Kinsta Managed Wordpress Hosting
Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting Tried and Tested – Is it Worth It?
Do you need a fast, secure, and easily backed up WordPress host? Do you want a premium web host with all the latest features?
Kinsta claims to offer all of this and more.
Does it stand up to its claim? Do you want to know how premium web hosts work? Keep reading to learn more about Kinsta managed Wordpress hosting and its features.
About Kinsta
Founded in 2013, Kinsta created a simple hosting provider free of marketing gimmicks, yet full of incredible features. They offer low prices and a fast and secure home for websites. What you see is what you get – there aren’t any fancy claims that turn into smoke and mirrors. Kinsta is honest, straightforward, and useful.
Kinsta WordPress Hosting Homepage
What do you get with WordPress hosting? Don’t let its low $30 per month entry-level plan fool you – it’s not a budget plan with budget features even with its cheap price.
Kinsta offers managed WordPress hosting. They offer a combination of excellent WordPress website hosting and management services. They secure, cache, and back up WordPress websites, saving you time and the pressure of learning the technical side of your website.
Compared to generic website hosts, Kinsta ensures faster loading times, fewer downtimes, and fewer performance issues. Their focus is on managed WordPress hosting – so they only work with WordPress websites. Each staff member is highly trained in all things WordPress, helping users not only with hosting but some software issues too.
What Does Kinsta Offer?
Kinsta offers many features besides its web hosting and managed WordPress hosting. Check out the great features below.
Google Cloud Platform
How does it sound to have your website hosted by the same servers hosting Spotify, Snapchat, Intuit, Best Buy, Philips, and Coca-Cola? Kinsta offers the use of the Google Could Platform, which offers 23 global server locations for hosting your website, with more on the way (Hong Kong and Switzerland are next).
The Google Cloud Platform offers highly scalable hardware, able to handle any surge in traffic. Got a viral website? Don’t worry, Google Cloud Platform can handle the experience, giving your customers a smooth experience throughout.
Automated WordPress Website Backups
Kinsta keeps all WordPress backups for 14 days on the entry-level plans and longer on the higher-tiered plans. If you need to restore a backup, you can deploy it to your live site or test environment.
Kinsta Website Backup Manager
Kinsta offers daily backups, which you manage through your Kinsta dashboard. Do you want 6-hour or hourly backups? Kinsta offers them for an extra monthly fee.
Would you prefer manual backups when you need them? Kinsta offers this with the touch of a button. Back your site up and download it on your server for safekeeping.
Kinsta Staging Website Manager
Test your changes before they go live with Kinsta’s staging site. Each Kinsta hosting plan includes access to a staging site. Before pushing additional features out to your website, you can test:
- New plugins
- Website customizations
- Code edits
- New WordPress templates
Kinsta Developer Tools
Kinsta offers a variety of developer tools perfect for the novice and experienced user. Kinsta offers developers:
- Ability to switch between PHP versions
- Simple restart of the PHP engine
- Access to the New relic PHP monitoring tool
- Search-and-replace tool for each WordPress database content changes
Check out the technical details of each hosting plan here.
Kinsta Account Management Dashboard
Kinsta has a custom dashboard, called the My Kinsta portal. This user-friendly dashboard allows you to:
- Create new WordPress websites
- Update plugins
- Manage backups
- View resource usages stats
- View website visitor analytics
Installing WordPress
Installing WordPress is easy. Log in to the custom control panel and create a WordPress website. The process is user-friendly and fast. In a few clicks, you have a WordPress installation ready for your customizations.
Kinsta Website Management Panel
If you have multiple sites hosted by Kinsta, you can manage all sites on one dashboard, making it easy to manage your sites.
Kinsta Support
Kinsta doesn’t offer telephone support, however, their 24/7 chat support is quick and efficient. Once you submit a ticket or reach out via messenger, they handle your request quickly. Each request I’ve had, they’ve handled in a few minutes.
