Kinsta Review (2021)-9 Things you must know before you signup

Leah Rachel
19 min readOct 28, 2020

Welcome to my 2021 Review of Kinsta. Being a Kinsta user, I feel very comfortable about writing this review and I’ll be mentioning any drawbacks I may have had with it and why I recommend it to you. Before I dig in, for those who are new to web hosting, Web hosting is a service that allows organizations and individuals to post a website or web page onto the Internet.

A web host, or web hosting service provider, is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for the website or webpage to be viewed in the Internet. Websites are hosted, or stored, on special computers called servers. When Internet users want to view your website, all they need to do is type your website address or domain into their browser. Their computer will then connect to your server and your webpages will be delivered to them through the browser.

Obviously, there are many companies that offer this service and not all are the best. You definitely have to consider various factors before you choose the web hosting provider you want depending on the pricing, reliability and how fast your website will load. The slower your website is the more customers you’ll lose meaning you’ll also be losing money.

👉Check out their homepage here

So these are the topics I’ll be going through in my Kinsta Review:

  1. What is Kinsta?
  2. Performance of Kinsta Hosting
  3. How the Kinsta Dashboard looks like
  4. How to get started with Kinsta
  5. How is Kinsta Different from the others
  6. Pros and Cons of Kinsta
  7. Kinsta Pricing
  8. My final Conclusion
  9. How Kinsta compares with other hosting companies

1.What is Kinsta?

Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting provider that takes care of everything related to the website. With cutting-edge technology and top-notch services, Kinsta is believed to make support very seriously. Kinsta takes managed WordPress hosting and performance to the next level. Powered by Google Cloud Platform and their lightning-fast “premium tier” network, WordPress users can choose from 20+ data centers around the globe.

Kinsta is proud to be developer-friendly offering support for complex installations such as Bedrock, reverse-proxy configurations, with access to tools such as SSH and WP-CLI on all plans. It has a 30 Day money back guarantee which you can get started with today.

Launched in 2013, Kinsta was the brainchild of a group of WordPress experts unimpressed with the WordPress hosting solutions on the market. Today, it’s one of the fastest growing WordPress hosts in Europe and America. Amongst an impressive laundry list of benefits, Kinsta promises lightning-speed hosting, next-gen infrastructure and great customer service. Kinsta has also recently rebranded to a very sleek and user-friendly version of itself and is looking better than ever.

Brands such as Ubisoft, Asos, Intuit, and GE host their websites on Kinsta. There are four significant offerings for its customers:

  • A hosting solution that continuously monitors the health of the site
  • Pro-active WordPress experts at the user’s beck and call at all times
  • The quick and easy installation process for beginners
  • Advanced features for developers to play around with in due course

👉Learn more

2. Performance of Kinsta Hosting

Performance is perhaps the second most important characteristic of a good WordPress host — the first one being reliability.

a) The Speed of Kinsta Hosting

When referring to speed with a web hosting provider, we mean how fast your website loads when a user accesses it. The faster your site loads, the better. In fact, statistics show that 40% of people will abandon any site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, with 47% of users expecting a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. So, if you don’t want to lose traffic, then your site needs to load quickly.

While you can do quite a lot to increase the speed of your webpage, there is one factor you have no control over and that is the capability of your web hosting provider’s servers. The better the servers, and the more resources they allocate to your site, the faster your page will load.

To determine how good Kinsta’s servers are, we ran a load impact test. The test starts by sending one mock visitor to the website and then increases the number of concurrent visitors up to 50. The goal is to determine how fast the servers respond when they are put under pressure.

In the graph below, the blue line represents the number of visitors, while the green line represents the response time. As you can see, Kinsta’s response time remained relatively stable at around 125 ms all the way through to 50 concurrent visits, which is very impressive.

This speed is possible because Kinsta uses Premium Tier Network of Google Cloud Platform for hosting its websites.

What does this mean?

Google Cloud Platform is one of the most used Cloud Platform along with Azure and AWS. Your website will be hosted using the same infrastructure that is being used by the likes of Youtube, Gmail, Google Maps, etc,. Some of the notable clients that use Google Cloud Platform include HSBC, Sony, Snapchat, etc,.

Even Apple has been using Google Cloud for hosting its iCloud data. This is the reason Kinsta is very fast, they use the same technology used by all the big corporate websites in the world.

Kinsta has a churn rate of 5%, meaning that a customer never leaves them. They claim that when their customer leaves, they are forced to come back after noticing the changes in site speed after leaving. This is what happened when one of the customers left Kinsta.

