting I could find.
After all, I just wanted to get started. Not to mention I was in high school and broke!
I tried BlueHost, GoDaddy and HostGator.
They're great to get started, but they offer very little in terms of speed and security.
As soon as I grew a site past a few thousand visits per month, I knew I needed something better.
Enter: Kinsta.
What is Kinsta WordPress Hosting?
Kinsta offers premium, fully-managed WordPress hosting.
Unlike shared WordPress hosting like BlueHost or HostGator, you get a dedicated server for your website(s) with Kinsta that you don't share with anyone else.
This means faster speeds and better security.
Additionally, Kinsta uses Google Cloud Platform for their hosting, which means you get a beautiful and incredibly easy-to-navigate dashboard for all your websites.
That's right—gone are the days of navigating ugly and confusing cPanels! Just look at this wonderful dashboard:
Even the most basic plan gives you:
What Do You Get with Kinsta Hosting?
If an extremely fast website, fewer website management tasks, and less downtime to worry about all sound appealing to you, Kinsta WordPress hosting might be right for you.
But in case you need more convincing, let's take a look at what else you get:
Use of the Google Cloud Platform
Kinsta's main benefit is it's use of the Google Cloud Platform. This means your WordPress websites are hosted on the infrastructure created and maintained by Google. No other managed WordPress hosting providers use this tool.
Being a Google Cloud Platform partner allows Kinsta to host your website on state-of-the-art infrastructure with the choice of 21 global data centers — and more on the way.
So if your website randomly goes viral and you get a huge surge of traffic? You're covered. That traffic will all be routed to the nearest server, ensuring uptime and the highest possible speeds.
Automatic WordPress Website Backups
One of Kinsta's extra security features is it's automatic website backups. They create daily backups of all your websites that you can easily revert to with the click of a button.
You can also upgrade to six-hour and hourly backups for an extra monthly fee, if you tend to make frequent changes and need the extra protection.
Of course, you're able to manually create a backup at any time as well.
WordPress Website Staging Service
All Kinsta plans include free access to a staging environment where you can test any changes before pushing them to your live site, such as adding or removing plugins, themes, or any code edits.
Once you're happy with the changes on your test site, you can push them to your live site with the press of a button.
Developers will also appreciate the ability to switch between different PHP versions, easy restarting of the PHP engine, and access to the New Relic PHP monitoring tool.
There’s also a search-and-replace feature that’s accessible from the Kinsta dashboard for making changes to the contents of your WordPress website database.
Kinsta Review: Performance, Price & Customer Service
Now that you understand what you're getting with Kinsta, let's look at how well it actually performs, how much that performance costs, and how good their customer service really is.
Kinsta Web Hosting Performance
Kinsta is lightning fast. In fact, it's one of, if not the, fastest managed WordPress hosting providers in the world. But don't take my word for it - ThemeIsle did a direct comparison of the top seven fastest hosting providers and found that Kinsta had a fantastic combination of speed, performance, and uptime.
Here are their test results:
When it comes to web hosting performance, Kinsta won't let you down. They provide a fast site speed and have a 100% uptime, beating many other Managed WordPress hosting services such as WP Engine or SiteGround.
Plans & Pricing
Kinsta's basic, one-site web hosting plan starts at $30 per month, which is a steal for managed WordPress hosting.
From there, it goes all the way up to $1,500 per month, depending on how much bandwidth, site traffic, and overall number of WordPress sites you need hosting for.
Click here to view their pricing plans page.
Every plan also comes with a free SSL and CDN. Their CDN (Content Delivery Network) is excellent, and means you don't need to use a separate CDN like Cloudflare to further speed up your WordPress site.
I'm personally on the "Business 4" plan, which hosts up to 600,000 visits and gives you 60 GB of disk space. I haven't been dissapointed on this plan so far.
Customer Support
Let's put it this way:
I've needed help dozens of times, for everything from accessing my FTP server to fixing my SSL certificate, figuring out what I did wrong that broke the site, fixing redirects, and much, much more.
Every single time, they answered me within a few minutes with the exact thing I needed. I've never been dissapointed by Kinsta's customer service.
They even did all the legwork to move over several of my websites from other hosting providers!
Kinsta Pros & Cons
So Kinsta WordPress hosting is fast and has excellent customer service. These are obviously pros, which I'll talk about below. But Kinsta does still have a few cons you should know about as well.
Pros
Cons
The Verdict: Who is Kinsta Premium WordPress Hosting for?
If you're interested in a faster and more reliable host for your WordPress website, I can geniunely say there is none better than Kinsta.
While they are more expensive than entry-level shared hosting, the benefits vastly outweight the costs in my opinion. Not only will your website have better load times, you also get a free CDN, a staging environment to test changes, a free SSL, live chat and email support, and server side caching.
Not to mention the Google Cloud Platform that gives you the data center closest to where you and your visitors are located!
Kinsta offers so much bang for it's buck, the only person I can't recommend it to is the person who truly can't afford it or doesn't need fast hosting.
If you are serious about your online business and want to take your site to the next level, Kinsta is for you.
Besides, it has a 30-day money back guarantee, so what have you got to lose?
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