What’s Kinsta WordPress hosting anyway?
What exactly is Kinsta, and what exactly does their WordPress hosting bundle consist of? Also, what sets them apart from every other web hosting plan that is specifically designed for WordPress that is now available?
The power of Google Cloud Platform hosting made available and simple to understand for everyone to use is, in my opinion, the best way to summarise what Kinsta has to offer in just one line.
And I apologise in advance if it comes out as too commercial on my side, but that is really how I feel. For the sake of providing you with a concise illustration of what I mean (before we go into it more extensively later on), it would seem that Kinsta does not believe in the conventional cPanel admin for the purpose of administering your hosting account. Instead, they provide you with their very own bespoke solution, which is considerably simpler to use and takes you directly to the data and metrics that are most relevant to your situation.
But let’s begin from the very beginning shall we? Kinsta WordPress hosting is comprised of the following, behind the hood:
A hosting platform that is completely managed for WordPress. And although I am aware that “managed” is a name that many hosts like to use, it is very clear that Kinsta’s primary emphasis is on taking care of everything management-related on your behalf. The aforementioned administration panel, for instance, does not even have any choices that are directly related to management.
The Google Cloud Platform is what it operates on.
Hosting options at the Business, Enterprise, and Custom levels are provided, depending on the customer’s requirements.
The most basic plan gives you:
- The ability to run one WordPress site
- 10 GB of SSD storage
- Upto 25,000 unique visits/month
- 1 free site migration
- 1440 daily uptime checks per site
- The ability to hook up a CDN of your choice
- Let’s Encrypt support
- HTTP/2 support, PHP 7
- SSH, WP-CLI, Git support
- Automatic database optimization per week to boost the performance.
- Self-healing PHP technology
- Premium DNS management
- You get to choose your data center location
- Staging areas available
- Extensive knowledge base available
What does the Kinsta dashboard look like
I’ve already touched on the nature of the dashboard in the previous paragraph, but now let’s have a look at what it seems to be like from the perspective of a real user:
As you can see, it’s rather different from the ways in which solutions such as cPanel accustomed us to doing things. To put it more simply, the control panel for Kinsta is geared more toward the routine or everyday activities that are associated with your hosting platform, as opposed to the actual management of the server itself.
You have easy access to the following via the panel:
Your websites—this is also where you may tweak the initial configuration, establish new FTP accounts, see your historical backups, add HTTPS, and do a variety of other things.
Site migrations provide a convenient summary of all site migrations performed on your account, as well as the option to carry out further migrations.
DNS settings.
The analytics portion is one that I really like. In addition to the benefits you get from using a script provided by a third party, this one is a welcome bonus.
There are also sections for Billing, Settings, Activity Log, and User Guide.
Our initial impression of Kinsta WordPress hosting
In general, people have a favourable opinion, although there were a few rather minor problems along the road.
To begin, the preparations for the move as well as the migration itself went off without a hitch. The website was hosted on Pagely one day, and then on Kinsta the next day.
(Personally, I wasn’t engaged in any way with the migration process at all. The only reason I realised that anything had changed was because I was updating a post at the same moment that the transfer was taking place. I finished my work, made sure everything was saved, and then reloaded the website, but the changes weren’t there. As it turned out, I worked on those adjustments in the older version, and when I refreshed the whole thing, I noticed Kinsta’s.)
Almost immediately after the shift, we saw a significant decrease in reaction times, which went from around 400 milliseconds to approximately 50 milliseconds.
As you can see, it’s rather different from the ways in which solutions such as cPanel accustomed us to doing things. To put it more simply, the control panel for Kinsta is geared more toward the routine or everyday activities that are associated with your hosting platform, as opposed to the actual management of the server itself.
You have easy access to the following via the panel:
Your websites—this is also where you may tweak the initial configuration, establish new FTP accounts, see your historical backups, add HTTPS, and do a variety of other things.
Site migrations provide a convenient summary of all site migrations performed on your account, as well as the option to carry out further migrations.
DNS settings.
The analytics portion is one that I really like. In addition to the benefits you get from using a script provided by a third party, this one is a welcome bonus.
Even while viewing the site manually, without using any measurement tools, there were clear increases in performance, which is to say that the performance was rather good.
To keep things from sounding too ideal, though, we did also find ourselves with some unforeseen free time. Over the course of only one month, the idle time amounted to a total of 1 hour and 30 minutes.
A few of our UptimeRobot statistics are as follows:
After dependability, performance is maybe the second most crucial quality that a decent WordPress server should have. The main quality should be reliability.
In addition, the speed of websites has been the subject of a significant amount of coverage in the media in recent years. Others are not as persuaded as those who feel that it is essential for search engine optimization. On the other hand, everyone is completely persuaded that having a website that loads quickly is vital for user experience, and this is something that cannot be contested.
Therefore, it was only logical that we anticipated Kinsta to provide an outstanding performance.
And right off the outset, I’ll just come clean and say that we did a poor job with this particular aspect of the project. I mean, the blog isn’t very optimised in terms of the source code that it utilises and the numerous hand-made modifications that have been done to it over the years. I say this because there have been a lot of changes made to it over the years.
Despite this, Kinsta WordPress hosting still manages to load everything in only two seconds, despite the fact that Pingdom gave us many failing grades for our website’s performance. In addition to that, the TTFB that I showed you previously has been reduced by fifty percent (and that including the increase we experienced when switching to SSL).
