TL;DR: What We Think of Kinsta
Kinsta provides powerful hosting solutions powered by Google’s premium-tier network. Their specialized support and developer-friendly environment have made them a favorite among high-end users. But for beginners and smaller sites, the price tag might just cause sticker shock.
Suitable for:
Managed WordPress, Developers-friendly, or eCommerce Hosting
Kinsta Pros & Cons
Kinsta Pros
- Outstanding server uptime and speed performance
- Choice of 30+ server locations
- Optimized for best WordPress site performance
- Plans auto-scale during visitor spikes
- Specialized WordPress support staff
- Highly developer-friendly
Kinsta Cons
- Expensive; not suitable for owners with multiple small sites
- No email hosting
- No shared hosting
- Some WordPress plugins banned
Kinsta Who? Quick Intro
Kinsta emerged in 2013 from the collaboration of four friends – Mark Gavalda, Anita Dunai, Peter Sziraki, and Tom Zsomborgi – with a shared vision of excelling in managed WordPress hosting.
Specializing in a specific niche of web hosting can be extremely challenging, but Kinsta has managed to succeed. The company first started by offering powerful web hosting designed around WordPress and has since diversified into application, database, and free static site hosting solutions. Under the leadership of CEO Mark Gavalda, Kinsta has grown into a globally recognized hosting platform, celebrated for its exceptional service and support.
Our Kinsta Experience & Detail Findings
| Performance |
What server speed features does Kinsta offer?Kinsta hosting is optimized for best WordPress performance. You’ll get built-in cache mechanism, worldwide data centers, premium private network, the highest CPU servers (C2 and C3D), and HTTP/3 CDN that covers 260+ POPs worldwide. This combination allows Kinsta to take a different approach (compared to traditional hosting providers) when users overload their servers. Instead of pulling down a user’s site, Kinsta will auto-scale up their server capacity and charge an overage fee of $1/1,000 visits. The company publishes their server and network service status publicly, click here to visit. |
| Security |
Are websites hosted at Kinsta safe?Kinsta excels in security, offering top-notch measures to safeguard your website. Their platform boasts features like advanced web application firewall (WAF), free SSL, daily backup, to ensure your data remains secure and your site impervious to common cyber threats. |
| Supports |
Is Kinsta customer support good?Kinsta’s customer support stands out for its specialized WordPress expertise, delivering prompt and effective assistance for a wide range of WordPress-related hosting challenges. Help is avaliable via live chat and email. |
| Value for Money |
Does Kinsta offer good value for its pricing?Premium hosting services like Kinsta tend to be more expensive due to their specialized focus on WordPress optimization and performance. These platforms provide a suite of tailored services including automatic updates, enhanced security, and expert WordPress support, which contribute to their higher cost. When considering Kinsta, it’s important to assess your hosting needs to find out whether the additional cost for these specialized features aligns with your requirements. |
| Overall Users Satisfaction |
What other users think of Kinsta?Overall user satisfaction with Kinsta, as indicated by the data in our market research, is predominantly positive. Customers often describe Kinsta as a top-quality, professional hosting company. Its WordPress hosting services receive particular praise for their performance and reliability. Users frequently mention the efficiency of Kinsta’s customer support, appreciating the quick and helpful responses. For additional insights, please refer to the user reviews section below. |
| Beginners Friendliness |
Is Kinsta suitable for beginners?No, Kinsta is not suitable for newbies due to its higher pricing. Solo bloggers and those with low-traffic blogs may find it hard to justify the cost, and hosting multiple smaller sites under Kinsta can be quite expensive. |
| Small Business Friendliness |
Is Kinsta suitable for small businesses?Kinsta is suitable for SMBs that require high-performance hosting and are willing to invest in premium services. With its powerful solutions powered by Google’s premium-tier network, specialized support, and developer-friendly environment, Kinsta offers excellent performance and reliability. However, the higher pricing might be a consideration for smaller businesses with tight budgets. |
| Web Developers Friendliness |
