Hi everyone,
Today, I’ll be doing a comprehensive Kinsta review, so please sit back, relax, and watch my Kinsta review to know if it’s suitable for you.
Now, when it comes to high-quality WordPress hosting, you really have a handful of choices, and one of them is Kinsta. Let’s see if it’s a good one in this review.
Kinsta is actually one of the WordPress hosting providers we use ourselves. You can pick from 24 data centers worldwide, and as you’ll see right away, it has a wide range of plans to offer. So, the first noticeable thing is just how many tiers Kinsta offers. The three main ones are called Starter, Pro, and Business One (there’s also Business Two, Three, and Four). For this review, I’ll only look at Kinsta’s first three plans.
Please note that the pricing of their plans can go up and down a bit with time, but all the features will remain the same on all the plans. As usual, I have left a discounted link description down below, so you can check the current pricing and features of all their plans.
Now, let’s come back to the topic. The key differences in these plans are the limits in monthly visitors, disk space, bandwidth, and, of course, the price. It’s not the most affordable provider, I should say. The Starter plan, with its 25,000 monthly visits and 10 gigabytes disk space, is probably good enough for a small personal website or blog. You will only be allowed one WordPress installation, which means one website.
The Pro Plan lets you install two sites and share between them fifty thousand monthly visits plus 20 gigabytes of disk space. It’s good for a small to medium business website. According to Kinsta, if you want to set up an online store, then they would recommend you to go for the Business One plan. Here, limits go up to 100,000 monthly visitors, 30 gigabytes of disk space, and five WordPress installs. You might also notice that this plan doubles the amount of PHP workers from Pro, which is what Kinsta says you need for a stable e-commerce website.
Now, this is how Kinsta’s dashboard looks behind the scenes: nice, well-designed UI, and you can quickly jump to the right section with the left panel menu. The user management menu is particularly well done, both in terms of navigation and features. It’s super easy to give login access to a collaborator, and you can control the permissions for individual team members. The site section is a great way to preview statistics about each site at a glance. This is very useful if you want to keep an eye on your monthly visitor and bandwidth limits.
You can see in the top right that you can change the environment. That’s because Kinsta lets you work on a draft or staging version of your site to try new features or apps, for instance. The backup section is also easy to understand. You get 14 days of automatic daily backups on the lower plans, which is not bad, but I personally would like to have a few more. On the Business Three plan, for instance, you get up to 20 days, which is more adequate, I think. However, you can easily create and download a manual backup or link your site backups with a Cloud solution.
The tools section is also useful for more tech-savvy users. So, you can modify or clear your cache, restart PHP, and manage things like SSL certificates. I’ve already pointed out the environment options. Other WordPress-specific features include the ability to see which apps are installed at a glance. You also get at least one free premium WordPress migration to Kinsta’s server-level caching and a CDN to deliver content faster worldwide. Also, it’s good for peace of mind that if your site is hacked, you get priority support from the Kinsta team, and they will put your site in maintenance mode until things are sorted out. They will even take care of removing the malware for you. You also get the latest PHP and MySQL versions and the option to use two-factor authentication and even IP deny in case you want to create a blacklist of users who shouldn’t enter your site.
So, as I previously mentioned, Kinsta is not cheap, but are you getting what you pay for in terms of performance? Well, the answer is undoubtedly yes. The uptime, which we tested for several months, never dropped under 100%, as you can see here. It aligns with their 99.9% uptime guarantee. If, in a rare case, the servers are down for longer, you’ll get credit towards your next billing if an uptime service level agreement is important to you. We should mention, then, that you should definitely go with Kinsta.
In terms of speed, Kinsta also passed our tests with flying colors, with an average of 2.17 seconds loading speed. This easily clears the three seconds recommended by Google for excellent user experience and SEO.
Support is another strong power of Kinsta. The customer care agents, when queried via live chat, always delivered good answers in due time. Some might prefer phone or email, but when the live chat is that good, then I think there’s very little need for other channels. Plus, the online resources are also well-written and easy to find, which always wins points in my book.
So, on paper, it seems there’s a lot to love about Kinsta. Now, let’s go over the pros:
- Great uptime and blazing page speed: If your business depends on having a reliable, fast site, you can definitely feel safe with Kinsta.
- Great live chat answers: I can’t stress enough how nice it is to have such a well-structured and useful knowledge base.
- Peace of mind: With Kinsta, you’re also purchasing anti-hacking measures, regular backups, and just generally stable technology.
- WordPress-focused features: Staging areas make installing and maintaining a WordPress site super easy.
Having said all that, I can totally see why Kinsta is not for everyone. It’s not exactly cheap; there are more affordable providers such as A2 Hosting or DreamHost. And don’t forget that Kinsta will make you pay extra if you go over your monthly limits. Speaking of which, the visitor caps can be a real deal-breaker for certain businesses, for instance, e-commerce with seasonal traffic spikes. It goes without saying, but if you’ve not used a WordPress website, you can’t even consider Kinsta.
Also, if you need a list of viable alternatives, don’t forget to check the links description box down below.
And like I mentioned previously, if you do decide to get Kinsta, please remember to check the discounted link.
And that’s it for our Kinsta review.