Kinsta and WPX Hosting are two of the top web hosting providers today. Interestingly, they were launched in the same year, 2013, and both have gotten far in being among the best choices for managed WordPress hosting. Below we list the key differences between Kinsta and WPX Hosting, comparing their features, performance and pricing, to help you decide which hosting service will work best for your WordPress websites.
Contents
Kinsta vs WPX Hosting WordPress Hosting Comparison Chart
| Name | Kinsta | WPX Hosting |
| Â |  |  |
| Pricing | Check Pricing at Kinsta.com | Check Pricing at WPX.net |
| Traffic Tiers | Starter: 20,000/mo Pro: 40,000/mo Business: 100k to 600k/mo Enterprise: 1m to 3m/mo | Business: Unmetered Professional: Unmetered Elite: Unmetered |
| Storage Tiers | Starter: 10 GB Pro: 20 GB Business: 30-60 GB Enterprise: 100-250 GB | Business: 10 GB Professional: 20 GB Elite: 40 GB |
| Monthly Bandwidth | Starter: 50 GB Pro: 100 GB Business: 200-500 GB Enterprise: 500-1000 GB | Business: 100 GB Professional: 200 GB Elite: Unlimited |
| Websites | Starter: 1 Pro: 2 Business: 5-40 Enterprise: 60-150 | Business: 5 Professional: 15 Elite: 35 |
| Hosting Interface | MyKinsta | Custom |
| Content Delivery Network | KeyCDN | WPX Cloud CDN |
| Free SSL Certificates | Yes | Yes |
| Staging Area | Yes | Yes |
| Free Site Backup | Yes | Yes |
| Free Site Restore | Yes | Yes |
| Backup Retention | 14-30 days | 28 days |
| Free Email | No | Yes |
| Site Transfer | Yes | Yes |
| Multisite Support | Pro and up | Yes |
| Customer Support | 24/7 live chat and ticket | 24/7 live chat |
| Money Back Guarantee | 30 days | 30 days |
Features
Kinsta is built on Google Cloud Platform while WPX Hosting has their own servers.
Kinsta is powered exclusively by Google Cloud Platform, giving it numerous advantages over most other web hosting providers. GCP has some of the most expensive and fastest servers today, and its reputation as a reliable cloud computing solution is unchallenged. Meanwhile, WPX Hosting buys and configures their own servers and then underloads them with hosting accounts for improved flexibility and control.
WPX Hosting has also developed their own Content Delivery Network, unlike Kinsta which chose KeyCDN as their premium CDN solution. The WPX Cloud CDN is part of the reason why WPX Hosting is one of the fastest web hosts on the planet. Both have also created their own custom dashboard instead of simply using cPanel. This gives them greater control over site management UI and feature settings.
Site migrations are free for the first limited number of times on Kinsta, depending on your plan, and it will be carried out by their expert team. On WPX Hosting, you can transfer as many sites as you wish. And because WPX Hosting allows more website installs per hosting plan tier, it’s generally better suited for customers who have multiple sites. With advanced memory caching, Kinsta is optimized for WooCommerce sites though, something which WPX Hosting does not support.
A big difference between Kinsta and WPX Hosting is the latter’s inclusion of email services. Kinsta recommends third-party email services while WPX Hosting firmly believes hosting providers should include email in their features.
Speed
WPX Hosting is slightly faster than Kinsta.
Kinsta and WPX Hosting are two of the fastest hosts today, trumping many other managed and non-managed services. However, there can only be one winner in this regard, and WPX Hosting comes out ahead. According to GTMetrix, Pingdom Tools and Winbench results, WPX Hosting wins out over Kinsta though it’s not by a large margin and it’s location-dependent. Depending where you are, sites on Kinsta may load faster and take less time to first byte.
Load impact testing, which shows each host’s caching performance, further solidifies WPX Hosting’s advantage in this department. WPX Hosting was able to handle roughly 50% more requests, transferred 50% more data, and had a lower average load time while having a higher peak average bandwidth.
Load storm testing, which is a more intensive simulation of real visitor traffic, flipped the advantage however. With nearly equal requests handled, Kinsta had 6 times fewer errors, and had a much lower peak response time.
As such, WPX Cloud CDN shows that it’s delivering as promised in providing faster load times for WPX Hosting clients. WPX is able to make constant tweaks to their custom CDN to maximize WordPress performance, while Kinsta relies on KeyCDN which is a separate service. KeyCDN has 34 PoPs around the world, though, while WPX Cloud still only has 26 end points.
Reliability
Kinsta and WPX Hosting have excellent uptime and customer support.
As managed web hosting providers, Kinsta and WPX Hosting are pretty much as reliable a hosting service as you can find, with 99.9% website uptime SLAs. Both StatusCake and UptimeRobot confirm that Kinsta and WPX had 100% uptime during testing. Daily backups are automatic and you can restore backups at any time.
Kinsta performs site monitoring every two minutes to stay on top of any critical issues. Their isolated LXC containers also provide added security in combination with real-time DDoS protection, GeoIP blocking, self-healing PHP, and the GCP firewall itself. Kinsta also adds a 100% hack-fix guarantee just in case. On the other hand, WPX Hosting includes daily malware removal for free in addition to constant site monitoring.
Customer support is also fantastic on both hosting providers. Both provide 24/7 live chat with WordPress experts and engineers. WPX Hosting promises response times of 30 seconds on average while Kinsta’s ticket response time is under 2 minutes. Support quality has been impressive as noted by third party review sites such as G2 and Trustpilot.
Plans and Pricing
WPX Hosting offers more affordable pricing than Kinsta.
Now here’s where WPX Hosting simply outshines Kinsta on value. Kinsta’s lowest tier is more expensive than WPX’s, which also includes 5 websites compared to Kinsta’s single installation. WPX Hosting’s monthly bandwidth limits are also double that of Kinsta’s, which can be critical for overage charges.
The biggest difference is there are only three tiers offered on WPX Hosting, Business, Professional and Elite, while Kinsta stretches its plans into four Business tiers, four Enterprise tiers, and an extra customizable tier for even bigger clients. As such, it’s easy to see that WPX Hosting caters more to smaller sites and med-sized enterprises while Kinsta goes all the way to hosting as large a site as you want.
You can use their 30-day money-back guarantees to test hosting performance and see whether their services show an improvement on your sites. Both include many similar features in every plan, such as staging areas, free SSL certificates, easy WordPress installations, the latest PHP 7.x updates, and more.
Verdict
Kinsta is better for bigger websites while WPX Hosting caters more to smaller and mid-sized sites.
Kinsta and WPX Hosting are without a doubt superior web hosting choices compared to a large majority of options out there. However, their pricing makes it clear that Kinsta is highly targeted at large enterprises with its expanded tiers for Business and Enterprise. Meanwhile, WPX Hosting only has three plans that cost lower, with more WordPress installs and higher bandwidth limits. Because their performance as well as features are roughly similar, you’ll want the plan that’s closer to your needs. With excellent support, you can get an amazing managed WordPress hosting experience from both of these providers.
FAQs
Third party testing shows that WPX Hosting is slightly faster than Kinsta, though page load times are still dependent on the server location and yours.
Yes, WPX Hosting is a more affordable managed WordPress hosting provider compared to other hosts. Page loading speed, site uptime and customer support are all deemed to be above average on WPX Hosting.
Yes, WordPress offers both free and paid hosting. However, for fully managed WordPress hosting, you’ll want to look for providers who offer specialized services.
For most small websites, managed WordPress hosting is definitely not needed. However, websites that continue to grow can benefit from the services provided by these companies since they will handle security, uptime, updates, speed and more for you.