In conclusion, Kinsta is really fast. In fact, we can say in this Kinsta review that this host is the fastest I’ve ever tested. They are well accomplished to meet your sudden surges in traffic and load due to their exceptional auto-scaling feature. Hardware resources are allocated to each site automatically by their virtual to scale up or down as needed by the demands of your site.

👉>>Start your free trial today<<👈

b) The Uptime

Uptime refers to the amount of time your website is functional and can be accessed by users. In large part, your web hosting provider is responsible for how long your website is down. The longer your site is down, the more traffic you will lose because people can’t access your site. If it’s down for too long, users will eventually give up trying to access it, which will hurt your reputation.

With Kinsta, downtime will never be a problem as our tests revealed they have an uptime of 100% with an excellent average response time of 489ms.

The 100% uptime is incredibly impressive because it’s very difficult to achieve. In fact, most hosting providers are unable to offer such a figure and generally gravitate around 99%.

Kinsta uses PHP 7.3, which is the latest version available right now. PHP is a server language used by WordPress. Using the latest version of PHP helps in increasing the security and speed of your website at large. Here’s a graph which shows the difference in speed offered by different PHP versions.

Google hardly speak about any hosting companies. However, they dedicated an entire blog post to praise the service offered by Kinsta, and gone on to claim Kinsta as the fastest growing WordPress host in Europe and America.

👉>>Start your free trial today<<👈

c) Response Time

The performance was strong, to say the least, with noticeable improvements even when accessing the site manually without any measuring tools.

3.How the Kinsta Dashboard looks like

Kinsta’s panel focuses more on your daily/regular tasks as related to your hosting platform, rather than on server administration per se. It is very different from what solutions like cPanel got us used to.

Through the panel, you can easily access:

  • Your sites — it’s also where you can tune the initial setup, create new FTP accounts, see your past backups, add HTTPS, etc.
  • Site migrations — a nice overview of all site migrations done on your account + the ability to perform more.
  • DNS settings.
  • Analytics — this section I really like. It’s a nice addition on top of what you get from a third-party analytics script.

There are also sections for Billing, Settings, Activity Log, and User Guide.

👉>>Start your free trial today<<👈

4. How to get started with Kinsta

Once you sign up, you have two options: you can either start a new site or migrate an existing one.

Starting a new one is extremely simple. You just go to your user panel > Sites > and click on “Add Site.” At this stage, you need to provide some basic info:

Migrating an existing site is nearly just as simple, but it does involve giving Kinsta more details about your current installation. But that’s actually a good thing; it only means that Kinsta wants to learn all the ins and outs of your site before migrating it onto their servers, hence minimizing any failure probability. Once you fill out that form, Kinsta picks up and takes care of the whole process for you.

👉>>Start your free trial today<<👈

5. How is Kinsta Different from the others

a) Kinsta’s One-click WordPress instance launch is impressive

WordPress is a user-friendly content management platform. Kinsta understands that. With its one-click installer, you can install a WordPress site and launch it without any hassle. Who said migrating a website was difficult. It is probably not with Kinsta wordpress hosting

b) Kinsta hosts on Google Cloud Platform:

Kinsta uses Premium Tier Network of Google Cloud Platform for hosting its websites.

c)Kinsta fully manages your WordPress site

Kinsta is just awesome and the best wordpress hosting by that I mean you get to access an entirely dedicated dashboard for all the tasks that you have to complete on WordPress. You also need not break your head over switching the dashboards of different hosting providers.

d)Kinsta uses PHP 7.3

Which is the latest version available right now. PHP is a server language used by WordPress. Using the latest version of PHP helps in increasing the security and speed of your website at large.

e)Kinsta CDN is super impressive

Another Kinsta WordPress benefits are that now it has a Content Delivery Network (CDN) integration that turbocharges your assets on the World Wide Web (www). It’s an absolute no-brainer to use CDN. Why? Because it takes off the load of your server that speeds up the content delivery to your users thereby making their experience better.

CDN also reduces the bounce rate of your website. The lesser load on your server minimizes the bandwidth costs. It also takes care of the scalability of your website. This is a boon for eCommerce sites that have to continuously add product webpages. If you are using a smaller host, it could keep your website from crashing as the CDN is handling most of the load.

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

g)4. 99.9% Uptime Guaranteed

In fact, Kinsta offers an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee. This vote of confidence is a clear result of its cloud-hosting infrastructure. Cloud hosts by nature are much more reliable at keeping websites online.

