Kinsta WordPress Hosting Review 2024: Is Kinsta Worth It?

Would you like to manage the security of your WordPress website?

Kinsta WordPress Hosting is a managed WordPress hosting provider powered by Google Cloud Platform that fulfills all your needs regarding your website.

The performance and managed WordPress hosting standards are raised by Kinsta.

Kinsta could be the right web hosting for you if you’re looking for fast loading times, fewer website management tasks, and less downtime.

A cloud-based provider, Kinsta provides managed WordPress hosting options with a ton of server resources and optimization that you won’t find anywhere else.

It offers all of the benefits of a cloud-based host in terms of speed and scalability. Kinsta has a simple user interface and a lot of useful WordPress management tools.

Kinsta has a simple user interface and a lot of useful WordPress management tools.

In this Kinsta WordPress Hosting Review, let’s check out exactly what you will get with Kinsta Web Hosting.

Table of Contents

Kinsta WordPress Hosting Review: Is Kinsta Worth It?

What is Kinsta?

Kinsta is a WordPress hosting company that specializes in managed WordPress hosting. It offers Amazing support, and enterprise infrastructure optimized for WordPress.

Kinsta’s offering could be summarized as follows:

The power of Google Cloud Platform hosting made it accessible and understandable for anyone looking for dependable web hosting services.

Is Kinsta Worth It?

If you have the funds, Kinsta’s managed WordPress hosting plans are well worth the money.

If you want to run something other than WordPress and want a premium hosting experience, check out its Liquid Web.

Is Kinsta Shared Hosting?

Kinsta does not offer shared hosting. They are the only provider that uses container-based infrastructure from entry-level plans up through our top Enterprise plans.

This means that a site can grow with Kinsta without ever having to go through major infrastructure migrations.

Where is Kinsta Located?

Budapest, London, and West Hollywood are all home to Kinsta’s offices. If you’re curious about where their data centers are located, they use Google cloud infrastructure and have data centers in almost every country.

It is a fully managed WordPress hosting service for businesses of all sizes.

Kinsta WordPress Hosting

When it comes to managed WordPress hosting, 2 hosts are there- WP Engine and Kinsta. They cost almost similar amounts, but Kinsta is certainly more scalable, developer-friendly, and straightforward as well as its features are easy to use.

Kinsta Web Hosting

Kinsta, founded in 2013, has been working to become the hosting provider of choice for WordPress users who are prepared to look beyond marketing campaigns and want low prices for fast and secure services for their websites.

Its Web Hosting is not only taking care of some aspects of managing a WordPress website for you, but they also host your site in an environment that’s optimized for WordPress websites.

With Kinsta-managed WordPress hosting, you can expect faster website loading times, as well as less downtime and fewer performance issues compared with generic web hosting.

Furthermore, as Kinsta only offer to host WordPress websites, all of their support staff are highly experienced at helping WordPress users and are also experts at solving problems related to this software.

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Kinsta Features

Reasons, Why Kinsta Is a Good Hosting Solution

Let’s go through some of the biggest features of hosting with this Kinsta WordPress Hosting Review. These features will certainly save time when it comes to maintaining, managing, and updating your WordPress Website.

1. Custom Hosting Dashboard

Kinsta gives you its easy-to-use hosting dashboard. You’ll manage all aspects of your site from this dashboard, and it also lets you access detailed analytics.

2. Security Hardening, Plus A Hack Fix Guarantee

Kinsta puts in place several rules to help keep your WordPress site. You will get proactive security features like:

Hardware firewalls
DDoS detection
Uptime monitoring
GCP Firewall
Self Healing PHP

The Google Cloud Platform machines are available to all customers to boost performance in great measure.

3. Server-Level Caching

Kinsta implements caching at the server level; that’s why you will no longer need a caching plugin.

Specifically, Kinsta implements four types of caching:

Page cache – this is what most people think of when you say “WordPress caching.”
Bytecode cache
Object cache
CDN cache

While Kinsta does eliminate the need for a caching plugin, it still lets you control your cache from your WordPress dashboard via the new Kinsta Cache option in your dashboard menu.

