Kinsta Hosting Review – Is it the Fastest WordPress Host?

This is our Kinsta hosting review after using and evaluating their managed WordPress hosting. Kinsta focuses on premium hosting for WordPress websites whether they are large or small. Having used dozens of hosting companies and hosting plans, we decided to give Kinsta a try a few years back.

For most WordPress site owners, when choosing a host they tend to take price into consideration more than anything else. If that sounds like you, you’re likely not going to like Kinsta’s pricing. But, we challenge you to hear us out.

Related: Kinsta vs Rocket.net – which Managed WordPress hosting is best?

Speed matters: Is Kinsta WordPress hosting fast?

We found Kinsta hosting to be the fastest we had ever used when we first put a few sites on their platform a few years back. All Kinsta plans come with a global CDN, and that combined with all the behind-the-scenes optimization that Kinsta has engineered make their WordPress hosting incredibly fast.

Without much optimization at all, our first Kinsta WordPress site was getting very high scores from both Pingdom and in Google’s Page Speed test. In fact, just enabling Kinsta’s CDN and incorporating it with WP Rocket, our desktop score was a 97.

It was only because of some custom header elements that it took a bit of tweaking to get our mobile score into the high 80’s. We know with a bit of attention and we’ll have both in scores in the 90’s.

Kinsta hosting vs. AWS self-administered

The one comparison that is very, very close is when we manage our own AWS servers running Nginx as well as AWS hosted MySQL databases. But, to be honest, most users aren’t going to go the self-administered route. It is cheaper, and can perform better, but it does take know how, and also makes you the server admin. If something is to go wrong, it’s up to you to figure it out and fix it.

Related: Kinsta is one of our recommended WordPress hosting providers for SMBs!

Kinsta WordPress Hosting vs. Competition

You could say that Kinsta has a lot of competition, but we really don’t think there are too many direct competitors. Kinsta isn’t trying to earn the cheapest WordPress hosting award, they’re geared toward the best managed WordPress hosting.

So, from our standpoint, Kinsta’s real competition are WP Engine, Rocket.net and Pagely. Of these managed WordPress hosting providers, our choice is Rocket.net (read our Rocket.net review). And, that decision includes Kinsta. But, and this is important, Kinsta is a very, very close second. And, that is our preference; Kinsta may be yours.

[After switching to Kinsta] a high-traffic WordPress news site processing hundreds of PHP requests per minute reduced their response time from 250ms to 80ms by switching to C2 machines – that’s a 212.5% increase in performance!

Kinsta.com

At the end of the day, we found we got every so slightly better speed from Rocket.net. But, Kinsta was right on their heels. And, taking all things into consideration, Kinsta might be a better choice for many. We really like Kinsta’s site management dashboard and tools. Everything is so logical and straightforward.

Managed WordPress Features without the steep price? Check out our SiteGround StartUp vs GrowBig vs GoGeek comparison!

How is Kinsta’s hosting environment so fast for WordPress sites?

Kinsta has gone to great lengths to provide enterprise-level WordPress hosting speed at a reasonable price. Here are just a few of the features of their hosting platform that drive it’s fast response and rendering times:

• Entire infrastructure on the Google Cloud Platform
• C2 compute-optimized virtual machines
• Premium, low-latency traffic routing
• Custom LXD implementation
• Custom Nginx implementation
• Custom MariaDB implementation

Kinsta’s environment, custom implementations of LXD, MariaDB and Nginx, and specifically the use of C2 VMs (virtual machines) is what makes their managed WordPress hosting so fast. How fast, Kinsta notes that “A high-traffic WordPress news site processing hundreds of PHP requests per minute reduced their response time from 250ms to 80ms by switching to C2 machines – that’s a 212.5% increase in performance!”

Kinsta hosting site management dashboard

Having used many different site management dashboards, Kinsta’s is our new favorite. The dashboard looks great, and the user interface is straightforward, intuitive and communicative. But, that’s just the beginning.

The real standout: the user experience. Kinsta really thought through the tasks necessary to administer a WordPress site. They then built task flows that not only address those tasks, but streamline them, too.

Related: Check out our comparison of RankMath and Yoast SEO!

The Kinsta dashboard in practice

We came across another refreshing example of this today. We deployed a WordPress site from our local development environment to Kinsta. A few days later we needed to make a few updates. Kinsta includes staging sites with every domain.

So, we clicked a single button which instructed Kinsta to create a WordPress staging site from our current production site. Within minutes, the new site WordPress was set up. The process was simple. But, if you’ve ever done this on other hosting providers, this is often the start of a frustrating process. There’s number of things that are often disappointing when going through this process, including:

• The domain name – Is it something logical or a random string of characters and numbers?
• Server parity – Is the hosting environment identical? It’s not uncommon to lack SSL or other features critical to real-world staging.
• Pushing staging to production – There’s often many hoops to jump through to make sure you don’t destroy the production site including the domain name set in the WordPress database and making a backup of Production before hand.

Real-world WordPress task: Kinsta excelled

We had quite literally been through a frustrating customer service session with GoDaddy just doing essentially the same thing. The most frustrating things? Everything above. GoDaddy was difficult to work with, and didn’t even seem to understand why we might think a (free) SSL Certificate might be assumed to be free on a GoDaddy eCommerce plan.

Needless to say, we didn’t have that high of expectations for Kinsta’s process of migrating our Staging site to Production. We just hoped it was better. Boy was it.

We backed up our Production site and just did the push. We wanted to see what would happen without researching it first. Here’s how Kinsta handled the task:

1. Kinsta automatically made a backup of our current Production site and database.
2. Our staging site was then pushed to replace our production site.
3. Along the way, Kinsta automatically maintained the correct URL references for Production.
4. The dashboard alerted us that the push was complete.

The whole WordPress migration was seamless. And, it did everything you’d expect. This is just one example of how Kinsta’s self-service site management doesn’t just make functionality available, it incorporates thoughtful steps into processes automatically.

Better than cPanel?

For us, absolutely. We’re not, and have never been, big cPanel fans. While just about an industry standard, cPanel is showing its age. The cPanel user experience is inconsistent and clunky when we compare it with something as streamlined and modern as Kinsta’s site management dashboard.

Major Kinsta customers

Many well-known companies trust Kinsta for their WordPress hosting needs. A few that you may recognize include:

• Buffer
• Flippa
• FreshBooks
• General Electric
• Hootsuite
• MariaDB
• TripAdvisor
• Ubisoft

While you may not be building the next Buffer or TripAdvisor, it’s good to know that companies with extreme needs insofar as heavy usage, uptime and speed trust Kinsta.

What real customers like us are saying

We took a look at review of Kinsta’s hosting, and found a consistent theme. Kinsta’s reviews are excellent across the board, with one common complaint: price. Maybe this complaint is because there aren’t any other significant issues with Kinsta’s hosting.

The alternative is that the price really is too high. At the end of the day, it comes down to what you are looking for in in WordPress host. For us, we see Kinsta as a great solution when speed and ease of use are critical.

Final thoughts on Kinsta WordPress hosting

Kinsta WordPress hosting costs more than shared hosting, or non-managed hosting. But, for what Kinsta offers, the price is completely reasonable. And, the more sites you need to host, the better the pricing.