Kinsta hosting review

Kinsta has been providing managed hosting services to WordPress users since 2013. It has 70000+ customers. It is a great option for people who want to focus only on the business and nothing else.

Why Kinsta? Well, let’s see the demerits of unmanaged hosting services to get the answer. Here’s the list of things you do in an unmanaged hosting environment:

• Install a web server, SSL certificate, and a database management system manually.
• Edit the DB/server configuration file.
• Back up the databases manually.
• Upgrade the software/OS when an update is available.
• Keep the server secure by configuring firewalls, blocking ports, etc.
• Make sure that the CPU/RAM usage is not high to avoid the account being suspended by hosting service providers.

Unmanaged hosting service providers offer a command-line interface. If you need a GUI, you must buy a CPanel license yourself. If you hire a developer to perform the above tasks, you’ll end up spending 100s of dollars every month. The expenses will be over $1000 if your website gets a huge amount of traffic. Also, in unmanaged hosting, you should know what you’re doing. If you blindly copy-paste commands, your site will never go live or it will crash frequently.

If you’re using Kinsta, the above things will be taken care of by engineers and you’ll be given a GUI to manage sites and their settings.

Technologies used by Kinsta

Nginx: Nginx is one of the most powerful web servers in the world. It is used by some of the most visited websites on the web. It consumes a low amount of RAM compared to other servers and delivers top-notch performance.

PHP 7: Zend technologies had launched the most powerful version of PHP in 2015. Kinsta was one of the first companies to adopt the latest PHP. It lets users switch to older PHP versions (7.0+).

MariaDB: MariaDB is a high-performance database that uses the codebase of MySQL. It is reliable and fast.

Google cloud infrastructure: Kinsta uses the reliable Google Cloud Platform to offer managed hosting service

See full details here 

Kinsta Features

Free site migrations: Moving a website from one server to another can be a headache. Incorrect web server configuration can lead to numerous SEO issues and misconfigured DB settings can make your site unavailable to the visitors and search engine bots.

Kinsta technical staff takes care of the site migration task. They ensure downtime free migration. To make sure that your migrated site is working fine before it goes live, the staff will check the migrated site by pointing a temporary domain to the nameserver.

Dashboard: Kinsta dashboard is easy to use. It allows you to see the invoices, payments, bandwidth used by the site, backups, etc. It also enables you to manage the DNS settings of a website and see the number of visitors the website received in the last 24 hours, week, or month. The analytics data include the website response time, overall bandwidth used for a specific request, etc.

Kinsta lets users restore the website backup with a single click of the mouse. You’re allowed to test the backup on the staging site before restoring it on a live website.

Security: Kinsta staff monitors the traffic to the servers they manage. If they find anything suspicious, they’ll take measures to make sure that a site isn’t affected by the attack. If the site has been hacked, Kinsta will fix the problem free of cost. Kinsta staff has a team of engineers that can fix any type of WordPress issue.

Also, to make sure that the website is up, Kinsta staff checks the network/website status every 2 – 3 minutes. If the site is down, they’ll start working on the issue immediately.

Backups: Kinsta creates a full backup of the site every day. You can manage the backups from the dashboard. The backups are stored for 14  to 30 days.

Support: It doesn’t matter what time it’s, you can get in touch with the staff anytime by raising a ticket.

Check out what existing customers have to say about Kinsta

Developer friendly: Kinsta allows users to extend their technology stack with Redis, ElasticSearch, Cloudflare railgun, etc. It is the only renowned managed hosting firm that lets users use Nginx as a reverse proxy i.e. Nginx can communicate with other application servers such as Tomcat, GlassFish, etc. Instead of serving pages, the application server will send data to Nginx and Nginx will send the page to the visitor. The visitor’s browser will interact with Nginx instead of an application server.

CDN: Kinsta provides an option to enable/disable CDN service for a website. This service is provided by KeyCDN which has 30+ POPs around the world. KeyCDN employs HTTP/2.0 technology.

Locations: Kinsta allows users to host their websites in 17 different geographic locations. Hence, if you are targetting a specific country, you can choose the server nearest to the visitor’s country.

DNS: The unmanaged hosting provider uses Amazon’s Route53 hosted DNS service. Route53 is a premium service that is used by some of the largest internet companies. It is secure and fast.

Caching: Users using Kinsta don’t have to use a third-party caching plugin. Pages are cached on the server automatically. You are allowed to purge/delete the cache from the dashboard.

Kinsta plans and pricing

Kinsta has launched several managed hosting plans. The price for the same starts at $30. The most expensive plan costs $900. How the plans are classified? The Kinsta plans depend on the amount of traffic your website will get, the number of websites you can host, and the amount of disk space your application will use. All Kinsta plans include free CDN, SSL, and services mentioned above.

See the details of Kinsta plans here

Final thoughts

Kinsta is one of the top managed hosting service providers. It uses powerful servers of Google, reliable CDN service of KeyCDN, and the top-notch DNS service of Amazon. It employs the latest and most powerful open source technologies and provides good support to the customers. If you’re searching for a reliable managed WordPress hosting service, buy a hosting plan from Kinsta.