**From this interface, you can easily clear your cache and can enter specific URLs to purge whenever you update part of your site automatically

4. Automatic Backups With Storage

With Kinsta, you can benefit from the security of backups without any effort on your part, which is a great feature of Kinsta Hosting. Kinsta automatically backs up your site every day. And it then stores those backups for 14 days.

If needed, you can also run manual backups at any time. You get 5 manual backups at a time, with each manual backup also getting 14 days of storage.

This hosting also automatically takes a backup when you perform certain actions, like moving your site from staging to production. To restore from any of these backups, it’s as simple as clicking a button. You can either restore it straight to your live server or to your staging site.

5. Easy Staging Sites

Kinsta makes it easy to access the duplicate staging version of your site at any time. It lets you safely test out changes or updates to your site before applying those changes to the live version of your site.

Your staging environment gives you many of the same options as your live environment. Kinsta will automatically back up your live site whenever you do this so that you can easily undo the changes if needed.

6. Free And Easy SSL Certificate

In today’s age, an SSL certificate and HTTPS are essential for all WordPress sites, not just sites processing payment information.

HTTPS is for :

Makes your site more secure.
Boosts trust with your visitors.
Helps you rank higher on Google.

You will have this benefit with Kinsta Hosting because you can easily install a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt via your Kinsta dashboard:

7. Free, Built-in CDN Via KeyCDN

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) speeds up your site’s page load times around the world.

You don’t need to pay for CDN separately because Kinsta has partnered with KeyCDN to give you free access to KeyCDN’s premium CDN service (the amount of free bandwidth depends on your plan).

Beyond that, you can also create new CDN zones right from your Kinsta dashboard rather than using an external interface.

8. Kinsta Analytics

What’s happening at your site, you can easily observe. Kinsta gives you access to a detailed Analytics tab in your Kinsta dashboard that includes tons of analytics features:

Basic usage, including top requests by bytes and views
CDN usage
Mobile vs. desktop traffic
PHP throughput
Response codes, including a list of all your pages that generate 404 errors
Cache hits vs. bypasses
Geo and IP-based data

9. Live Chat Support 24/7

If you need help or have an issue to solve, Kinsta offers 24/7 live chat support via the in-dashboard Intercom widget. The nice thing about the Intercom widget vs. traditional live chat implementations is that:

You can browse around your dashboard without losing your chat. It means you can dig into a dashboard area without trying to play hide and seek with your live chat window.

If you ever need to pull up one of your old chats later, you can do it right from the same widget because your chat logs are stored by default. Kinsta does not offer phone support.

10. Free Premium DNS

Most domain registrars’ free DNS service is slow, while premium DNS services are much faster. As with CDNs, Kinsta gives you access to the benefits of premium DNS without requiring you to pay, thanks to built-in premium DNS via Amazon Route 53.

You’ll also be able to manage and add DNS records right from your Kinsta dashboard:

11. Easy Team Management Features

Kinsta includes team features that let you:

Control which features specific users have access to.
Give users access to all sites on your account or just specific sites.
Beyond that, you also get an activity log that lets you track all of your users’ actions.

12. Easy Redirects Via The Kinsta Dashboard

Kinsta does not use the Apache Web Server that many shared WordPress hosts use, which means that you won’t configure your site’s redirects using Apache’s .htaccess file.

Besides, Kinsta gives you a simple in-dashboard tool to create and manage both 301 (permanent) and 302 (temporary) redirects:

You can also bulk import or export redirects, which is helpful if you need to redirect several pages.

13. Two-Factor Authentication For Your Kinsta Account

If someone were to access your hosting administrator account, all of your sites are concerned about the authentication.
To keep your Kinsta hosting account secure, Kinsta lets you enable two-factor authentication.

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Exploring Kinsta Dashboard

Kinsta has an intuitive dashboard to manage all your WordPress sites. The Kinsta dashboard follows the design philosophy symbolic of the WordPress dashboard that we all love and want to get started with a secure hosting service.

Much like the WordPress admin dashboard, you get your main options on the blue sidebar on the left. Each module has its sub-settings that follow a similar design layout.

Kinsta dashboard covers site management, WordPress backups, site analytics, billing, support, and user management.