Is Kinsta suitable for developers?Yes, Kinsta is highly suitable for web developers. Its platform include a number of highly developer-friendly features including DevKinsta – a free local development suite for WordPress developers, automatic daily backups with 14 restoration points, and Cloudflare free SSL integration. The easy-to-use staging environment (see screenshot below) allows developers to switch between live and staging environments with a few clicks, and the site preview tool enables thorough testing before migration. Additionally, built-in performance monitoring, ready-to-use New Relic monitoring, and tools like ionCube Loader, geo-location targeting, and redirection further enhance the development experience. While the cost may be higher, we think the value provided in terms of performance, support, and features makes Kinsta an excellent choice for professional web developers. Demo
|
| Host Own Email |
Can you host your own email accounts ([email protected]) with Kinsta?No, you cannot host your own email accounts with Kinsta. To do this, you will need to utilize a third-party email provider like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 at additional cost. |
| Onboarding |
Is it easy to get started with Kinsta as a new customer?Signing on with Kinsta is a quick and pain-free experience. Their onboarding process is smooth and clean, free from the annoying upsells that hosting companies often attempt. For site owners who prefer to have their site migrated by Kinsta, you can request a site migration directly from your dashboard (see screenshot below). In short, everything aligns well with their great dashboard and site management features. However, the absence of email hosting and domain registration services means users must rely on third-party services for these needs, which can be a drawback, especially for those new to managing websites. |
| Free Trial |
Can you try out Kinsta for free?Yes, Kinsta offers a 30-day free trial period. If you are not satisfied with their services for any reason, you can cancel within this period and receive a full refund. |
Kinsta Plans & Pricing
While first started as a managed WordPress hosting provider, Kinsta has expanded beyond WordPress and now utilizing Google and AWS infrastructure for application and database hosting services. Their current plans support a variety of mainstream scripts including Node.js, Ruby, Python, Java, PHP, Scala, and Go, indicating a broader focus on diverse web technologies and applications.
When evaluating your options, it’s crucial to remember that many hosting companies offer substantial discounts during the initial signup period, but the pricing often increases significantly upon renewal. You should thoroughly research and compare the renewal prices, not just the introductory rates, to understand the true cost of hosting over an extended period.
To help you make a more informed decision, we have prepared two tables below which compare the initial signup and subsequent renewal costs of Kinsta services with several other providers that we actively monitor.
Kinsta Signup Price vs Others
| Web Host | Shared | VPS | Dedicated | Cloud | Managed WP | Windows |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kinsta | $ - /mo | $ - /mo | $ - /mo | $35.00 - 675.00/mo | $35.00 - 675.00/mo | $ - /mo |
| Cloudways | $ - /mo | $ - /mo | $ - /mo | $11.00 - 1056.00/mo | $14.00 - 487.00/mo | $ - /mo |
| Hostalia | $1.06 - 1.06/mo | $ - /mo | $117.89 - 321.7/mo | $11.69 - 294.88/mo | $ - /mo | $ - /mo |
| SiteGround | $3.99 - 10.69/mo | $ - /mo | $ - /mo | $100.00 - 400.00/mo | $3.99 - 10.69/mo | $ - /mo |
| HostPapa | $2.95 - 12.95/mo | $19.99 - 249.99/mo | $ - /mo | $ - /mo | $19.95 - 114.95/mo | $ - /mo |
| A2 Hosting | $2.99 - 14.99/mo | $2.99 - 99.99/mo | $109.99 - 529.99/mo | $ - /mo | $11.99 - 41.99/mo | $ - /mo |
Kinsta Renewal Price vs Others
| Web Host | Shared | VPS | Dedicated | Cloud | Managed WP | Windows |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kinsta | $ - /mo | $ - /mo | $ - /mo | $35.00 - 675.00/mo | $35.00 - 675.00/mo | $ - /mo |
| Cloudways | $ - /mo | $ - /mo | $ - /mo | $11.00 - 1056.00/mo | $14.00 - 487.00/mo | $ - /mo |
| Hostalia | $5.35 - 16.08/mo | $ - /mo | $117.89 - 321.7/mo | $11.69 - 294.88/mo | $ - /mo | $ - /mo |
| SiteGround | $17.99 - 44.99/mo | $ - /mo | $ - /mo | $100.00 - 400.00/mo | $17.99 - 44.99/mo | $ - /mo |
| HostPapa | $12.95 - 34.99/mo | $19.99 - 249.99/mo | $ - /mo | $ - /mo | $19.95 - 114.95/mo | $ - /mo |
| A2 Hosting | $12.99 - 29.99/mo | $8.99 - 239.99/mo | $199.99 - 749.99/mo | $ - /mo | $25.99 - 61.99/mo | $ - /mo |
Caution: Web hosting prices can change frequently. For the most accurate pricing information please visit the official Kinsta website.
