If you’re looking for the best managed WordPress hosting, it’s more than likely that you have narrowed your search down to either Kinsta or WP Engine. After all, they are two of the best in the industry.
Kinsta and WP Engine are both great hosting providers and either one of them is a very good choice for your WordPress sites. In this review of Kinsta, we’ll be taking a look at what they have to offer and what makes them one of the leaders in the managed WordPress hosting space.
Contents
Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting Plans Comparison Chart
| Starter and Pro | Business 1-4 | Enterprise 1-4 | |
  |  |  | |
| Price | Check Price at Kinsta.com | Check Price at Kinsta.com | Check Price at Kinsta.com |
| WordPress Installs | Starter: 1 Pro: 2 | Business 1: 5 Business 2: 10 Business 3: 20 Business 4: 40 | Enterprise 1: 60 Enterprise 2: 80 Enterprise 3: 120 Enterprise 4: 150 |
| Monthly Visits | Starter: 20,000 Pro: 40,000 | Business 1: 100,000 Business 2: 250,000 Business 3: 400,000 Business 4: 600,000 | Enterprise 1: 1,000,000 Enterprise 2: 1,500,000 Enterprise 3: 2,000,000 Enterprise 4: 3,000,000 |
| SSD Storage | Starter: 10 GB Pro: 20 GB | Business 1: 30 GB Business 2: 40 GB Business 3: 50 GB Business 4: 60 GB | Enterprise 1: 100 GB Enterprise 2: 150 GB Enterprise 3: 200 GB Enterprise 4: 500 GB |
| Free CDN | Starter: 50 GB Pro: 100 GB | Business 1: 200 GB Business 2: 300 GB Business 3: 500 GB Business 4: 500 GB | Enterprise 1: 1000 GB Enterprise 2: 1000 GB Enterprise 3: 1000 GB Enterprise 4: 1000 GB |
| 30 Day Money Back | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free Premium Migrations | Starter: 1 Pro: 2 | Business 1: 3 Business 2: 3 Business 3: 3 Business 4: 4 | Enterprise 1: 5 Enterprise 2: 5 Enterprise 3: 5 Enterprise 4: 5 |
| PHP Workers | Starter: 2 Pro: 2 | Business 1: 4 Business 2: 4 Business 3: 6 Business 4: 6 | Enterprise 1: 8 Enterprise 2: 10 Enterprise 3: 12 Enterprise 4: 16 |
| Backup Retention | Starter: 14 days Pro: 14 days | Business 1: 14 days Business 2: 14 days Business 3: 20 days Business 4: 20 days | Enterprise 1: 30 days Enterprise 2: 30 days Enterprise 3: 30 days Enterprise 4: 30 days |
Features
The exclusive use of the Google Cloud Platform is one of the many features that you will have access to with Kinsta.
Kinsta offers a lot of features in their hosting packages. Here are some of the few standout features that make them one of the best managed WordPress hosting providers in the industry.
Cloud Based Hosting
Perhaps the most enticing feature from Kinsta is their use of the Google Cloud Platform. This allows them to offer significant improvements in speed, scalability, reliability, security and overall performance over other hosting providers. You can take advantage of the 24 Google Cloud server locations worldwide and choose a data center that’s closest to your WordPress site’s target audience. This results in very fast load times and low latency for your visitors.
Kinsta also partnered with KeyCDN to offer free premium CDN to their subscribers. A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is essential if you own a site – whether it’s a simple blog or a full on e-Commerce site. It works by using servers in different parts of the world, in this case, 34 POPs from KeyCDN, to deliver content to your visitors. It greatly improves your site’s speed because for example, if your visitor is from New York, the CDN will deliver the assets from the server that’s nearest to them. Kinsta made this process easy to manage in their control panel so you don’t have to worry even if your technical knowledge in the area is limited.
E-Commerce Optimization
WordPress is a very popular platform for e-Commerce sites due to the availability of free plugins such as WooCommerce. E-Commerce sites are complex in nature and if they are not properly optimized, they can be resource hogs, resulting in decreased performance. Kinsta has implemented a lot of optimization techniques to make sure that e-Commerce sites function properly without any hits in performance. They have put in place server-level caching to ensure that pages that should not be cached are exempted. This means that your site will be running as fast as possible and your visitors will have a smooth experience while visiting your site.
Kinsta also handles traffic surges with ease due to its cloud-based hosting. If your site has a sudden spike in traffic, you can rest easy as it will never go down. They also offer free daily backups or an optional hourly backup.
Free Site Migration
If you’ve ever had to migrate a site before, you will know how much of a headache it can be. It’s a real stress-inducing process, especially if you are not the most technical person. All of Kinsta’s plans include one or more free premium migrations – the number depends on your chosen plan – and unlimited basic migration if you are transferring your site from specific hosts.
