Are you looking for the best overall hosting provider? Well, in this Kinsta review, I’m going to go through everything that you need to know about Kinsta before deciding if they’re the right hosting provider for you.
I’m not going to waste time here with fluff content, but instead, I’m going to provide you value by showing you the most important results from my live testing, like the page load speed, uptime, and customer support quality. I will also show you a live demo, so you essentially get to test out Kinsta without having to purchase a hosting plan for yourself. And lastly, I’ll provide you with my honest recommendations on if or who should buy Kinsta. I will have a special bonus offer for you if you decide to pick up Kinsta through my special discounted link in the description below. I also have a free checklist on starting a successful blog for everyone, so make sure to stick with me to the end, and I’ll show you how to get access to this bonus.
But for now, let’s get right into this review.
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. When you need to set up your CDN, just click on “here.” If you need to restore your backups, you can 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. Click here and click “Get Started.” 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. I recommend you buy all your 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.” 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. 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.
Now I will take it a step further and add some design elements to it to increase the page size. Don’t worry if you’re overwhelmed looking at this; my course that I will provide you for supporting the channel will guide you through this step by step. I am 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. 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. 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 ask 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’ve tested who are actually willing to remove the malware for free too, which is awesome.
For question 2, 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 wait, 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 5 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.
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’ll 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, which is the Google Cloud Platform. So, we click on “View Plans.”
Kinsta’s pricing plans are very simple. You can see here from the starter plan is thirty dollars. 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. Another useful feature they have is the free daily automatic backups. This is a must-have and I believe 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 gonna do just that later on in this video, 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 gonna 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 the Google Cloud Platform, which theoretically should be faster than the standard Digital Ocean or Vultr service. But I’m still going to test them out later in this video to really see if it lives up to expectations. I did take one mark off them as they are one of the more expensive managed WordPress web hosting providers, starting at 30 dollars per month for 25,000 visits and only one website. This is not cheap compared to other managed WordPress providers.
Recommendation
Overall, I have given Kinsta an average score of 9.5 out of 10. They really are the best web hosting provider I’ve tested overall. They have unbelievable speeds with a responsive and easy-to-navigate user interface, and the customer support is top-notch as well. You just can’t beat that combination. So this is my recommendation for you, whether you’re a beginner or advanced user, looking for the best overall hosting provider on the market. I believe Kinsta is a very worthy option that I think you should really consider.
However, if you are on a tight budget and can’t afford to pay for a managed WordPress hosting solution, then I don’t think Kinsta is the right option for you. Instead, you should be looking at a shared hosting option. Now, I think picking the right hosting provider is such an important step in your business, so you need to get this right. And if after watching this review, you think Kinsta is not the right hosting provider for you, then I recommend you check out this hosting alternative. But if you’re happy with Kinsta, then go to this next video, and I’ll see you over in the next tutorial.