Bottomline: Is Kinsta Right for You?
At the heart of Kinsta’s reputation is its unmatched managed WordPress hosting, celebrated for both its lightning-fast performance and stellar support. By harnessing the power of the Google Cloud Platform, Kinsta ensures a level of reliability that sets it apart, making it a preferred choice for those prioritizing website speed and uptime above all.
Yet, its premium services come at a premium price, and the absence of email hosting might pause those looking for a more comprehensive or wallet-friendly package. This positions Kinsta as an exquisite choice for professionals and businesses willing to invest in top-tier hosting for their WordPress sites; but may prompt those seeking an all-in-one solution or tighter budget control to explore elsewhere.
Recap: Kinsta Pros & Cons
Kinsta Pros
- Outstanding server uptime and speed performance
- Choice of 30+ server locations
- Optimized for best WordPress site performance
- Plans auto-scale during visitor spikes
- Specialized WordPress support staff
- Highly developer-friendly
Kinsta Cons
- Expensive; not suitable for owners with multiple small sites
- No email hosting
- No shared hosting
- Some WordPress plugins banned
Alternatives: Other Web Hosts to Consider
In case Kinsta is not right for you, below are some alternatives to consider. You can also find more options in our hosting reviews page (full list).
Kinsta provides a fast and easy-to-use platform for VPS hosting. I have seen many different hosting providers and I have to say Kinsta and DedicatedCore are my favorites now. My server location is in Las Vegas and I am located in Finland. Still, I have not experienced slow or lagging website performance on all my websites. The Control panel for a website is easy to use and support is always there for me when I need help. I would recommend Kinsta, from small to large websites!
We’ve been with Kinsta for more than a year and the service has worsened ever since.
A few points below that have been very problematic for us:
Staging area is not a testing environment because it is useless – it’s as different an environment as it could be compared to production, so testing is impossible or misleading, as usually the behaviour you will have on the production area is completely different.
Customer support is unclear as you speak with up to 4 people for a small problem, and nobody has context. You’ll have to wait 10 minutes for each person you speak with and you won’t get a conversation, but very long responses which are superficial and vague. Very frustrating.
Kinsta imposes some updates to your site on short term that may put you in a position to have to switch to a more powerful plan, thus making you pay more. No testing period is available to upgrade or downgrade to or from a higher plan, you just have to trust their judgement.
I would not suggest their service if you plan on having a reliable & scalable hosting for your site; it may be ok for some minor Wordpress blogs which are self-service, definitely not for more complex application or sites as the standardised options are too weak and cost too much compared to other solutions.
Very expensive…. but…. can you put a price on peace of mind?
I’ve been growing a website for several years. During that time, I’ve used several different hosting solutions.
Each of our previous solutions caused intermittent problems which meant hiring consultants to create ‘fixes’ that never really lasted.
Looking back on it, I spent many years with the worry of hosting issues at the back of my mind.
That was until mid 2023 when I moved to Kinsta. I found it hard to justify the price at the start (900+ p/m), however, the peace of mind it has given me is more than worth it.
The support are competent and respond in a timely manner and the performance is top-notch.
Everything was going fine, until Aug 2023. The PHP updated, took my website down and has destroyed my organics which are only now starting to recover (and I am a one man band). Admittedly, I should have updated everything, but the response form Kinsta was dreadful. After discussing the issue, they just left me high and dry and eventually agreed to allowing me access in order to make some changes. I had to rebuild my website on my own whilst it was down, which would have easily bankrupted the business had I not had enough knowledge to do a rebuild. I have cancelled my plan now and moved to a host that have confirmed if the PHP updates in the future, they will roll it back and allow me to work on the site whilst it’s live and still selling. It caused huge amounts of stress and they couldn’t care less. If you are not a corporation with huge amounts of staff working on PHP updates all the time, stay well away.