Kinsta Site Management Module

The Site management module in the MyKinsta dashboard gives you the external access information of your site, including sFTP, SSH, and database access, including phpMyAdmin. You can easily change your SFTP and phpMyAdmin passwords with a click of a button.

The first thing you notice is the green LIVE icon prominently displayed across each sub-module across the MyKinsta dashboard. You can switch to the STAGING environment by clicking on Change Environment at the top right corner.

Domain Management in MyKinsta

The Domains tab lets you manage domains that map to your WordPress installation. You can add/remove domains and configure primary and secondary domains for your site.

You can also take advantage of Kinsta’s temporary URL (Sitename. kind of. cloud) if you wanted to test your site before migrating it over.

Kinsta WordPress Management Tools

WordPress Management Tools of Kinsta is the most prominent feature that enables you to do tedious tasks in a few clicks. Some of them are already discussed before. Here, going to explore the rest of them:

PHP Engine: Kinsta offers you PHP versions of the latest one. You can select any version using this tool. PHP 7 is incredibly faster than its predecessor.

Restart PHP: When you modify your PHP version or face a plugin or theme conflict, often, a simple PHP restart can help. Using this option, you can restart PHP without logging in to your site via SSH directly from the Kinsta dashboard.

New Relic Monitoring: New Relic is an application monitoring service meant for advanced users who want to monitor their WordPress site performance at extremely granular levels.

Kinsta offers direct integration with New Relic, which can be enabled with a simple API key. Their support team can also enable New Relic on their end for you temporarily.

Search and Replace: This tool enables you to find and replace any value in your WordPress database. This is a potent function and needs to be used with extreme caution.

You have to first switch to the staging environment, take a manual backup of your site, and then use this tool.

Apart from these tools, Kinsta offers performance enhancement tools such as CDN, server-level redirection rules, and raw access logs.

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WordPress Backups with Kinsta

Taking regular backups of our WordPress Website is much more important. The professionalism with which Kinsta WordPress Hosting approaches WordPress backups will undoubtedly impress you.

Backups Daily: First off, Kinsta automatically creates a backup of your WordPress site every day. It can be restored with just one click. Backups are kept for two weeks.

Manual Backup Process: Up to 5 manual backups are possible that are also stored for two weeks.

Backups You Can Download: You can also make a weekly downloadable backup, which’s valid for 24 hours from the time of backup creation. This is helpful in case you want to keep a separate backup of your site outside of Kinsta.

System Generated Backups: Apart from daily backups, Kinsta will automatically generate backups of your site when you perform any of these events:

(i) use the search-replace tool from the MyKinsta dashboard, (ii) push a STAGING environment LIVE, and (iii) restore a backup to your LIVE environment. System-generated backups are also retained for 14 days.

Hourly Backups: For high-traffic and mission-critical websites, Kinsta offers more frequent backup options. You can back up a site every six hours for an additional $50/site/month, and hourly backups cost $100/site/month.

Besides the user-accessible backups, Kinsta also stores persistent disk snapshots of every machine in their infrastructure every 4 hours for 24 hours and then every 24 hours beyond for two weeks.

Kinsta Plans & Pricing

Like most other managed-to-host providers, the thing you will notice about Kinsta is that it’s not cheap. But Kinsta always follows the standards of user experience with its provided design & features.

Kinsta’s Starter plan costs $30/month and includes one WordPress site, 20,000 visits, one free migration, and 50 GB of CDN bandwidth. This hosting offers a 30-day money-back guarantee and varying quotas of supported sites, free migrations, and CDN bandwidth in all their plans.

Kinsta’s plans are divided into three categories:

Starter & Pro Plans: $30-$60/month supporting 20-40k visits/month.
Business Plans 1-4: $100-$400/month supporting 100-600k visits/month
Enterprise Plans 1-4: $600-$1500/month supporting 1-3M visits/month

Anything higher requires custom enterprise plans.

