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Kinsta Premium WordPress Hosting
From $30/month
Pros
- Configurable Automatic & Manual Backups
- Simple Dashboard layout
- Great performance
- Strong secure environment
- Easy WordPress website setup
- One-click SSL install
- Excellent Support team
Cons
- Higher Service Cost
- No email hosting
- Low HDD Storage Capacity
The Kinsta Premium Managed WordPress Hosting service was founded in 2013. It is built on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with the help of experienced WordPress developers. Their focus is on speed, security, and stability of the hosting environment.
This means Kinsta are able to implement the same high-quality level of reliability, performance, and security that Google offers in all of their services. Google has developed their architecture for high performance and scalability. So your website will get the benefit of this technology as well. Every WordPress website exists in its own isolated container. Each container has dedicated (not shared with any other website) resources. The result is a secure, high-performance hosting environment.
They utilize 18 data centers across the globe. So you can locate your website as close to your customers as possible.
We want to send out a huge “Thank You” to the folks at Kinsta who supplied us with a 30-day Business Plan to do our testing for this article.
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In this review, we will provide you with an overview of the service. We will then discuss key elements of their hosting offering such as hosting costs, support, reliability, performance, security, and ease of use.
Hosting Costs
The monthly fees for hosting with Kinsta are some of the highest in the industry. When making a performance comparison of Kinsta, other Managed WordPress Hosting providers are more expensive.
The Starter or lowest cost plan at Kinsta costs $30 per month. There are 8 different hosting plans with the most expensive running $900 per month. You can see a full list of plan features and costs on their website.
When you take into account the level of performance, reliability, scalability, and security you get, the cost for Kinsta hosting is actually very reasonable.
Still not sure? Try out Kinsta risk-free. They offer a 30-day money back guarantee.
Support
I have always suggested hosting to other website owners based on the support I receive. A good source to help determine the level of support is to have a look at some of the most common WordPress Hosting groups or forums. The most notable is the WordPress Hosting Group on Facebook. Many people ask about moving their site to Kinsta and want to understand what level of support they can expect.
Given the minimal amount of contact we had with the Kinsta support team, we were impressed by the quick response times. Our questions and requests were addressed within a few minutes. Even when we didn’t go through the normal support channels.
Accessing the support team was very easy. There was a personally branded chat window in our Kinsta Dashboard letting us know they were there to help. Also on the dashboard was a link to the Kinsta User Guide. This directed us to their online knowledge base with common questions categorized by popular topics.
One last thing relating to support that impressed us was their “Free hack fix”. If your website is hacked, they will fix it with immediate priority.
Kinsta provide top-quality premium support.
Reliability & Performance
The Kinsta Premium Hosting service excels at reliability. They earned the Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance award for four years since 2014.
The tests thrown at a website during the evaluations for this award are brutal. These tests are comprised of load testing, uptime monitoring, and performance testing. But Kinsta handled the tests without issue.
We were unable to run any reliability tests ourselves, but we did manage a few performance tests. For these tests, we used Pingdom and PageSpeed Insights. We verified these results using WebPageTest.org which was also used to benchmark performance for the Top Tier WordPress Hosting awards.
Getting this score for a website without images optimized or anything else for that matter is nearly impossible. But the Kinsta platform performs so well, our website produced great performance scores from the moment it went live.
Immediately after setting up a website (http://retiredentrepreneur.kinsta.cloud/), we installed the Layers theme from Elementor. We then installed the Elementor plugin and some Essential Add-ons. We wanted to build a rich page quickly with lots of images so we could test page load times.
Pingdom Speed tests on the first run had a page load time of 1.4 seconds. This is good considering the page size we had created was 4.7MB. Well over the recommended size. Subsequent tests had page load times of 747 milliseconds (or 0.75 seconds). The speed increase was due to the Kinsta Caching and basic CDN configuration.
Google’s Pagespeed Insights backed this up with an initial score of 96 out of 100 for a desktop session. Subsequent tests we saw an increase in score to 97.
The end result was a website that performed very well with no optimization effort on our part.
Ease of Use
This is where the Kinsta Premium WordPress Hosting service really shines. They have gone to great trouble to make every setting and tweak as easy as the click of a box or button.