I’ve been around Wordpress for quite a while but never took advantage of a dedicated Wordpress hosting service such as Kinsta. The amount of features it offers is astounding. Almost anything I can think of is already thought of in Kinsta. And if not, the support is superb. Never ever have I felt so empowered to just reach out and get answers or a little bit of brainstorming how to tackle my issues. The response time is amazing and they are available 24/7
Kinsta’s website performance is top notch and their support personal is knowledgeable, fast, and friendly.
Their support techs will help explain issues, troubleshoot errors, and how to resolve them and stop them from happening again.
For three years, Kinsta has been my trusted hosting platform. Their easy-to-use interface and quick loading times always impress. Their customer service team is great, swiftly resolving any issues. With Kinsta’s dependable security measures, like daily backups, I feel assured my site is safe. Whether you’re a big corporation or a small business, Kinsta’s reliability and performance make it the ideal choice.
The support team at Kinsta are all very knowledgable and willing to help. I haven’t had any experience in which I think the support team member that handling me is just clocking-in and clocking-out.
They are all very eager to help and assist us.
Excellent hosting services. I particularly enjoy how easy it is to create staging sites and download backups.
They also have the best support I have ever encountered on any platform often going above and beyond what you would expect of the average support specialist. They are amazing.
At $100/month, you’re just better off buying a Synology or QNAP, firewall, UPS power backup, SSL, and a static IP to host your own website, folks. Trust me. You’ll save money in the long run and learn something new. This is a scam.
I seriously love you guys. Support is always on point for me. All my questions about the upcoming work were answered perfectly. I feel more confident about the upcoming job and I know they will be there if I need anything when I am on at 2am. Jorge was great, personable, and prompt – thank you!
Google’s increased focus on core web vitals cut organic traffic to my Squarespace site by half starting in May 2021 because of poor performance. Kinsta is blazing fast and provides everything I needed to get a rebuild up and running from scratch in about a week. Now, i’m all green in search console and my organic traffic is rapidly rising again.
Fun fact #1: Woocommerce REQUIRES 512MB of PHP memory.
Not so fun fact #2: Kinsta standard plans come with 256MB of PHP memory. (Yes that is half of what Woocommerce REQUIRES to function properly.)
Not so fun fact #3: When you become aware of this the awesome support team will recommend that you upgrade to an agency account that comes with 512MB of PHP memory.
Not so fun fact #4: Your request to upgrade will be declined if you do not have a website that says you are an agency.
Bottom line: You are not paying a premium price for premium hosting. You are paying an extortionate rate to sabotage your Woocommerce website. Don’t do it.
The support team are very knowledgeable but also very honest and if they need to escalate or they are having platform issues they let me know what and why and importantly how long it should take to get resolved or escalted. Gives me confidence to work with them and recomend them to others.
Kinsta is the best experience I’ve ever had with hosting WordPress websites. I recommend them over all over hosts. As a long-time administrator and web dev, I’ve done almost everything, including building a LAMP stack from scratch and completing builds for commercial websites. Knowing they are handling the backend security and uptime parts of the equation is a massive relief. They also have excellent full-time chat support. I don’t think I’d ever want to host anywhere else.
Many promises, to be the fastest and best wp hosting. I started with the business pack 1, tested, asked for help. Quick response times, that started out well, i thought.
But as soon as our site was live, the troubles began, slow load times and very slow backend. So i needed some more php workers. But then you need to upgrade to a more expensive plan. 3 Times more expensive!!! Crazy!
If i knew this in advance i rather stayed with our other host. We never had these issue’s there. It saved me a whole week of work.
DONT USE KINSTA! The customer support is really bad. if the issue gets deep nobody can help you and you get more headache then u need to.
Also it is really expensive! DONT USE THEM!
Kinsta wordpress service is not fast and their customer support is not good. I migrated 3 sites, all were slower, and their suggestion was “try disabling your plugins”.
Their migration service was awful too.
Avoid.
I migrated my Woocommerce site’s hosting to Kinsta 9 months ago and have been thoroughly impressed ever since. The server resources and performance are significantly better than those provided by our previous host, and the tools we now have access to are more diverse and powerful compared to the limited set we had before. Furthermore, the customer support is of top-notch quality, and the live chat feature is simply brilliant because the support team is fast, efficient, and knowledgeable. They are always willing to go the extra mile to help and nothing is too much to ask.
