In this Kinsta review, I’m going to show you everything that you need to know about Kinsta before deciding if you should get started with this web hosting provider. I’ll provide you with the most comprehensive review where I will break down the pricing structure and show you how to get the best deal currently available.
Next, I will guide you through the entire sign-up process and judge how easy their platform really is to use. I would then grade their performance based on page load speed and uptime from the Kinsta plan that I purchased. And lastly, I will provide you with the pros and cons and my honest recommendations on if or who should buy Kinsta.
At the end of this , I’ll give you a very special offer if you decide to pick up Kinsta through my link below, and I’ll let you know how to get access to this course later. But for now, let’s get started with pricing options.
Click on the link in the description or type this into your browser; it will take you to my special Kinsta discount page, where you will get the best discount Kinsta is currently offering. From here, we can see that Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting platform, and they use premium cloud hosting on their servers. Click on “View Plans.”
Kinsta’s pricing plans are very simple. From the Starter plan, it’s $30, and you get one website, 25,000 visits, and 10 gigabytes of disk space. If you want more, then you need to upgrade to the Pro plan or the Business plan, and the difference here is that you get an increase in all three of the limits that I’ve mentioned before. So, for example, on the Pro plan, you’ll get an extra website, and your number of visits will double from twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand, and your disk space will also double from ten to twenty. All other features apart from these three on Kinsta’s plans are all the same, so they’re not the determining factor.
Another great unique feature that Kinsta offers, which many other hosting providers don’t give you this for free, is their free premium migration. This means that Kinsta’s team will manually migrate your website for you to Kinsta from another hosting provider for free. This is an awesome free feature to have.
Kinsta has also partnered with KeyCDN to provide you a free solution for your CDN services. And another useful feature they have is the free daily automatic backups. This is a must-have and should always be free and included for you, and Kinsta has done just that.
The next thing I want to quickly mention is you can either go on the monthly plan or the yearly plan, but just a quick note that on the yearly plan, you will get an equivalent of two months free. So, if you’re sure about Kinsta and you want to move forward with them, I suggest you pay the yearly plan because once people buy hosting, they don’t tend to leave for a long time, so it’s an easy way of saving money. But if you’re not satisfied, there’s always this 30-day money-back guarantee anyway at the start, and you can get all your money back.
Kinsta also satisfies one of my other main criteria with the caching plugins. So, Kinsta has a server-side caching already, which does not require you to have any cache plugins or custom plugins like WP Rocket or even Lightspeed Cache. And they promise that this will be even faster than those plugins, but there’s only one way to find out, and that’s to test it, and I’m going to do just that later , so stay tuned.
So now you just have to pick the plan that you think will suit you, but in my test, I’m just going to choose the Starter plan.
The overall pricing score I would give Kinsta is a 9 out of 10. They provide you all the expected features of a managed WordPress hosting provider. They have server-level caching, and the automatic daily backup is provided for free. They also use Google Cloud Platform, which theoretically should be faster than the standard Digital Ocean or Vultr servers. But I’m still going to test them out later to really see if it lives up to expectations.
After purchase setup and ease of use, right away from their home page, you can see it looks very easy to navigate with their custom user interface compared to the cPanel that a lot of other hosting providers use. The design is also very clean and simple. You can see here everything you need for your website can be accessed on the left-hand panel. For example, if you go into tools, you can modify your site caching and SSL certificates from there. And when you need to set up your CDN, just click on here, or if you need to restore your backups, you can just simply go to here. So everything is there for you, and it’s very responsive.
Now let’s see how easy it is to install and create your WordPress website. So click here and click “Get Started.” And now we want to install WordPress. Choose your domain name; you will have to purchase your domain name from somewhere else as Kinsta does not provide a domain name service. So what I recommend you do, and what I do myself, is I buy all my domain names from Namecheap.com. They’re one of the best and cheapest domain name providers.
Put in the name of your site here, and now we choose our data centers. Kinsta amazingly has 24 data centers around the world, and the one you should choose is where most of your customers are located. So, for example, if it’s in Australia, then you should pick Sydney, but for this case, I’m going to pretend that my customers are global, so I’m just going to choose Northern Virginia here.
Now you need to put in your site title, put in username (make sure not to use “admin” as this will make it easier for hackers to get into your website), and now you need to decide if you want to install WooCommerce or Yoast SEO. Put in WooCommerce if you want to use it for your eCommerce store, and for Yoast, I don’t recommend this; I have a different SEO plugin that I use.
Once you’re happy with everything, click on “Add Site.” Now give it a few minutes for Kinsta to get your website ready, and once it shows that our website is live, we can move on to the next step.
And what about installing an SSL certificate? To do this, you can either click it from here or go to “Tools,” scroll down to the bottom, and click on “Enable HTTPS.” Click on “Generate Free SSL Certificate,” click on “Generate,” give it a few moments to load, and that’s it; our Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate has been successfully installed. Now we should enable the “Force HTTPS” also, click on “Enable,” and we want to force all traffic, and now click “Force HTTPS.” So you can see, installing an SSL certificate was very simple.
Now one thing that is missing with Kinsta is they don’t provide you with email hosting, but this would not be a big deal for you if you’re normally using something like a G Suite account anyway (I do this). But for some beginners, they might want to just use the provided email hosting, which Kinsta doesn’t have for you.
Overall, I would score Kinsta a 9 out of 10 for setup and ease of use. I think all users, especially beginners, would love how clean their user interface is and just how easy it is to navigate and do things to your site. I personally think this is one of the cleanest user interfaces out of all the ones I have tested so far. I’m very impressed with Kinsta here. I did take one mark away from them for not having the option to purchase domain names from Kinsta; they also don’t have the option for you to host your emails with them. Not having these options makes it harder to use overall, especially for someone who is looking for a simplest solution.
