Kinsta Review 2024

Edited by Johnathan Bell

Updated


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Kinsta is one of the world’s most trustworthy hosting providers, powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform. It provides superb WordPress, database, and app hosting options, all with frighteningly fast speeds and supported by first-rate customer service.

Who should choose Kinsta? Kinsta is a good choice for website owners and businesses that value speed and security, as well as developers, database administrators, and digital entrepreneurs. Looking for something more affordable and suitable for beginners? Our featured partners all offer beginner-friendly hosting options with everything you need to get started at entry-level price points.

Featured Partners

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Grey circle with an i in the middle Featured Partners pay us for placement on our site. When you sign up for one of them using our links, we get paid a small percentage at no cost to you.

Hostinger

The easiest option

Starts at $2.49 per month

  • Fail-proof setup
  • Great for beginners
  • Free AI tools

Bluehost

For new WordPress sites

Starts at $2.95 per month

  • Guided onboarding
  • Recommended by WordPress
  • 24/7 support

HostGator

Best security and scalability

Starts at $3.75 per month

  • All types of hosting
  • Enhanced security tools
  • Affordable as you grow

Kinsta Pros and Cons

Kinsta’s popularity stems from the fact that it provides website owners and organizations with a variety of choices and services for managed WordPress hosting that are ideal in terms of speed, security, and top-tier support.

There were a few limitations I discovered, which might be problematic for people on a tighter budget or seeking new domain hosting options. Consider the benefits and drawbacks listed below before deciding on Kinsta as your web host.

What we like about Kinsta

  • Extremely fast response and load times: My analysis detected an average load time of 725 ms and a response time of 4 ms.
  • Fantastic support: All my interactions with Kinsta’s support team were extremely smooth. They were available 24/7 via email and live chat, with responses coming back every few seconds.
  • High premium on security: I observed that Kinsta employs both proactive and reactive efforts to keep its clients’ websites safe from fraudulent requests and DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.
  • Robust infrastructure: Kinsta hosts sites on Google Cloud Platform’s Premium Tier network.

What fell flat

  • No domain hosting: One of the most significant drawbacks is that the platform does not provide domain hosting.
  • Lacks phone support: While Kinsta allowed me to contact the sales team by phone, they did not provide support services through the same channel.
  • No shared hosting: Kinsta web hosting may not be ideal for small website owners looking for a cheap shared solution.
  • Not the cheapest: With its current prices, Kinsta don’t make it among the cheapest web hosting solutions.

Digital.com’s Editorial Review

Due to its fantastic customer reviews, lightning-fast load speeds, incredible features, security, and an overall emphasis on quality, we think Kinsta’s a great option for it’s target audience. During my testing, I found Kinsta to be dependable and performative all around.

See how we review hosting providers.

Plans & Pricing

Jump to Review

  • Application hosting–$7 per month
  • Database hosting–$18 per month
  • WordPress hosting–$24 per month

Features

Jump to Review

  • A custom-built control panel
  • Highest-end CPUs and global delivery
  • Local WordPress development
  • Application and database hosting
  • 99.9% uptime guarantee
  • Free Pro package with an agency plan
  • Free SSL certificate
  • State-of-the-art infrastructure

Performance & Uptime

Jump to Review

  • 35+ global data centers
  • 99.9% uptime guarantee
  • Average response time: 4 ms

Security

Jump to Review

  • Enterprise Cloudflare
  • Malware and virus prevention
  • Free SSL certificate
  • Daily backups
  • Free site repairs

Support

Jump to Review

Kinsta’s highly-qualified technical support team can solve any problem you may face. They’re available 24/7 and promise a reply rate of fewer than two minutes.

  • Live chat
  • Phone
  • Video call
  • Email
  • Help center

Improvements

Jump to Review

The team behind Kinsta is continually updating and improving the web host’s services, with a primary emphasis on maintaining efficient hosting servers and expanding on the features they already provide.

Plans and Pricing

Kinsta offers three distinct types of hosting, depending on what you need to host. Each type has multiple tiers to choose from so there’s plenty of room to grow.

Application hosting–starts at $7 per month

  • Good for: developers and experienced users

Database hosting–starts at $18 per month

  • Good for: developers, administrators, IT teams

WordPress hosting–starts at $24 per month

  • Good for: growing or established WordPress sites

All plans come with unlimited users, uptime monitoring, 25+ data centers, CDN, and Cloudflare DDoS protection.

Features

Whatever hosting plan you choose from Kinsta, you’ll get impressive features like free SSL through Cloudflare, software-defined network security, and staging environments for your website, as well as free migrations. Kinsta does not provide shared or virtual private hosting services, focusing on secure and speedy managed cloud hosting.

Kinsta web hosting is not among the cheapest providers, with one of the key reasons being that it hosts all of its customers’ sites on Google Cloud Platform’s Premium Tier network.