I love using Kinsta it’s helped so much in keeping our company organized and our websites in one place. I love the ease of domain changes, obtaining domains, backups, and so many more features! My favorite part is the live support! I’ve used the support a few times, and they’re so helpful, and they’ll help you save a lot of time and frustration I was helped out today by Bladimir Fernandez, we narrowed down the problem in a matter of minutes and I was able to restore the page I was working on flawlessly. Could not be happier!
Selecting Kinsta as the host for our news business was one of the best decisions I’ve made. It just works, the infrastructure just feels rock solid, the performance is great (when coupled with Cloudflare), and the support has been outstanding every time we’ve needed it. Well worth the price.
Totally overpriced.
Instead of reliable hosting our site was down for a while. They make update so your wp doesn´t function without any notification.
Support not helpful at all, only standard messages.
STAY AWAY!
Marius is carrying the banner of excellence that I’ve come to recognize in kinsta customer service. In several years after maybe a dozen various issues I have always been super pleased with your responsiveness and the dedication of your agents. Nothing else comes close in my experience.
Good and fast change to Kinsta. Moving also multi-sites, by Kinsta, was ok. The 24/7 help is good organized with archive reports (from questions) used by all several Kinsta experts.
❌WARNING- NEVER EVER GO WITH KINSTA. They deleted two websites after 14 days. I had an issue with one of my credit cards, due to nonpayment within 2 weeks they deleted both websites and completely all backups. They had sent emails about this non-payment, and the emails had gone to my spam. Therefore they destroyed my two sites. I contacted them as I noticed my sites were down and all they could say was sorry we followed procedures. I have lost a lot of money and all they said was sorry, we did the best we could. After 15 years in digital and many hosting companies I have used NEVER have I experienced this. I only went with them due to a recommendation. DO NOT USE THEM!
The customer service at Kinsta is excellent. They are thorough and knowledgeable, making it accessible for beginners. The access and reference to countless Help articles and blogs make for great reference and step-by-step guidance. They helped set up our new website and provided support every step of the way. I especially appreciate their willingness to dive down into more specific problems and help us figure them out. I can’t recommend them enough!
After fifteen years of having in house system administrators and using services like AWS or our own VPS setups and constantly having to manage, update and configure the back end we had less time to focus on content creation and higher budgets and two extended periods of downtime over multiple days and non-existent support. Since moving to Kinsta earlier this year the support has been amazing, firstly moving us with free migration on multiple large WordPress sites. The staging environments have allowed us to roll out new features and test designs in record time and our sites are faster and much easier to manage. Support has been amazing with no downtime to speak of and helping us debug any issues we have within 2 minutes we can chat with a representative and actually get people who understand the natures of Nginx, WordPress, and the ability to fix the issue. We love KINSTA
Saintly Solutions has chosen Kinsta as its WordPress hosting platform. Kinsta is extremely developer friendly and has a very intuitive user interface. The service and support is amazing!
Kinsta is the Managed WordPress Hosting provider for our corporate website. We use Kinsta to ensure that our website stays up to date with the latest WordPress version, is backed up continuously, and utilizes features that ensure the best performance possible when users are browsing our website. Kinsta is able to provide everything necessary for our company to ensure that our website will always be live, we have available backups in case of an emergency, and much more. I would not use another Managed WordPress Hosting provider other than Kinsta.
Kinsta is presently being used in several of our clients systems for their entire organization. Kinsta provides a solid and fast web hosting solution that lets you ensure that you can simply focus on getting your website right while the hosting is solid. I honestly have never had any issues, and in the times that I have the support staff have been really responsive.
We host all seven of our websites with Kinsta. Some are very high traffic, with extremely large databases and some are quite small. Kinsta offers specialized WordPress hosting that is fast and reliable and the migration process to them was fast, well communicated, and perfectly executed. We’re a year two of our relationship and very happy.