If that’s not enough, Kinsta also pairs this with continuous monitoring and uptime checks every minute. If they fail to correct error response codes within 30 minutes, your account will be credited. This guarantee holds true, 24/7, every day of the year.

h) It’s (Nearly) Hands-Off

Like the name suggests, managed WordPress hosts should allow you to spend less time worrying about your website, and give you more time to focus on growing it.

Kinsta has a really wide range of features that provide an optimised environment for you to keep improving your website, without needing to worry about technical issues.

i)Good For Traffic Spikes

Who said growing your website had to be so complicated? Another very attractive feature of Kinsta is its scalability, a direct payoff of its cloud-based architecture.

In the case of an unexpected traffic surge, Kinsta’s integration with the Google Compute Engine lets a website’s container scale dramatically to as many CPUs as needed. As the cloud auto-scales to manage the load, so your WordPress site can remain online without crashing.

In contrast, many 3rd party hosts are constrained to 2–6 CPUs per Virtual Private Servers.

Bear in mind, if you do exceed the monthly visits cap of your plan, you will still need to pay an overage fee of ($1/1,000 visits) after a specific number of visitors, but you’ll be notified at 80% and 100% usage.

However, the important thing is that your site will stay online! After all, the last thing you want to happen is to invest in paid traffic, or finally go viral, and then suffer a site-crash exactly at your moment of glory. Imagine all that wasted opportunity!

Kinsta also offers a Exponential Traffic Spikes and Surges Upgrade specifically designed to address these sorts of massive traffic events if you know they are about to happen.

j) Kinsta is also built for developers

Yes, that’s right. Kinsta is an excellent option for developers. It doesn’t matter if they have to scale a website or build their site or design a test server or create a full-fledged website for your clients — developers are going to have a gala time in experimenting with Kinsta.

Kinsta provides a staging area too which is a boon! With the staging area, you can create a playground of themes, features, plugins, code modifications to name a few, so that once you are satisfied, you can apply those changes to the website with just one click.

But you will have to access SSH so that WP-CLI can be put into use to perform updates and other functions. Kinsta also provides secure tunneling into databases stored in the cloud. The websites hosted on Kinsta can run on PHP7, PHP5.6, and you can switch between them without breaking into a sweat.

👉>>Start your free trial today<<👈

6) Pros and Cons

Pros

a) Best Architecture

Kinsta uses the premium tier network (not standard) of Google Cloud Platform and offers all 18 data center locations that provide the lowest latency in a strategic position.

You are free to choose from the following 18 data centres for your WordPress websites:

  • Los Angeles, California (us-west2)
    • The Dalles, Oregon, USA (us-west1)
    • Ashburn, Virginia, USA (us-east4)
    • Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA (us-east1)
    • Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA (us-central1)
    • London, UK (europe-west2)
    • St. Ghislain, Belgium (europe-west1)
    • Changhua County, Taiwan (asia-east1)
    • Sydney, Australia (australia-southeast1)
    • Montréal, Canada (northamerica-northeast1)
    • Netherlands (europe-west4)
    • Hamina, Finland (europe-north1)
    • Hong Kong (asia-east2)
    • São Paulo, Brazil (southamerica-east1)
    • Frankfurt, Germany (europe-west3)
    • Jurong West, Singapore (asia-southeast1)
    • Tokyo, Japan (asia-northeast1)
    • Mumbai, India (asia-south1)

b). Automated Backups

Kinsta has an automated backup system in place that makes 14 backups simultaneously. It backs up once a day by default. Moreover, you can manually create a backup, and then you can easily restore your site from the Kinsta dashboard, at any time. Whenever you restore a backup, you create a new backup that reflects the state of your website just before you reset it. If you want to undo the restore, this is handy.

c). High security network

Kinsta offers a highly secure system that monitors your website 24/7 and is secured by robust firewalls. Malware scans, tight restrictions on software and firewalls ensure that your site is safe.

Kinsta scans your website every 60 seconds to ensure that all security features are intact and cyber attacks are not occurring. This means Kinsta provides

• DDoS detection
• Hardware firewalls
• Uptime monitoring
• SSL support

d). CDN

Each of the Kinsta hosting plans offers generous free CDN bandwidth. Check included bandwidth below:

• Starter plan includes 50GB
• Pro plan includes 100 GB
• Business 1 plan includes 200 GB
• Business 2 plan includes 300 GB
• Business 3 plan includes 500 GB
• Business 4 plan includes 500 GB
• Enterprise 1 plan includes 1 TB
• Enterprise 2 plan includes 1 TB
• Enterprise 3 plan includes 1 TB
• Enterprise 4 plan includes 1 TB

If your CDN limit is reached, they are going to keep your site going and charge just $0.10 USD per additional GB of CDN bandwidth.

e). Money Back Guarantee

You can try any plan of Kinsta (including add-ons) for 30 days risk-free. If you decided to cancel your hosting account within 30 days, Kinsta will issue a full refund. Check it out here.

