With the availability of thousands of WordPress hosts in the market, it 's hard for anyone to select a reliable host that provides excellent services and has a good reputation in the market. However, every single host today claim to be the best. But, I am going to solve this problem so that you know about what is "Trending" in the WordPress hosting these days.
I am talking about Kinsta WordPress hosting, which was named as one of the ''most reliable hosting companies'' of the year 2016, by codeinwp.com Today I would like to share my experience with Kinsta WordPress hosting with you all through this review. I have been using this managed hosting service for quite some time now, and the experience has been fantastic. I used it for my clients and my own personal websites too. Whether customer support or speed, Kinsta offers various excellent services.About Kinsta
Kinsta is a high performance managed WordPress hosting provider. It was established by a WP developer and programmer named Mark Gavalda. The company has offices at multiple locations such as Los Angeles, London, and Budapest. This WordPress hosting company has eight years of experience in the industry and has cutting edge technology to compete with leading hosts.
The company is setting new milestones in WordPress hosting and earning a high reputation in their niche. They are offering several high-end solutions in web hosting.
As per the WordPress Web Hosting Performance Test By LoadStrom, it was mentioned that Kinsta is doing a remarkable job in WordPress hosting. They say companies like Kinsta do not have to struggle to stay in the market. They organized certain tests on speed and response time etc., and were impressed by the results.
They also mentioned that Kinsta's performance was incredible and much better than many well-known WordPress hosting providers. As per Kevin from the LoadStrom, even a newcomer like Kinsta has made its position in Top performers and that the performance of Kinsta in the performance test was top tier.
Kinsta offers enormous features to its clients that make them a favorite choice of many businesses in WordPress hosting. It is the best choice for people who are looking for high performance hosting solutions. Mint.com, AdEspresso, Intuit, Skagway, GE, AdStage as well as UbiSoft are some of the prestigious clients of Kinsta hosting.
Some Key Features By Kinsta
No Limit to Visitors And Page Views
Kinsta allows you to have unlimited traffic for your website. However, they cap the bandwidth after the mentioned data usage, but plentiful for many businesses. I believe that this is how it should be, the best way to go! It is even better than WP Engine that asks for higher amounts of an additional payment over usage along with limited visitors.
I think no one should charge for extra visitors at least. All of Kinsta's payment plans include this option.
Kinsta Architecture
Kinsta is entirely powered by influential Google Cloud Platform and the first managed WordPress company to do so. Google Cloud Platform provides features like LXD containers, automatic scaling along with one of the most robust Google network on earth. Kinsta has opted for the regional deployment mode provided by this platform.
These multi-regions offered to Kinsta by Google are Asia-Pacific, Central Europe, and US Central. Along with all this, Kinsta has the perfect architecture that includes back-end framework also. Kinsta's framework also includes
- Ubuntu 16.04
- Nginx, an open source reverse proxy server for HTTPS, POP3, HTTP, SMTP, Load balancer, IMAP protocol, web server and HTTP cache.
- HTTP/2
- PHP 7.1
- Memcached
- Object Caching
- Free SSL-powered by Let's Encrypt
- Free DNS through Amazon Route 53
- MariaDB
- Application performance monitoring is done by New Relic.
- Relic makes sure the1440 daily uptime checks for every site (hard to find!)
Kinsta has a superb technology, which ensures that the website they are hosting loads very quickly. The architecture powered by Google Cloud offer fabulous scalability as well as significant improvement in the speed.
Interactive Dashboard
Kinsta offers a smart and elegant dashboard. This panel is given secure access through the "two-factor authentication" along with activity logs to ascertain the safety and reliable access. It keeps all the records of each and every activity of your account. It also provides you all the relevant information including visitors, bandwidth usage, and invoices, etc. Kinsta dashboard has a management screen that lets you filter the site in case a client has many websites.
Impressive Hosting Analytics
It helps you clear the cache quickly from the dashboard directly. It also provides you the capability to change the PHP engine (such as PHP 5.6, PHP 7 and PHP 7.1) with just a click. In fact, the open-source virtual machine HHVM is also available with all the plans offered by Kinsta. New Relic Monitoring can be configured by restarting PHP.
Readily Available Server Logs
The WordPress logs are readily available through the available tools. This functionality is very useful on a daily basis. It not only saves lots of time, but also efforts to have these logs on the dashboard. You do not need to check SSH or FTP to scrutinize the error logs on the server. You can check access logs and cache logs along with error logs.
Highly Secured Network
Kinsta provides active as well as passive security to all the WordPress websites managed by its team. They monitor every malicious threat or intent and stop them through multilayered protection. The WordPress sites maintained by Kinsta are checked continuously for uptime, DDoS attacks and is involved proactively in blocking the malicious code that tries to enter their network.
Kinsta security system includes hardware firewalls with software based tight restrictions and malware scanners. They also offer third party SSL support.
Free SSL Certs from Let's Encrypt
Kinsta renders its clients with free SSL certificates with every hosting plan. These SSL certificates are powered by Let's Encrypt and offer one-click SSL configuration on your website. It allows your WordPress website up and running in just a few seconds. You only need to pick it from the drop-down list provided in the dashboard, and it is ready to go.
Custom SSL
Besides, free SSL provided by Kinsta, you can also utilize your preferred custom SSL certificates for the premium certifications. In fact, the same dashboard can be used to upload the keys of these custom SSLs, without any outside support.