Securing your website with an SSL certificate is very simple. Just enable it and select the domain name to enable. You can also force all traffic to then go to the https:// address instead of http://.
Enabling a CDN for your website is also just as easy. Kinsta offers free integration with KeyCDN services. From your hosting dashboard, you can configure new CDN zones. If you need some help, the chat icon in the lower right is just a click away.
The system is so easy to use we set up our first website in just a few minutes. Here is how we did it.
Setting up our first website
The first step is to go into your Site menu from the Dashboard. You should see a popup allowing you to enter the new site information.
Select a location for your hosting based on the 18 Google Cloud Platform data center locations displayed.
Add a Site Name, in all lowercase letters only.
You are also given the option to add your own Custom Domain. You can do this now or later after everything is set up.
The last box asks you to select an install mode. You can choose to add a New WordPress install or Clone an Existing website. If you select New WordPress install, you are asked to add login details and contact information for the Admin user. You can also select if you want WooCommerce, Yoast installed.
You can also select the Multisite box if you want to install a version of WordPress Multi-User instead of the standard single site WordPress install.
Done! Very straight forward and simple.
We received the notification email that we had a new WordPress website before Kinsta was finished.
We ran into an error here. The spinner just kept turning on the screen with nothing happening. We had to shut down the tab and reopen it. But when we returned to our dashboard everything was fine.
Working with the Kinsta Dashboard
After your website is set up, you can go to the Sites menu and select your new website name. Then click on the Domains menu. You can now see your new website domain and two buttons that allow you to view your new website, or log in to the WordPress Dashboard.
If you did not add a custom domain during setup, you can do add one from this screen.
From within the Sites menu for your website, you can configure backups. You can schedule automatic backups to occur daily, hourly or perform a manual backup. Backups are kept for up to 14 days. There is an additional fee for backups made more frequently than once a day. But the standard limits should be enough for most websites.
Under certain conditions, system generated backups are triggered. These can be triggered when pushing a staging environment to the live environment or restoring a backup to the live environment. All backups are stored on the server. A backup can be restored to your Kiinsta website with the click of a button.
If you need to make a backup for off-site storage, you can go to the Downloadable backup menu. You are allowed to make one downloadable per week for off-site storage.
We tried this out and everything went very smoothly. A customer support agent pinged us in the chat window with information on the next steps once our downloadable backup was finished.
There are a number of other tools and options you can configure from the dashboard. But we have covered the most common and critical.
In summary, the dashboard is simple. Getting help is nearly immediate with the click of a button.
Additional Observations about Kinsta
You can set up SSL Certificates in real time, or install a third party certificate. This is allowed for custom domain names only. The Kinsta SSL certificates are free and provided by Let’s Encrypt. Once installed, you can force all traffic through an HTTPS connection.
If you want to change the version of PHP your website is using, this can be done from the Tools menu. The PHP engine can also be restarted if needed. This is useful if you need to make changes to the PHP configuration. You can then restart it so your new configuration takes effect.
One thing we have not really addressed is the security. Kinsta uses Linux containers (LXC) on top of GCP which allows them to completely isolate each account and each individual WordPress site. Using GCP also ensures that they employ encryption at rest to store customer data.
Another strong feature is their Staging tool. If you need to make some changes to your website, you can create a staging environment. This allows you to make changes to the website in a private environment. Not on the Live website. You push the changes to the live website with the click of a button when you are finished.
No downtime. No broken website while you work on it.
One service missing from the Kinsta solution is email. They do not provide an email service with any of their plans. GSuite is their recommended email platform.
Kinsta does support the use of transactional email services such as SendGrid or Mailgun. This allows WordPress to be able to send emails to visitors and the administrator when needed. But it is not a full email service.
Here are some more helpful resources from Kinsta on the topic of email.
In Conclusion
Performing the testing and writing this review on the Kinsta Premium WordPress hosting service has caused me to examine our current hosting provider. My next task is to examine email providers and build a plan for migrating emails from our existing provider.
We can easily address the other migration tasks to move our client’s thanks to the experienced team at Kinsta.
They truly have built the best premium hosting service for WordPress websites.
Do you use Kinsta Premium WordPress Hosting? Please leave us a comment and your scores for each area below. Having some real-world insight is helpful to everyone.
Thank you for reading.
