Kinsta Review (2024)Worth Paying For This WordPress Hosting Expert?

Kinsta Pricing

Kinsta caters to a lot of different sites, ranging from $35 – $1,650 per month. That’s a very wide spectrum, but for this comparison, we’ll only focus on the first three key consumer plans, Starter, Pro and Business 1. After Business 1, it goes up to Business 4, and then Enterprise 1 – 4.

The key thing to note is that the prices displayed here are for monthly payments. You get 2 months free when you buy annually, which I think is a pretty good deal.

* Prices reflect monthly prices. Get 2 months free with annual plans

What can you expect from each Kinsta plan?

So obviously, the reason Kinsta has so many plans is that each of them is segmented based on the number of websites you can run, monthly visits, storage and CDN storage, which I don’t think many other providers usually limit.

Still, all of the plans include a number of features, such as the following:

• Very good customer support team. It’s only via chat, but their agents are top-notch, and they work 24/7.
• WordPress-specific site architecture (read: better and faster)
• Staging environment to test your WordPress website before publishing changes
• Free premium migrations (concierge service). You get 1, 2 or 3 depending on your plan.
• Unlimited basic migrations from other hosts with their WordPress experts.
• 30-day money-back guarantee
• Automatic database optimization
• Automatic daily backup and manual backup points (& paid add-ons to have backups every 1 or 6 hours)

Now for specific plans, the names are pretty much self-explanatory.

Monthly Kinsta WordPress hosting plans, yearly packages come out a bit cheaper but the full amount needs to be paid in advanced

They also offer Disk Space Upgrades: should you ever run out of webspace you don’t necessarily need to upgrade to a higher plan. For $20 per month, you get 20GB on top. You can stack as many of these $20 upgrades as you like.

STARTER: Good for a small WP-hosted business website or blog. Just remember that if you deal with heavy files, for instance as a photographer or videographer, you might need to upgrade to the next plan or opt for a Disk Space Update. You’ll be able to have a maximum of 25,000 visitors a month and 10 GB of storage.

PRO: better suited to small – medium business websites. A big blog should probably go on that plan too, but Kinsta doesn’t actually recommend it for an online store. You’ll be able to have a maximum of 50,000 visitors a month and 20 GB of storage.

BUSINESS 1: this is where things become serious in terms of monthly visitors and storage. It’s also got twice the amount of PHP workers per site as the previous plan, which is what Kinsta says helps multiple requests needed for ecommerce. You’ll be able to have a maximum of 100,000 visitors a month and 30 GB of storage.

Then don’t forget that you have the Business plans 2, 3 and 4, with added numbers of monthly visitors and storage. Finally, Enterprise plans 1, 2, 3 and 4 also scale everything up in terms of numbers.

If your website has a certain size, you can also negotiate a custom plan (which we did).

Kinsta Pros and Cons

When to use Kinsta web hosting?

WordPress-based professional websites will find a lot to love about Kinsta. You can keep your site (or sites) safe, online virtually all the time, and deliver decent site speeds for your users. It’s great for SEO, and reliable enough to host a big ecommerce site.

However, if you see wildly fluctuating numbers of monthly visitors, , I suggest looking elsewhere. You do get notifications before you go over any kind of limit, but you’ll still be charged for them (see the FAQ for more info on how it’s calculated).

When not to use Kinsta web hosting?

If you have a site that doesn’t depend on the best performance, there are more affordable web hosts out there, and there are definitely more affordable WordPress hosts. I’m thinking of portfolios, blogs or personal websites where you’re not constantly worried about delivering the best site speed to your visitors (or to Google for search engine optimization).

This may only be my personal experience, but overall, we’ve seen quite a few configuration issues when compared to other WP hosts like WP Engine or Siteground. Or to put it in the words of our developer: “Somehow the server configuration on WPEngine is more user-friendly to plugins and WordPress. It just works better. Less conflicts.”

Kinsta Specifications

Kinsta Backups

One of the key features you want from your WordPress site is the ability to save and restore it at any given point. The good news here is that Kinsta offers quite a lot of options:

Kinsta backups

In my opinion, 14 days isn’t long enough to feel really safe about your site, but I’ll leave that up to you. On the flipside, you can also purchase and install add-ons that save your site every hour, or 6 hours.

I’d also like to note that backing up and restoring is super easy, thanks again to Kinsta’s excellent UX and great online resources. Compared to WP Engine it’s also blazing fast. What takes mere seconds with Kinsta, takes up to 5 minutes with WP Engine. This is because Kinsta only creates an incremental backup – similar to Siteground.

This has one important disadvantage: when your core files are corrupted, you’ll face a major problem. However, we’ve never experienced that and are not intending to 🙂

Testing Kinsta’s managed WordPress hosting

Uptime tests

Our independent tests ran for 12 months, and as you can see below, it was a 100% success rate. Based on information and comments we’ve gathered online, this is a good indicator of how stable Kinsta is compared to other hosting companies.

And as you see in the table below, Kinsta is the only web host to have consistently achieved perfect 100% uptime scores over the last three years. Very impressive!

To monitor uptime I use StatusCake, a tool that checks each website every 5 minutes.

Don’t forget that if the rate drops below the 99.9%, the Kinsta user agreement guarantees you’ll be refunded some of your hosting charges.

Is Kinsta fast?

Yes, a Kinsta is a fast hosting solution. The 1.82 average in our latest web host speed tests easily clears the 3.00 seconds recommended by Google for best SEO results (read more about the importance of fast website loading times).

However, it’s certainly not the fastest web host that we’ve tested and as you can see in the table below, there are other providers that have consistently outperformed it for speed over the last three years:

Results in seconds

There are many steps you can take to fix a slow website and make WordPress faster.

But while Kinsta is not the fastest, these speeds should be more than enough to not frustrate your visitors.

Kinsta & WordPress

Kinsta is purpose-built to host WordPress sites, and it shows in part thanks to:

Kinsta & Developer Features

For developers, you’ll be happy to hear that Kinsta also includes staging, integration with WP-CLI, Composer and Git, and one-click cloning.

Creating a new environment at Kinsta

The staging environments is particularly well-designed, as you can see from the screenshot below:

Staging at Kinsta

Each environment works by creating a one-click copy of your site, but common sense applies when pushing the changes back to the live version (create a backup, double-check wp-config.php, etc…).

Pushing Kinsta staging to live

Final Kinsta Review Comments

Now let’s wrap it all up and gather our thoughts about Kinsta here.

The main takeaway for me is that Kinsta is reliable, fast, and good for business WordPress sites. That includes online stores too. Developers will love all the technical options and, and business owners will enjoy the ease of use and safety features.

But it’s certainly not for everyone. If you don’t need all the bells and whistles, you could look at:

• SiteGround: for unlimited traffic and bandwidth. It’s more affordable and runs at blazing speeds. The only downside (or advantage maybe) is that they aren’t as WordPress-focused as Kinsta.
• WP Engine: probably Kinsta’s closest competitors. They’re extremely similar in terms of pricing and features, but you get a few WordPress extras like free themes, phone support in higher plans and a guaranteed uptime of 99.95% (vs 99.90% at Kinsta).
• DreamHost: one of the most affordable web hosts, with surprisingly good performance for US users. They cut corners on support times and advanced features, but worth looking at nonetheless.

> Try Kinsta risk-free for 30 days or check out our other guide to the best web hosting!