CDN
Kinsta does not provide CDN. They are hosting provider, not a CDN company. And in case, you are interested in awesome speed accompanied with the high-powered servers of Kinsta then I would suggest the implementation of KeyCDN. While this combination of performance and speed is outstanding, KeyCDN also includes more than twenty-five POPs, HPACK compression, Free SSL, HTTP/2 support, etc.
Fully Managed WordPress Site
The site management feature offers you to access all the information related to your website such as IP address, SSH connections, database access, SFTP/SSH information, etc. They have also given an "Open MySQL" button that takes you straight to phpMyAdmin.
Staging Areas For Websites
Kinsta offers you to copy your WordPress website in a sandbox environment provided by them, so you can edit your WordPress website and add latest developments to it. You can also change the design or test a new plugin using this feature.
The staging areas offered by Kinsta is going to be the favourite feature of developers and web designers. These areas can be created with a click only. You also get access to MySQL database and sFTP information. Kinsta ensures daily backup of your website during staging, so in case you want to go back to the earlier version, you can easily do it.
One-Click Site Staging Facility For Developers
Kinsta offers you one-click site staging facility, that lets you make modifications to your site quickly. Whether the development of the site or adding test plugins, updating WordPress or adding code, it offers you a secure site staging environment. This is a very useful feature for the developers. You can make any kind of change instantly.
This offers you best environment for testing various add-ons on your WordPress site. And you can always make it live very comfortably. You can restore the staging before it is live. In fact, you can also restore the changes achieved during the staging and run the website as such.
Complete Site Information at Your Disposal
It includes your WordPress website details such as Page views, unique views, bandwidth usage and other information.
Outstanding Customer Support
The customer support offered by Kinsta is fantastic. Their team is very supportive and empathetic. I remember the day when I started using Kinsta, I had hundreds of questions to ask them, and they answered all my questions patiently. Mark and other support team members are very knowledgeable and experts in their field. They all aim towards rendering faster WordPress websites.
I must appreciate the efforts they put in during their shifts providing significant assistance to their customers with 24*7 availability and the best part is that they are available through your Kinsta dashboard.
Hence, even if you are working till late, irrespective of time, they are ready to assist you at any hour. Their technical expertise and experience is the industry standard and the way they handle the performance or scaling issues, I was spellbound.
Automated as well as Manual Backups
Kinsta also offers the facility of automatic backups. The system has the capability to store 14 backups at the same time. The default setting is for one backup per day. However, you can also take the backups manually as per your requirement.
When you restore any backup, it also takes the backup of your WordPress website just before the restoration and reflects it in the dashboard further utilization, in case you would like to undo the alterations made.
Additional Features
Kinsta also offers several additional features just like any leading WordPress web host including Git Support, Multisite support, WP-CLI, one-click cloning feature, and many more.
Site Migration For Free
Companies that are not very happy with their WordPress hosting providers do not shift mostly because of headaches behind the website migration, which require plenty of efforts as per many. So here is the good news for people who are looking to migrate. Kinsta offers free migration services.
Their team assigns you a temporary domain so that everything can be set before putting your domain on the Kinsta servers. Kinsta's expert team migrate your website securely and make it a hassle free process for you. You do not even need to lift your finger, and before you know, your WordPress website will be up and running.
Pricing
Kinsta focuses on providing its hosting services to various medium size businesses to large enterprise clients as it offers high-end performance WordPress hosting. I am not saying that you compare them with Flywheel or WPEngine, but Kinsta has made a place for itself, in the area of WordPress hosting. They have earned an excellent reputation in such a short time that not many companies can achieve.
Their plans are basically can be differentiated by the number of WordPress websites allowed, bandwidth and storage space. It also offers you the facility to hire more PHP technicians with higher packages. These developers execute the code on the WordPress website.
Pros of Using Kinsta
- Kinsta provides fully managed WordPress hosting and offer all the management through its interactive and user-friendly dashboard.
- It is built on Google Cloud Platform.
- It has three locations of data centers; hence, you can locate your server based on your target market.
- Staging made easily accessible by staging areas or sandbox environments
- Complete uptime monitoring
- High security and safety
- Superfast speeds
- Kinsta offer scalable hosting solutions
- Payment on monthly basis
Various Hosting Plans- Business, Enterprise, and Custom
Along with Enterprise web hosting plans, Kinsta also offers customized packages to its prestigious clients. It mainly focuses on medium to large businesses. That is why kinsta has included three packages for WordPress hosting. These are
Kinsta vs WP Engine: Kinsta is Much Better Than WP Engine
However I do not believe that WP engine and Kinsta belong to the same category of industry, but it is always better to compare to check your standards. This also gives us some useful information. Earlier I have hosted some of my websites on WP Engine also, so I would like to compare the speed differences between the two as for me speed is something that not every host can excel in.
When I tested the speed on the WP Engines as well as on Kinsta, multiple times, the first time was DNS queries. On WP Engine, I received an elaborated first-time requests, sometimes for as long as 3 seconds.
I never faced such issue on Kinsta. However, both the hosts are getting served from the similar regions of their data centers.
Kinsta showed an improved speed by 46% only by moving its servers, which is rather unusual but interesting.
The speeds offered by Kinsta are much better than WP Engine and at an outstanding rate. This shows that Kinsta is actually a high-performance hosting provider.
Conclusion
When I started using Kinsta as a managed WordPress host for my website, I was little reluctant. But seeing them flourish has been an incredible experience. The company earned a name for itself and provided wonderful service to its clients. It may not be the topmost web host, but the kind of performance and speed it offers is no less either.
I hope you like Kinsta Hosting review 2017 and please share your experience with Kinsta hosting.