A custom-built control panel called MyKinsta

Kinsta does not employ cPanel. Instead, all plans include a custom-built control panel called MyKinsta. My experience with it has shown that it has many user- and developer-friendly features that together make site administration a breeze.

I accessed all of my Kinsta web hosting accounts using a single login, which included synchronization and hotlinks to Kinsta’s help tools and technical support resources. The site also enables new users to sign up for a demo account to try out all of the available features.

Kinsta's straightforward control panel

Highest-end CPUs and global delivery

Kinsta has worldwide availability. I found over 35 data centers ready to deliver enhanced performance and secure file transfer protocol speeds, regardless of where my visitors were located around the globe.

Setting up a new site on Kinsta and choosing from over 35 data centers

A free local WordPress development suite – DevKinsta

Kinsta’s site builder impressed me as a user-friendly tool for building, developing, and deploying WordPress sites. It’s free to download for macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu.

Application and database hosting

In addition to managed WordPress hosting plans, Kinsta provides application and database hosting to developers, database managers, and digital entrepreneurs.

Beginning with the latter, Kinsta allows databases to grow on the same network that runs Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail. Their infrastructure is entirely powered by Google’s Premium Tier network, which is the quickest and most dependable.

For application hosting options, Kinsta provides a robust infrastructure that is quick to set up, tried, dependable, and prepared to grow.

99.9% uptime guarantee

Kinsta’s hosting packages all provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Upon further digging, I found that each site runs in a single Linux container, with the database operating as a service within the site container. I activated site monitoring alerts and got email notifications anytime there was a site, DNS (domain name system), or SSL error. Reportedly, users would also be notified in case a domain is about to expire.

Free Pro package with an agency plan

Kinsta will handle all of your client sites’ migrations, no matter how complicated they are. As the agency owner, you will get a free Pro plan with the same high-performance and secure hosting that every Kinsta client receives.

Free SSL certificate

All Kinsta web hosting plans provide automatic and free SSL certificates through CloudFlare that will grant your site extensive security. It’s even equipped to support wildcard domains.

State-of-the-art infrastructure

All of Kinsta’s standard hosting plans include advanced security features such as daily uptime checks, automatic backups, SSL integration, DDoS attack detection, malware scanning, and a hack fix guarantee.

While testing Kinsta, I was able to do the following:

  • Create IP (internet protocol) address blacklists
  • Password-protected directories, posts, pages, categories, and WooCommerce products
  • Manage private keys and digital certificates
  • Create filters for email accounts and users
  • Contact a professional security team to deal with malicious attacks, hackers, and breaches
  • Apply automatic backups

Kinsta only allows encrypted SFTP and SSH (Secure Shell) connections and performs frequent automated security tests on each plugin installed to detect vulnerabilities and security concerns. It gave me peace of mind to know that Kinsta retains two weeks’ worth of backups at all times, with the option of increasing data retention if requested.

Performance and Uptime

Websites hosted on Kinsta’s 35+ datacenters load rapidly and remain up and running at all times, thanks to a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Uptime and reliability

Kinsta guarantees consumers a 99.9% uptime guarantee backed up by its service-level agreement (SLA). Depending on the hosting package, customers may get service credits upon request if their site is down for more than 43 minutes (0.1% of the time in a standard 30-day/43,200-minute period).

Downtime brought on by scheduled outages, force majeure situations, any maintenance carried out within the Maintenance Period, and other similar circumstances are not eligible for SLA Credit.

Kinsta conducts automatic testing every two minutes to ensure that this value remains constant throughout time.

From Kinsta's website. Shows overage costs and 35 data centers, 99.9% uptime guarantee, 25k+ happy customers, and over seven billion page views per month

Site response times

Kinsta’s servers have very fast response times. In addition, Kinsta includes Cloudflare services with its hosting packages, which speeds things up even further.

Line chart that shows connection time from multiple locations for Kinsta over the course of a year

Source: Sucuri

Kinsta boasts an average response time of 4 ms, according to my tests, which indicates your site will load rapidly. This is the time it takes for Kinsta’s servers to respond to a web request. The time it takes for your particular website to load will also be heavily influenced by how you build it.

Security

Kinsta provides an enterprise-level Cloudflare integration to prevent viruses and malware from getting near your website.

SSL certificates

All Kinsta web hosting plans come with a free SSL certificate. Thanks to its Cloudflare integration, you can effortlessly safeguard your root domains with an infinite number of subdomains.

Protecting your data

Hardware firewalls, active and passive security, and other sophisticated features of Kinsta prevent unauthorized access to your data. The software backs up daily with a minimum of 14 days of backups to keep your data safe and secure in the event of a mishap. Each backup provides a comprehensive snapshot of a site’s environment at the moment the backup was produced, including files, databases, redirects, and NGINX settings.