Not only that, If you cancel your subscription after the first 30 days, the unused part of the subscription to your plan will still be refunded. This includes both annual and monthly plans. Kinsta does not have long — term contracts; you can cancel your subscription at any time.

f). Customer Support

Kista customer service is best as compared to others. Kisnsta team answers quickly. I appreciate organizations that know the need for fast websites and know WordPress and its platform better than the rest.
Kinsta support team is available 24/7 on the dashboard.

Someone is willing to help you, even when you break your site in the middle of the night. As compared to other hosts in the market they also have experience with scaling and performance problems.

g). Unlimited free site migrations from WP Engine, Flywheel, Pantheon, Cloudways and DreamHost

h) . Great Uptime

Kinsta claims an average uptime of 99.9% — not really uncommon in the hosting industry.

They back this up with a guarantee. That means that if something happens wherein the host’s uptime falls below 99.9%, you’ll receive some form of compensation.

The details of this guarantee can be found in the Kinsta Service Agreement. According to the agreement, users will receive credits if downtime ever exceeds one hour. You’ll receive 5% off of your bill on the next invoice if downtime goes beyond one hour and 10% off the next bill if it goes beyond two hours.

i). 24/7 Live Chat

Customer service is definitely one of the most important factors that can influence your business’ revenue majorly. In fact, 86% of the buyers are willing to pay more for great customer experience.

One of the fastest and most-used communication options is live chat and it’s something that we always test with every host.

Luckily, Kinsta offers 24/7 live chat support.

We asked Kinsta’s customer service representative a question and received a response in less than a minute.

What’s more, we were very impressed with how they responded. There were some really detailed answers provided.

j). Easy to Use Control Panel

When you sign up for Kinsta you get access to Kinsta’s own custom dashboard instead of commonly used cPanel.

Kinsta’s control panel has a straightforward interface. You have all of your main sections on the left side, including the knowledge base. Plus, you can access all of the information on your various sites including, migrations, analytics, users, activity log, and more.

The main dashboard has a wealth of information regarding important metrics like unique visitors, data transfers, and more.

It’s very self-explanatory and should be easy for just about anyone to grasp with no real learning curve.

Cons

No Phone Support: They don’t offer phone support but you can always reach them via email, support ticket, and live chat.

Cloud hosting so no email hosting

👉>> Start Your Trial Today<<👈

7.Kinsta Pricing 2021

Kinsta offers premium hosting plan to everyone. They are popular with larger companies and business customers, but they also have $30/month entry-level plans for those of you just starting out. Remember, it’s a high-end hosting performance hosting providers.

They are above than the rest of the companies. Just try yourself

  • The Starter plan is $30 per month and allows you to create one website. It has a monthly visitors cap of 20,000 with 10 GB of storage.
  • The Pro Plan is $60 per month and allows for two WordPress installs. You can have up to 40,000 monthly visitors and 20 GB of storage.
  • The Business Plan has four different tiers, ranging from $100 per month to $400 per month. These plans allow for between 10 and 40 WordPress installs with 100,000 to 600,000 visitors per month. SSD storage ranges from 30 GB to 60 GB.
  • The Enterprise Plan also has four tiers. They range from $600 to $1,500 per month. The number of installs falls between 60 and 150. Monthly visits are capped between 1 million and 3 million. SSD storage ranges between 100 GB and 250 GB.

You can get two months free with any plan if you pay for the entire year in advance.

👉Learn more about their pricing plans here

8.My final Conclusion

I recommend Kinsta because I have been using it for the past 9 Months and I have experienced any issues or lags in my website. When I was starting out in blogging, I started with bluehost since it was way cheaper and I didn’t have any money so it was my best choice. I used bluehost to host my sites for two years and then one day I heard about Kinsta and some of my friends who were also hosting on bluehost started migrating to kinsta.

Since I had made some money in affiliate marketing from my website I decided to try out Kinsta and so on January 7th this year I migrated to Kinsta too. It wasn’t hard to migrate and plus I knew if I experienced any issues with Kinsta in the first three months I’d have to go back to bluehost. Since then my site has been much faster and I dont regret moving to Kinsta and that’s why I’ve taken a lot of my time to write this long review about it recommending that it’s the best

👉>>Start your trial today and check it out yourself<<👈

Although if you are a beginner or you have a low budget I recommend trying out bluehost first.