Speed and uptime performance tests: So I have installed the basic WordPress site, and I went ahead and tested out the speed of the bare bones website using GTmetrix. The result is one second flat. This is a great start from Kinsta, even though this is not the fastest in my test so far, I must say they are very close.
So now I will take it a step further and add some design elements to it to increase the page size. And don’t worry if you’re overwhelmed looking at this; my course that I’ll provide you for supporting the channel will guide you through this step by step. I’m also going to install some free plugins to speed up the website. Normally, I would install the WP Fastest Cache plugin, which is for speed optimization, but Kinsta has a server-side caching already, so this is not required. The next plugin is ShortPixel, which is for image optimization. And lastly, I will install the free premium Kinsta CDN, which will also increase the website performance. This will make it more comparable to what you would do in real life.
This is now what the new website layout with all its new plugins looks like, and the speed is now 1.1 seconds, which definitely makes them one of the fastest hosting providers I have tested so far, and they easily pass Google’s recommended site load speed of two to three seconds. So, really well done to Kinsta here.
Now I have also been monitoring the stability performance of Kinsta with Uptime Robot and can report that their uptime for the last 30 days is a perfect 100. In fact, they have not had any downtime for over 45 days in a row, which is very impressive.
Overall, I would rate Kinsta’s speed and uptime performance a 10 out of 10. I cannot fault them on anything here; they have really amazing speeds, one of the best I have tested, and uptime is solid too, and they pass my minimum requirement easily. So well done to Kinsta overall in the performance department.
Support: Kinsta provides 24/7 customer support through email and live chat. Unfortunately, they don’t have phone support, so it is not so good for anyone who prefers this method of support.
I will test them out by asking them these three different questions on live chat:
- I would tell them that I have been infected by a virus on my website and asked for their help.
- I asked them a quick question about their domain name renewal cost.
- I asked them if they could do me a favor and install an SSL certificate and Cloudflare for me as I am a complete newbie and have no idea how to do this.
Here are the results for the first question: They ran a virus scan for me right away and were going to remove all the malware for me for free, as it is part of Kinsta’s guarantee that any website hosted with Kinsta would be free of any malware. I was really impressed with their support on this issue. They are one of the only hosting providers that I have tested who are actually willing to remove the malware for free too, which is awesome.
For question two, while Kinsta does not offer domain names, the support staff did offer a recommendation and a guide on setting up with Kinsta, all in one reply message. So I believe they did as well as they can here.
And for the last question, the Kinsta support staff was super quick to help. They had already installed the SSL certificate for me even before replying to my first message, which was super fast. They also provided a custom step-by-step guide and were willing to stay online to guide me through this setup. So I was very happy with this support too.
With regards to their response time, I contacted them at three different times of the day to make sure I get an overall average and not just the bias fast response time during their off-peak hours. So the three times were 49 seconds, 21 seconds, and 3 minutes and 22 seconds. The average of those three times turns out to be around 1 minute and 30 seconds, which is definitely one of the fastest response times from a hosting provider I have tested. I think the max wait time for any hosting provider should be kept under five minutes, which Kinsta passes with flying colors here.
Overall, I would say their support was amazing, and I would score them a perfect 10 out of 10. Their support team was friendly and willing to help immediately without having to ask twice, and their response time one of the best I have ever had from any online services.
Features: Cons: So let’s first start off with the cons. I only have one for Kinsta, and that is their price. Starting at $30 per month for only one website and 25,000 traffic limit per month is quite expensive. I do think their performance justifies it, though, as their speed is elite.
Pros: The first pro that stands out to me is Kinsta’s speed and uptime performance. They have an amazing website speed, and their 45 days straight of no downtime is amazing in itself. They are a very reliable hosting provider.
The second pro is an intuitive backend system, which I believe is much easier to navigate through than cPanel. This may not be a big deal for someone who has been building websites for a while, but it is a big plus for beginners just starting out.
The next pro is the fact that Kinsta has 24 different server locations around the world for you to host your website on. This will greatly increase your website speed for your visitors if you or your business are located outside of the United States.
Another positive feature is Kinsta’s customer support. I think they are also the best in the industry here. They are one of the most responsive at all times of the day and are always proactive to help you out and not just give you articles to read and fix things yourself.
Another great pro is their features. They provide server-side caching, which is better and faster than your standard caching plugins. They also provide free daily automatic backups, which many hosting providers try to charge extras for.
The last pro is that Kinsta offers free website migration. This means that Kinsta will move your website from your hosting provider to them for free when you sign up with them. You simply just have to click on the migration button, then click on “Request Premium Migration,” and follow the steps to completion, and their staff will personally do the migration for you for free. Most other hosting providers actually charge you for this, so well done to Kinsta here.
Overall, I would score Kinsta a 9.5 out of 10. They really are the best, whether you’re talking about speed, support, ease of use, or features. Kinsta is right up there. The only thing you have to consider with Kinsta is their price. So this is my recommendation for you: if you are a beginner or advanced user looking for the best overall hosting provider on the market, then Kinsta is a very solid option that I think you should seriously consider. However, if you’re on a tighter budget and don’t have a lot of money to spend, then I don’t think Kinsta is the one for you.
Now I think picking the right hosting provider for your business is such a crucial step, so it’s very important that you get this right. So if you think after watching this review Kinsta is not the right hosting provider for you, then I recommend you check out this alternative, which I believe will do a great job for you. But if you’re happy with Kinsta and you’re ready to go on to the next step, then go to this , and I’ll see you over in the next tutorial.