I moved to Kinsta on the recommendation of a WordPress engineer when we were trying to resolve issues with loading speeds on our website. We moved from another hosting company to Kinsta and instantly our site was 5x faster. On top of that, their customer service has been exceptional. No ask is too small and they are always exceedingly friendly and responsive. When I was with my old hosting supplier my site went down often without any notification from them and never an explanation as to why it went down, that it had gone done, that it had been fixed (I always had to report it in a long drawn out way) and never any concern for solving the ongoing issue on their servers. As an entrepreneur, I have a lot of plates spinning, and making sure my website is always available shouldn’t be something I have to worry about. Kinsta allows this to be one thing I don’t have to worry about at all. It’s such a relief and I’m so glad I switched. Thanks, Kinsta Team!
I’m an independent creative doing photography and writing, and I build and maintain the websites for my projects. I originally switched one of my sites to Kinsta after endless poor performance and abysmal customer service from other service providers. I was fed up with what I’d been using and my research led me to give Kinsta a try. What attracted me most initially were the good reviews of customer service, high performance, and the availability of a staging environment.
Kinsta replaced GoDaddy for me for hosting. Wanted to find a different service because GoDaddy had been letting me down more and more over a period of years and it was absolutely driving me nuts. Switching to Kinsta was an excellent move.
Kinsta is the BEST web hosting company I have ever signed up with and I am pretty sure I will be with them for many years to come. From day one, Kinsta has provided exceptional customer service. I can be working on my website late at night and still get help through live chat. I also have been able to remove plugins that I had paid subscriptions to use prior to switching to Kinsta. So it’s not really more expensive when you start looking at the entire package – fewer plugin subscriptions and less money paid for specialized help. I also need to mention their user interface is clean, organized, and easy to use. Oh, and my website speed – WAY FASTER! Overall, the Kinsta team helps me solve problems, fast, and they are always so kind and polite. I am one extremely satisfied customer and I can’t recommend them enough.
Kinsta offers fantastic customer and technical support which is very important to both me and my clients. Kinsta powers my own website and two client websites (one eCommerce and one B2B SaaS). Kinsta offers a super hosting platform for WordPress with a fantastic interface that is blazing fast and feature-rich.
We use Kinsta to host our clients websites as well as our own corporate website. It has been a game changer for us to be able to provide hosting without having to manage an entire load-balanced server infrastructure and all of the headaches that go along with that. Their customer support is amazing and allows us to not have to fret about having smart assistance when we need it and they are proactive about finding and fixing problems.
Kinsta provides WordPress hosting at scale. It solves security, speed, content delivery network integration (CDN), local development, staging environments, SFTP, and more. It is the fastest, most reliable, most robust WordPress host I have ever used.
The host is well suited for people who value the best, I mean the very best. They are awesome for agencies reselling services. They are not suited for people on a budget, and that’s a good thing.
We’re using Kinsta’s NGINX web stack and it’s been lovely to pass off the administrative aspects of the back end of the site to their team. Their support is very responsive, and things get handled quickly and efficiently. We moved from Azure to Kinsta, because the cost was similar, but Kinsta provided a pre-built, scalable architecture that works. So far 100% uptime. Added in features like the ease to manage staging sites, backups, and server utilization data made my decision to go with Kinsta a no-brainer. I couldn’t be happier.
If you’re a small site admin team and are sick of patching your virtual servers late at night you should switch to Kinsta. If you’re looking for a relatively hands-off solution, with easy staging site integration you should switch. If you need 100% reliability and the ability to scale up your service you should switch. I highly recommend their service for any WooCommerce or WordPress site.
I feel so privileged to have found Kinsta! I’ve been using WordPress for my business website for over 15 years. I moved my hosting to Kinsta within the last year. I continue to be amazed by this company’s dedication to providing the best technology, but also the most amazing support I have ever experienced. Not just once, but time and time again. It’s so rare to see a support team so genuinely happy to help. The speed and security benefits of Kinsta and the value for what you get have so positively impacted my business, I could go on and on. Thanks Kinsta and your amazing team! You have a customer for life and a full-time evangelist!
Kinsta is the overall best WordPress website host! While somewhat more expensive than other hosts, Kinsta is well worth your investment – they have more features, better technology behind their hosting platform, and better customer support than any host I have previously used.
I’ve used many different web hosts over the years and Kinsta stands out over the rest by far. Support is outstanding. The hosting service is rock solid – consistently fast and reliable. And the best thing is no conflicts or strange issues like with many other hosting services. I’ve been a Kinsta customer since 2014 and will be staying with them for the foreseeable future.