Additionally, Kinsta has a low churn rate of 4–5% meaning meaning that round 95% of people using Kinsta are satisfied with it and Keep paying for their subscription every month because I believe it’s the best.

9. Comparison of Kinsta

a) Kinsta Vs Wp Engine

WP Engine and Kinsta are two of the hottest names in managed WordPress hosting — which is exactly the type of hosting you should be considering if you have a profitable website to run. But which is best? And which one should you choose? Those are the questions we’ll be helping you to answer in this comparison — with the help of some real-life speed and performance tests

Both Kinsta and WP Engine have feature-packed plans and positive reputations, while also sharing similar pricing strategies, which makes choosing between them very difficult — at least at first glance. However, by reading this comparison, you’ll have all of the information you need to decide which one of the two you should pick.

Kinsta and WP Engine both offer a wide range of hosting plans for WordPress websites that are suitable for all types of projects — from basic blogs to large enterprise sites. So, no matter the size of your site and its audience, both hosts should have a plan that meets your requirements.

  • Kinsta Starter plan: $30 per month for one WordPress website, 10 GB of storage, 20,000 visits per month and 50 GB of CDN usage.
  • WP Engine Startup plan: $35 per month for one WordPress website, 10 GB of storage, 25,000 visitors per month and 50 GB of bandwidth.

Clearly, Kinsta is a bit cheaper to go for than WP Engine

Both Kinsta and WP Engine set limits on the number of visits your site can receive and how much bandwidth it can consume. If you exceed these monthly limits, then you’ll be charged the following overage fees:

  • Kinsta: $1 for each 1,000 extra monthly site visits and $0.10 for each additional GB of CDN bandwidth used.
  • WP Engine: $2 for each 1,000 extra monthly site visits but no bandwidth overages charges.

Since I fully recommend Kinsta since I’m using it, if you start your trial today, you won’t be disappointed.

Another key feature of good managed WordPress hosting is access to expert support staff. As companies such as Kinsta and WP Engine only host WordPress websites, their support staff are highly experienced when it comes to looking after this type of site. Unlike generic hosting, when you contact Kinsta or WP Engine, you should always be connected with someone who knows how best to support WordPress users.

However, there are some differences in how you can contact the support staff at Kinsta and WP Engine that may be important to you, depending on your preferences:

  • Kinsta support options: 24/7 live chat and tickets on all plans, but no telephone support.
  • WP Engine support options: 24/7 live chat on all plans, 24/7 phone support on all plans except the entry-level Startup plan, and tickets only available on top-tier custom dedicated plans.

b)Kinsta vs Siteground

When you compare SiteGround with Hosting plans with a similar price to it such as Bluehost, HostGator or Dreamhost, it is 2x faster than all of them. Moreover, if you starting a blog for the first time or running an average blog, they are one of the most chosen web hostings. It’s unheard to grow from hosting 5,00,000 website to 2 million in three years without showing good performance. We will dig more into their speed and other features below.

If you have a budget of $30/mo or higher and in a lookout for a hosting that can help you decrease your load time by 300–400ms better than SiteGround. Then Kinsta is a better choice than SiteGround. It all depends on your requirements and budget at the end of the day.

How did I come up with the conclusion above?

Speed-Kinsta is the fastest hosting available right now. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of speed in web hosting. It’s the most important aspect of user experience. Besides that, speed has become a major ranking factor in Google over the years, a slow website will be killed in search engine results. If you are not fast, your competitors will be, taking away your potential customers.

Start Your Kinsta Trial Today

The loading time of a siteground hosted website is 1.25s

Kinsta’s loading time is 962ms. Which is less than that of siteground’s.

c) Kinsta vs Bluehost

One of the great things about Kinsta is that they are very transparent. They have a blog where they have no problem admitting their faults and the drawbacks of their services, just as much as they talk about the positives.

They’re also different and more daring and innovative in comparison to other hosts, which often take the safest route possible. In fact, everything they do is different, from how they host website files to their data centers and the control panel.

And it has clearly paid off since they are far better than Bluehost in terms of everything from performance to customer support.

However, Bluehost offers great hosting performance for the price you pay. If you are just starting out a blog, Bluehost will offer you far better value than Kinsta. You can check out bluehost here but I still recommend Kinsta.

Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links and I will receive a small commission from any purchase made from my links. However, the commissions don’t affect the prices but just motivate me to keep writnd reviews about products and softwares that I believe in.

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Leah Rachel
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I am an inspired blogger and also an affiliate marketer.