And, if the worst occurs and your site is compromised, Kinsta will repair it for free.

Support

Kinsta’s support channels are available 24/7 and include phone and online meetings for sales queries, an email, and a rapid live chat feature for ongoing support.

While testing the site, expert support personnel aided me swiftly regarding the site’s features, emails, site migrations, platform configuration, themes, plugins, and plenty more.

One significant advantage of Kinsta’s customer support is its availability even if you’re just shopping around. Furthermore, after I registered an account and sought assistance, I noticed that the same agent was assigned to my case when I requested support in the same technical area multiple times. This was tremendously helpful since it saved me from continually repeating the basic details of my case.

An interaction with Kinsta's pre-purchase customer service. They responded within a minute each time

Recent Improvements

The following are just some of the recent product improvements rolled out by Kinsta:

  • A recent update to MyKinsta: MyKinsta, the sophisticated custom-built control panel, has been completely redesigned for usability.
  • New Tel Aviv data center: Kinsta’s Google Cloud Platform data centers now include Tel Aviv, Israel, bringing the total to 35.
  • Kinsta’s premium staging environment add-on: You can run up to five premium staging environments alongside your WordPress sites with Kinsta’s staging environment addon.
  • A new site preview tool: Kinsta’s site preview tool allows you to demo any migrated site before pointing it to its live domain through its WordPress temporary URL.

Compare Kinsta Alternatives

While Kinsta is great for specific use cases, it’s not perfect for everyone. Other alternatives, like WP Engine, Bluehost, DreamHost, or InMotion Hosting may better suit your needs.

Check out the top managed WordPress hosting providers to see how Kinsta stacks up or compare it to some of the most popular hosting companies, below.

Hosting Service

Pricing + Basic Plan Features

Kinsta logo

Kinsta
You are here.

Starts at $24 per month

  • One WordPress install
  • 10 GB (gigabyte) disk space
  • 25,000 visits
  • Free SSL, CDN, and staging
  • 24/7 support

Starts at $20 per month

  • 1 website
  • 25,000 monthly visitors
  • 50 GB of monthly bandwidth
  • 10 GB storage
  • Daily backups
  • Free SSL and CDN

Consider WP Engine if: you want the same performance and support but at a lower cost.

Starts at $2.95 per month

  • 1 website
  • 10 GB of storage
  • Free CDN and domain
  • Complimentary SSL
  • Custom WordPress themes

Consider Bluehost if: You’re starting a brand new WordPress website or are a complete beginner.

Starts at $2.59 per month

  • One website
  • SSD storage
  • Unlimited traffic
  • Free domain
  • Free SSL certificate

Consider DreamHost if: You value security and privacy but are on a tight budget.

Starts at $2.29 per month

  • Two websites
  • 100 GB disk space
  • Unmetered bandwidth
  • Free SSL certificate
  • 10 emails
  • Free website builder

Consider InMotion if: You want to host two new websites for the price of one.

What You Need to Know

How long has Kinsta been in the market?

Kinsta was formed in 2013 by a group of seasoned developers with one goal: to build the world’s greatest hosting platform.

Does Kinsta offer domain name registration?

No, Kinsta doesn’t offer domain name registrations.

Does Kinsta support HTTP/2 (HTTP2)?

Yes, all clients may use HTTP/2 (hypertext transfer protocol two) with Kinsta’s new Google Cloud-powered architecture.

Does Kinsta support multisite?

Yes, Kinsta supports WordPress multisite installations on their Pro and higher plans.

What is Kinsta’s cheapest managed WordPress hosting plan?

The managed WordPress hosting beginning bundle is $24 per month, paid annually. The Kinsta web hosting options aren’t the cheapest, but the services I received were well worth it.

Can you host HTML sites with Kinsta?

Yes, HTML (hypertext markup language) sites may be hosted with Kinsta. If WordPress is not set up for your site, Kinsta will host an HTML site without issue.

Does Kinsta offer a money-back guarantee?

Kinsta provides a 30-day money-back guarantee. This is applicable for all regular hosting plans and addons bought within the first 30 days.

Refunds are also allowed after 30 days. In such an instance, Kinsta will reimburse the unused part of your plan’s subscription.

How We Reviewed Kinsta

I test web hosts based on the following factors:

  • Plan value: What plans are available, and do they offer a good value?
  • Ease of use: Is the dashboard easy to navigate?
  • Support: How fast can you get help when needed, and is support genuinely helpful?
  • Features: What features does the host offer, and how do they compare to similar competitors?
  • Security: Does the host offer SSL certificates, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection, backup services, and scans for viruses and malware?
  • Speed and uptime: Does the provider offer a fast, stable environment for your website? How does it perform in tests, and what kind of servers does the hosting company use?
  • Recent improvements: What has the host done lately to update its technology and services?

Learn more about our review methodology.

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