All you have to do once you’ve created a Kinsta account is to go to your dashboard and request a site migration from there. They will correspond with you for any questions or any important info that you need to tell them. Once the migration is complete, they will notify you to check and see if everything’s fine.
Kinsta offers unlimited free basic migrations if you are transferring your site from the following hosts:
- WP Engine
- SiteGround
- Flywheel
- Pantheon
- Pagely
- GoDaddy
- Cloudways
- Bluehost
- DreamHost
- A2 Hosting
- HostGator
- WPX Hosting
- tsoHost
Basic site migration is for WordPress sites that are not complicated in nature (i.e. blogs, simple affiliate sites). Premium migration is for sites that have complex requirements such as membership sites and e-Commerce sites.
Kinsta Control Panel
The back-end control panel is very easy to use.
Kinsta uses their own custom control panel. It has a minimalist and modern look that’s very intuitive and simple to use. In the dashboard, you will see your sites, your resource usage, number of visitors and your payments. You can do a lot of things in the control panel such as viewing your site’s health and traffic, adding new sites, managing redirects, requesting migrations, one click staging and more. All of these are accessible in a very clean UI that is very easy to navigate.
Customer Support
Experienced WordPress experts will help you with all your site issues.
Kinsta’s support department consists of developers that are considered experts in WordPress and Linux hosting. The team is very knowledgeable with the ins and outs of WordPress as most of them actually developed and maintained plugins or have been involved with its core development. The support team is one of Kinsta’s greatest assets and they do a phenomenal job of assisting customers with their queries or issues.
Having a team of WordPress experts deal with any of your site’s issues is definitely better than having to go through different support reps that may or may not have the necessary expertise to help you. Support is available 24/7 through chat and a ticketing solution. Aside from the support department, Kinsta also offers a lot of help via their knowledge base, free eBooks, webinars and blog posts. Also, they boast a 100% solve rate, this means that they haven’t encountered an issue that they haven’t fixed. As a site owner, you’ll be able to focus on growing your site without having to deal with technical issues that can take a lot of time to fix.
Site Security
Kinsta’s WordPress security is one of the best in the hosting world.
Kinsta is very pro-active when it comes to security. They have a number of security services in place to make sure that your site is safe and secure. Kinsta enforces strong passwords whenever you install WordPress on a new site, supports 2FA (2-factor authentication), bans IPs with 6 failed log-in attempts and GeoIP blocking.
In addition to those, they try to prevent DDoS attacks before they happen, they monitor your site/s regularly and have firewalls in place to secure your data. If ever your site is compromised, they will fix it for free.
Moving to HTTPS is pretty much a requirement these days. If you don’t your site will be flagged as an unsecure site by different browsers and this will affect your SEO efforts as well as visitor/user trust. In the Kinsta control panel, you can easily add a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate to your site with minimal effort.
Plans and Pricing
Lower tier plans will also get the features offered in the higher tiers.
The plans are structured so that you can choose which one is best for your site, depending on the number of visits that you are getting. All of these plans have access to all the features that Kinsta has to offer – lower tier plans have limits to certain features but they still have access to them.
The differences in each of the plans are the number of WordPress installs, unique visitors per month and disk space. If the highest plan is still not enough for your site’s traffic or projected traffic, you can request a quote for a customized plan from them.
You can pay either monthly or annually. If you choose an annual plan, you will get two free months. They have a 30-day money back guarantee for all their plans.
Verdict
Kinsta and WP Engine are probably your top two choices when it comes to managed WordPress hosting. Kinsta’s exclusive use of the Google Cloud Platform, however, pushes it slightly over WP Engine in our view.
If you have a WordPress site/s and you want the best managed WordPress hosting, then you should go with Kinsta. They have a lot of exclusive features that make their hosting service truly remarkable. The use of the Google Cloud Platform will definitely improve your site’s performance and can result in better SERP rankings and sales/conversions. Their control panel makes it easy to manage your sites even if you are not the most technical person and if you ever encounter tech issues, their team of WordPress experts is just a chat window away. We definitely recommend Kinsta and think they are above the competition.
WP Engine is still a very good choice for managed WordPress hosting. However, Kinsta’s Google Cloud hosting is just too good to pass up.
FAQs
Yes, they are definitely one of the best when it comes to managed WordPress hosting. They offer a lot of exclusive features that you won’t find anywhere else.
They have multiple tiers for different types of users. The cheapest plan is priced at $30/month while the highest tier is at $1,500/month.
Kinsta guarantees an uptime of 99.9% for all sites hosted on their platform.
No, they have their own custom control panel. It is arguable better than cPanel as it has a modern and simple look that contributes to its ease of use.
