Kinsta is a managed WordPress host and the first WordPress host to offer cloud hosting powered by Google Cloud Platform. They were founded in 2013 and have grown to become powerhouses in the WordPress industry.
In this post, we’re going to cover what Kinsta has to offer and at what cost. We’ll also take a look at its hosting infrastructure and developer options. Let’s start with pricing and work our way down from there.
Kinsta Pricing and Overview of Plans
Kinsta has among the most flexible hosting plans in the managed WordPress hosting industry. They offer several plan tiers for standalone WordPress sites, multiple sites, and agencies, as well as custom plans for projects that require more resources than the Enterprise plans provide.
Pricing for plans starts at $35/month for the Single 35k plan and maxes out at $625/month for Enterprise-level single sites. There are plenty of tiers to choose from, ranging from single-site to multiple-site plans, to suit your needs and budget. Each single-site plan’s name reflects the monthly visits resources allocated, while the multiple-site plan names indicate the number of WordPress installations available on them.
Here’s a basic overview of the plans:
The visits, storage, and bandwidth resources continue to increase until they reach 3 million visits and 250 GB of storage for Enterprise tiers. All plans are backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee, and you’ll receive two months free of charge when you pay annually. Additionally, select plans come with a free first month. All plans also come with free wildcard SSL and CDN services through Kinsta’s partnerships with Cloudflare.
So, what sets Kinsta pricing apart from plans offered by other managed WordPress hosts? Let’s use Kinsta’s biggest competitors WP Engine and Flywheel as examples.
These hosts offer three plans and one custom plan for enterprise customers. This isn’t unusual for web hosts, but it does leave huge gaps in each company’s pricing structure.
WP Engine and Flywheel’s Startup and Starter plans cost $35/month and $25/month respectively. These plans have limits of 25,000 visits and 10/5GB of storage. The next plan up for each host costs $115/month and allows for up to 100,000 visits.
While you may reach 25,000 visits per month quickly, you’ll likely find it difficult to reach 100,000 visits per month in a similar amount of time. This means you’ll overpay for quite a while or pay overage fees consistently. All three of these companies charge $1/1,000 extra visits in overage fees.
At Kinsta, if you reach your plan’s monthly visits cap, you’re sent a notification at 80% and 100% usage. The overage charge is $0.50 per 1,000 visits.
There are also certain features only available in second-tier and higher plans. For example, if you require a WordPress multisite setup, you’ll need the WP 2 plan, which is $70/month, or higher with Kinsta. This feature will cost you $115/month with WP Engine and Flywheel.
Kinsta Hosting Technology, Speed and Performance
Kinsta is powered by Google Cloud Platform’s Premium Tier network, which gives you access to over 35 data center locations around the globe, plus Kinsta utilizes GCP’s fastest C2 and C3D servers. Additionally, Kinsta uses an advanced setup incorporating Nginx, LXD containers for complete site isolation, PHP 8+ (with EOL PHP 7.4 and 8.0 support), and MariaDB.
An enterprise-level Cloudflare integration is included in all plans at no additional charge. Through this integration, all users gain access to a CDN network with over 300 locations, free wildcard SSL, and numerous additional features for enhanced performance and security.
This base infrastructure gives Kinsta’s hosting environment a fast and secure framework to start with, but let’s explore how it expands from there.
Speed and Performance
As a managed WordPress host, Kinsta offers numerous features designed to increase the speed and overall performance of your site. A lot of these features are functionalities you’d typically need to implement through plugins or your own code.
A lot of this performance comes from the base of the hosting infrastructure mentioned above. The cloud hosting servers powered by Google Cloud Platform and its C2 and C3D virtual machines that are much faster and more reliable than shared and VPS hosting servers.
They also have the ability to scale automatically if needed, an essential feature for sites that receive random surges in traffic. Kinsta even has case studies you can view that demonstrate how their servers were able to sustain several WooCommerce sites during national marketing campaigns.
Furthermore, they offer server-level caching and free CDN services via Cloudflare on every plan, though each plan has a different bandwidth limit. The built-in caching functionality means you won’t be able to use certain third-party caching plugins. Fortunately, Kinsta’s server-level caching provides much better performance than the application-level caching these types of plugins implement. Plus, through Kinsta’s Cloudflare integration, you can enable Edge Caching for faster deliverability of your web pages.
Speed Test Results and Uptime Performance
As far as speed and performance goes, here are a few page speed metrics with different functionalities enabled. I performed two tests with a basic test website. Test A was conducted with only Kinsta’s basic hosting setup. Test B was conducted with optimized JS and CSS files.