Performance of Kinsta WordPress hosting
After dependability, performance is maybe the second most crucial quality that a decent WordPress server should have. The main quality should be reliability.
In addition, the speed of websites has been the subject of a significant amount of coverage in the media in recent years. Others are not as persuaded as those who feel that it is essential for search engine optimization. On the other hand, everyone is completely persuaded that having a website that loads quickly is vital for user experience, and this is something that cannot be contested.
Therefore, it was only logical that we anticipated Kinsta to provide an outstanding performance.
And right off the outset, I’ll just come clean and say that we did a poor job with this particular aspect of the project. I mean, the blog isn’t very optimised in terms of the source code that it utilises and the numerous hand-made modifications that have been done to it over the years. I say this because there have been a lot of changes made to it over the years.
Despite this, Kinsta WordPress hosting still manages to load everything in only two seconds, despite the fact that Pingdom gave us many failing grades for our website’s performance. In addition to that, the TTFB that I showed you previously has been reduced by fifty percent (and that including the increase we experienced when switching to SSL).
What hosting survey data says about Kinsta
A while back, we carried out a poll that ended up being the most comprehensive one of its kind about WordPress hosting currently available. The findings have provided us with a wealth of new understanding, and as a consequence, we’ve utilised them as the basis for the data in many publications since we first published them.
Despite the fact that Kinsta only received a few replies to the poll, every single one of them was quite favourable. In point of fact, they were so encouraging that we decided to investigate the origin of those entries and see if there was anything shady going on behind the scenes. There was none of it.
Summary. Kinsta provides managed WordPress hosting that is both quick and dependable, and it’s built on Google Cloud Platform. Users seem to like it, and it is undoubtedly one of the WordPress firms that has had the quickest growth over the last two years.
The following is a compilation of the ratings that our survey participants gave Kinsta:
How easy it is to get started with Kinsta
After you have signed up, you will have two choices available to you: the first is to build a new site, and the second is to migrate an existing site.
Beginning a new one is a very straightforward process. Simply go to your user panel, pick the “Sites” tab, and then click the “Add Site” button. At this point, you are required to provide us some fundamental information, including:
The process of migrating an existing site is just as straightforward, although it does require providing Kinsta with additional information about your present installation. But it’s really a good thing; it just means that Kinsta wants to understand all the ins and outs of your website before transferring it onto their servers, hence lowering the possibility of it failing during the migration process.
After you have finished filling out the form, Kinsta will take over and handle the remainder of the procedure on your behalf.
What makes Kinsta different from the competition
From my point of view, everything boils down to the following:
Kinsta provides you with the strength of a huge hosting platform (namely, Google Cloud Platform), but it does it in a very simple and straightforward manner, to the point where you don’t even need to be aware of anything that’s going on behind the scenes.
The WordPress hosting provided by Kinsta has performance that has been tuned and is ready to handle any traffic surges you may send its way.
It provides excellent safety while at the same time ensuring that everything is consistently backed up.
Lastly, but certainly not least, it seems that they take a straightforward approach to the characteristics of their servers, as well as the performance and bandwidth measurements that are guaranteed.
The rather simple staging environment that Kinsta provides is one of the few areas in which we have found it to fall short. In a nutshell, the only choice available is to move everything over to live. You can’t merely relocate the files or the database, for example; that’s not possible. If you are working on an existing site and only want to alter a few of things about it, you won’t find this to be very useful. However, I suppose it’s OK for relatively new websites.
For the purpose of providing you with a more comprehensive understanding of Kinsta’s position in the industry, the following is a comparison of some of the most popular managed hosting solutions:
How much it costs in practice
You may have taken note of the price column in the table that was shown earlier…
The answer is yes, the cost of WordPress hosting with Kinsta is rather more than the cost of hosting through other providers.
Even the most basic plan will cost you back a minimum of $29.17 a month, and the prices only go up from there, making it difficult to choose the right one.
The authorised amount of free bandwidth is another important factor to take into consideration in these price tables. Since we are on the Business 2 plan, we are able to get up to 250,000 visitors every month. If I had to speak from my experience, I would say that this is not all that much for the price, and for a website that receives a substantial amount of traffic, it is possible that it will be depleted pretty fast. The issue with bandwidth gets even more problematic when you consider that this plan permits you to host up to ten different sites.
You are in luck since your plan includes some CDN integration, which will be beneficial in light of the fact that the majority of your static traffic will be routed via the CDN rather than through your expensive Kinsta bandwidth. Just the CodeinWP blog accounts for our monthly use of 241 GB of content delivery network bandwidth.
Overage fees, which are sometimes referred to as the “silent killer” of hosting costs, are not nearly as severe with Kinsta as they are with other web hosts. If you go over the allotted amount of bandwidth, you won’t lose access to the service or anything like that; rather, you will be charged an additional $1 per 1,000 visits. Because our prior hosting platform consisted of a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with 4 terabytes of bandwidth, we never had to worry about exceeding that limit.
If your website is modest enough, you should be able to get by just fine with the free bandwidth that is included in your Kinsta account. On the other hand, if your website is already rather popular, you will very soon learn how little 100,000 or 200,000 unique visitors really are.
Should you choose Kinsta?
It should come as no surprise that Kinsta WordPress hosting is not suitable for everyone.
To tell you the truth, it’s probably not the greatest choice for websites that are just getting started or that get a very little amount of traffic.
There are some circumstances, on the other hand, in which you will be able to profit tremendously from what Kinsta has to offer.
Use Kinsta WordPress hosting if:
