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 on offer.
So, the first noticeable thing is just how many tiers Kinsta offers. The three main ones are called Starter, Pro, and Business 1. The reason it’s Business 1 is that it goes up to Business 4, and then there’s Enterprise 1, 2, 3, and 4.
I’ll only look at the first three today, and the key differences are the limits in monthly visitors, disk space, bandwidth, and of course, the price. It’s not the most affordable provider, I should say.
Starter, with its 25,000 monthly visits and 10GB disk space, is probably good enough for a small personal website or blog. You will only be allowed 1 WordPress installation, which means one website.
The Pro plan lets you install 2 sites and share between them 50,000 monthly visits plus 20GB of disk space. Good for a small to medium business site. Kinsta says it’s not good for an online store, however, as they recommend the…
… Business 1 plan. Your limits go up to 100,000 monthly visitors, 30GB of disk space, and 5 WordPress installs. You might also notice this plan doubles the number of PHP workers from Pro, which is what Kinsta says you need for a stable e-commerce website.
Now this is how Kinsta 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 a login to a collaborator, and you can control the permissions for individual team members.
The Sites 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 plugins, for instance.
The Backups section is also easy to understand. You get 14 days of automatic daily backups on the lower plans. It’s not bad, but I personally would like to have a few more. On the Business 3 plan, for instance, you get up to 20 days, which is more adequate I think.
However, you can see that 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 plugins are installed at a glance.
You also get at least one free premium WordPress migration to Kinsta, server-level caching, and a CDN to deliver content faster worldwide.
Good for peace of mind: if your site is hacked, you get priority support, and Kinsta 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, the option to use two-factor authentication, and even IP Deny if you want to create a blacklist of users who shouldn’t enter your site.
So I’ve already mentioned that Kinsta isn’t cheap, but do you get what you pay for in terms of performance? Well, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
The Uptime, which we tested for several months, never dropped under 100%. It aligns with their 99.9% uptime guarantee. If 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 that you get an even better 99.95% with WP Engine.
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 3 seconds recommended by Google for excellent user experience and SEO.
Support is another strong suit of Kinsta’s. 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, 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. Let’s start with the pros:
Great uptime and blazing page speed: If your business depends on having a reliable, fast site, you can feel safe with Kinsta.
Great live chat answers, and I can’t stress enough how nice it is to have such a well-structured and useful knowledge base.
With Kinsta, you’re purchasing peace of mind in the form of anti-hacking measures, regular backups, and just generally stable technology.
WordPress-focused features such as the staging areas. They make installing and maintaining a WordPress site super easy.
Having said all that, I can totally see why Kinsta isn’t for everyone.
It’s not exactly cheap. There are more affordable providers such as SiteGround, 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 dealbreaker for certain businesses. For instance, e-commerce with seasonal traffic spikes.
It goes without saying, but if you don’t use a WordPress website, you can’t even consider Kinsta.
And that’s it for our Kinsta review! If you want a more thorough breakdown of the pros, cons, and a list of viable alternatives, don’t forget to check out the link in the description below.