Test A had average load times of 470ms with Pingdom and 0.9s with GTmetrix. Test B had averages of 382ms and 0.7s.
If you want an idea of how well Kinsta performs with a production website, check out our results at Pingdom for MH Themes, which is hosted on Kinsta’s servers.
If you typically use WP Rocket’s optimization functionalities, know that Kinsta does allow you to activate the plugin with caching disabled. Similarly, Kinsta doesn’t allow every image optimization plugin on the sites it hosts as a way to prevent “performance impacts” these plugins can inflict. Plugins that optimize on external servers, e. g. Imagify, ShortPixel, Optimole, EWWW Cloud, Optimus, etc. are all completely fine to use at Kinsta.
Kinsta also implements uptime monitoring, which checks that your site remains online every three minutes or 480 times a day. The company’s uptime guarantee is 99.9% (SLA-backed), and they vow to compensate you if it falls below that percentage in a monthly billing period.
Security
Security is another aspect of web hosting Kinsta covers for you. Through its Cloudflare integration, DDoS protection and hardware firewalls are available for all clients. Server-level caching is also included; this means you won’t be able to install third-party security plugins, like iThemes Security.
Kinsta’s firewall is placed at the server level, for starters, rather than being based on PHP. The uptime monitoring is also part of their security arsenal as are the daily backups offered with every plan (backup retention varies per plan, but it’s a minimum of 14 days). While this prevents you from installing most backup plugins (incremental backup plugins are allowed), it does give you enough flexibility to render such plugins useless.
Kinsta hosting also includes malware scanning and a Malware Security Pledge as additional layers of security. Once you add your domain, it’ll be automatically secured behind a free wildcard SSL certificate from Cloudflare, but Kinsta also supports third-party certificates as well.
The icing on the cake, so to speak, comes in the form of only allowing SFTP and SSH over FTP, enforcing strong passwords for WordPress admins, and banning IPs after six failed login attempts.
The MyKinsta Dashboard
The MyKinsta hosting dashboard is intuitive and features a clean, user-friendly user interface. Its layout utilizes standard sections in line with other managed WordPress hosts, although Kinsta takes a few steps further with features like analytics and reports.
When you’re new to Kinsta, you’ll use the Sites or Migrations sections. These allow you to add new or migrate existing sites onto Kinsta’s servers. Creating a new WordPress site with Kinsta, for instance, took me only a few minutes using the Sites section.
You can also use this section to migrate an existing site manually on your own. If you’re new, you have access to one free migration, which you can request in the Migrations section. New customers are eligible for this service even if their sites use complex setups, such as ecommerce, membership platforms or reverse proxies.
With Kinsta’s analytics, you can monitor the resources your site uses, CDN usage, the devices your visitors use, performance and more.
The dashboard is also where you can use Kinsta’s various tools, such as backups, clearing the cache, enabling SSL, and more.
Kinsta also has features aimed at developers, including staging areas, the ability to switch between PHP versions on your own, support for WPI-CLI and Git, and they also offer a REST API tool for task automation. Flywheel, in contrast, locks down your wp-config file to the point where you can only edit it by requesting support to do so for you. While Git is supported, you can only use WP-CLI if you use Flywheel’s own local development software Local.
Similar to Local, Kinsta also provides a free local development tool, called DevKinsta. It’s powered by Docker and lets users to create, design and deploy sites offline.
Flywheel also strips down database access and limits you to their UI and setup. Kinsta gives you full access to phpMyAdmin. All in all, when it comes to technical details like this, there’s a lot that Kinsta allows you to do freely within the dashboard while other managed WordPress hosts either require you to contact support to have them done for you or don’t allow you to do them at all.
Let’s wrap up this review.
Final Thoughts
Kinsta is a fantastic WordPress host that offers an impressive server setup and a suite of useful, developer-friendly features. On the flip side, its UI is simple enough for non-developers to use. Additionally, with WP Engine acquiring Flywheel, Flywheel has changed its plans to align with its parent company’s (and to support its new cloud hosting infrastructure). As a result, Kinsta is one of the few independent managed WordPress hosts left, offering cheaper and simplified pricing options.
The only disadvantage Kinsta might have for advanced users and developers is that some third-party plugins aren’t allowed. But since you can use image optimization plugins that optimize on external servers as well as backup plugins that are incremental and security plugins, there shouldn’t be any need for a lot of other third-party solutions. Kinsta is even partners with WP Rocket.
Kinsta’s pricing starts at $35/month for one site, 35,000 visits, and 10GB of storage. The first month is free for Kinsta’s select plans. You’ll also get two months free of charge if you pay annually, and all plans are backed by a 30-day, money-back guarantee.