Some plans, you will get with the default features that are available in all Kinsta hosting plans:

Free CDN with variable bandwidth
Free SSL with Let’s Encrypt and the ability to import custom SSL certificates
One free site migration. Additional free migrations for higher plans
Daily automatic backups, manual backups, and 14-day backup retention (Business and Enterprise plans have 20- and 30-day backup retention)
GCP firewall for added security
Staging environment, SSH, and sFTP access to all servers
Automatic MySQL database optimizations
Multi-user access to the MyKinsta dashboard
24/7 support and 30-day money-back guarantee
2 months free in an annual subscription

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Kinsta CDN

CDN (Content Delivery Network) will take cached copies of your website. KeyCDN has partnered up with Kinsta to provide free CDN bandwidth in all their managed WordPress hosting plans.

You can enable/disable the CDN or clear its cache – all with a single click. Kinsta CDN serves all static content of your sites, such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files. The maximum file size is limited to 100MB terms limitations, and only the files inside wp-content and wp-includes can be included in the CDN.

It offers free CDN bandwidth in its hosting plans ranging from 50GB in their Starter plan up to 1TB in their Enterprise plans.

Kinsta DNS

The domain name server (DNS) is the very first touch-point between your site and the visitor. The basic function of a DNS is to point your website URL to the hosting server’s IP address.

Kinsta DNS is a premium DNS hosting service offered by Kinsta for free to all customers. Unlike Google Cloud, Kinsta DNS is built on Amazon Web Service’s Route53 premium DNS. The DNS management console is user-friendly and supports the one-click addition of G Suite’s MX records.

**It is highly recommended that migrating to Kinsta DNS – to see an instant performance boost in the DNS resolution time.

Kinsta Analytics

From your dashboard, Kinsta Analytics gives you detailed, server-level performance and traffic metrics. Since Kinsta is priced based on the number of visits per month, you must have detailed access to the visit logs.

The first thing to understand is that Kinsta’s traffic report is different from your Google Analytics report. This is because GA uses JavaScript, which means it only shows you human visitors, not anything else (such as bots and crawlers) accessing your site. In most scenarios, GA also can’t count visitors who are using ad blockers.

Kinsta doesn’t count visits from well-known “bot” user agents and filters out the data from analytics as much as possible.

A Web Application Firewall (WAF) such as Cloudflare or Sucuri can be used in combination with Kinsta. These services have extensive databases of what should be treated as “bad” traffic, and traffic from these “bad” IP addresses is prevented from ever hitting your Kinsta site.

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Performance of Kinsta WordPress Hosting

Performance is one of the most important characteristics of a good WordPress Hosting Provider. Also, another important is reliability.

So naturally, it is expected Kinsta to give us top performance.

When researching the fastest hosting providers for WordPress, it’s critical to consider performance and benchmark testing. In the performance testing of Kinsta, it was:

Average response time: 84 milliseconds (ms)
Uptime: 99.99%

From performing Load Impact tests, the minimum response time was 0.12 seconds, while the maximum response time was just 0.13 seconds.

Should You Choose Kinsta?

Certainly, Kinsta WordPress hosting is not for everyone. In all honesty, it’s probably not the best option for sites that are just starting or sites that have a low traffic volume.

However, you will be able to benefit from Kinsta’s offering greatly. In all, Kinsta can offer a lot to any entrepreneur who wants to focus more on growing his business and less on the technicalities of keeping his website online.

Suppose you think of running a direct online business, like an e-commerce store, where good site performance is of the essence since it translates into dollars quite directly.

What Makes Kinsta Different from the Competition

Kinsta gives you the power of a large hosting platform, and Google Cloud Platform yet does so in a very easy-to-use way so that you don’t even have to be aware of everything that’s going on under the hood.

Kinsta WordPress hosting is prepared for any traffic surges you may throw at it and is performance-optimized.

It offers great security while at the same time keeping everything backed up.

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Wrapping Up

It is a Kinsta WordPress Hosting Review from my own experience, but it would be more fun if you test it yourself. Kinsta Hosting comes highly recommended if your WordPress site needs a top-notch infrastructure and your budget enables it.

By signing up for a Kinta Account, you will never have to worry about your site downtime or other hosting-related technical issues. You will see how you can scale up with Kinsta’s hosting services. More than that, you don’t need to worry about your hosting would be able to handle the traffic or website load.

Kinsta WordPress Hosting Review 2024: Is Kinsta Worth It?16 min read