Kinsta Web Hosting Performance
Kinsta, like many other WordPress hosting companies, claims they offer excellent WordPress optimized services. How does Kinsta stack up to the competition? We’ve conducted tests and provided the results so you can see how Kinsta responds.
Kinsta Load Time
My site, https://www.hbsfinancialgroup.net/, has never loaded so fast.
Kinsta Pingdom Page Speed
Websites using the WordPress Twenty Seventeen theme has an average load time of 307 milliseconds. My website, which has many more features than the Twenty Seventeen theme, loads in 798 milliseconds.
To help you put it into perspective – the pages load in less than one second. Even my heavy website on Kinsta’s servers load faster than many websites compared to our tests with Bluehost and HostGator entry-level hosting plans.
Your site’s speed depends a lot on the theme choice. The Twenty Seventeen theme is ‘lighter’, which means faster loading than a feature-rich them like I use, but I still get fast results.
Map of Kinsta Data Center and Pingdom Test Center
The data center in Virginia and the Pingdom server in Washington DC were used when testing my website. These locations are near one another, so I had very fast page load times. Visitors further away from your data centers may have longer page load times.
During my tests, I only used Kinsta’s caching feature, but no other optimization options. If you use image and database optimization, theme file compression, or other helpful WordPress tools, you’ll have even faster load times than I did.
Kinsta Uptime Test
Uptime is crucial to your website’s success. Users don’t wait around for downed websites – they move onto another site. While most web hosting services promise 99.9% uptime, what do they offer in ‘real-life’, not on paper?
Kinsta, like most other hosts, guarantee 99.9% uptime. This means approximately 10 minutes of downtime per week. Over the 7 days we tested Kinsta, we had 100% uptime. We didn’t have the same results when testing Bluehost, GoDaddy, or SiteGround, though.
Kinsta Pricing
Kinsta offers 8 managed WordPress hosting plans:
- Starter – $30 per month which includes one WordPress install, 20,000 visits, and 10 GB space
- Pro – $60 per month for two WordPress installs, 40,000 visits, and 20 GB disk space
Kinsta also offers business plans starting at $100 per month for three WordPress installs, 100,000 visits, and 30 GB disk space and enterprise plans starting at $600 per month for 60 WordPress installs, 1,000,000 visits, and 100 GB disk space.
If you pay annually, you get two months free.
All plans include a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate and CDN access and are powered by the Google Cloud Platform. Upgrading is only necessary if you need more WordPress installations, visitor, or storage allowances. Each plan gets the same website performance, which is unique to Kinsta.
If you pay annually, you receive two months free, which makes sense, unless you are just testing it out.
What About Overage Fees?
Sometimes you underestimate your visitor statistics and go over your allotted amount. Kinsta allows this, for the most part, unless they think the usage is extreme. If they do, they may limit your website’s access until you resolve the issue.
If you have minor over usage, Kinsta charges:
- $1 per 1,000 visits
- $0.10 per GB
They charge your account immediately, keeping your site online with no interruptions. You can view the full details on Kinsta’s plan page.
Final Thoughts
Kinsta offers value pricing for superior services. They offer a variety of services you won’t find with other entry-level shared managed WordPress hosting services. Kinsta offers impressive uptime, and the capability to handle multiple visitors at once.
With automatic website backups, security monitory, and a user-friendly staging environment, you get a lot for Kinsta’s low monthly prices. Their 24/7 support with helpful agents keeps you going day or night, and the features are beyond what any other value managed WordPress hosting provider.
If you’re tired of your slow WordPress site or you’re ready to launch a new WordPress site, I highly recommend Kinsta.
If you want to try it – they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. Or, you can take their demo program for a test. Sign up and migrate your site to the staging environment. See for yourself the fast loading times and user-friendly features. If you’re not happy, get your money back within 30 days. Is Kinsta managed Wordpress hosting worth it? You bet it is, and then some!