A2 Hosting vs Kinsta – Hard to Choose, but I Did 2021

A2 Hosting vs Kinsta is one tough battle that will come down to the tiniest detail in order to crown the victor. These two powerful hosts are pretty similar, and yet very different. A2 Hosting boasts an array of different hosting plans for small to medium-sized businesses, while Kinsta only sells managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting for medium to large businesses.

To give a fair comparison and final verdict, I focused on five main criteria when I tested A2 Hosting and Kinsta. A2 Hosting came on top in four out of five categories.

Click here to see A2 Hosting’s latest deals or keep reading to see what makes A2 Hosting the winner of this comparison.

1. Plans and Pricing

Kinsta Offers More WordPress Hosting Plans, but A2 Hosting Is a Lot Cheaper

Since Kinsta mainly targets enterprise-level WordPress users, it offers managed WordPress hosting plans and also offers WooCommerce hosting plans. On the other hand, A2 Hosting offers a wider range of hosting solutions including shared, managed WordPress hosting, reseller, VPS, and dedicated servers.

Kinsta offers 10 managed and fully optimized WordPress hosting plans, whereas A2 Hosting offers three managed and four unmanaged (shared) WordPress hosting plans. Price-wise, A2 Hosting plainly offers much cheaper prices than Kinsta, but the starter plans (with both hosts) are very closely priced.

Neither A2 Hosting nor Kinsta offers a free domain name registration with their subscriptions. But, they both offer free website migration and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

In addition, A2 Hosting has an “anytime money-back guarantee” policy that allows you to cancel your contract and get a prorated refund for the unused period of your subscription at any time even after the first 30 days.

That being said, A2 Hosting easily knocks out Kinsta in the pricing round for offering different types of hosting, budget-friendly prices, and a more flexible refund policy.

2. Features

Unlike A2 Hosting, Kinsta Has Some Limitations

Both A2 Hosting and Kinsta offer feature-loaded managed WordPress hosting packages with lots of similarities between them such as SSD storage, daily backups, free CDN, free SSL certificate, staging area, and SSH access.

With A2 Hosting, you can get from 10 GB to 40 GB disk space, unlimited databases, unlimited email accounts, and you can host from 1 to unlimited WordPress sites. A2 Hosting also offers JetPack Personal licence (free of charge) with all plans for a safer and smoother WordPress hosting.

With Kinsta, you can get from 10 GB to 250 GB disk space and you can host from 1 to 150 WordPress sites. Also, Kinsta doesn’t offer email hosting, so you’ll need to find a solution.

Find more differences between A2 Hosting and Kinsta using the following comparison table:

3. Performance

Both Are Good, but Kinsta Has Faster Loading Speeds

A2 Hosting manages its services through its servers located in the U.S.A., the Netherlands, and Singapore. On the other hand, Kinsta operates 24 global server locations including U.S.A., Canada, Brazil, U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, and Switzerland.

SSD storage is used by both hosts in all their plans. SSD storage is known to perform much faster, in terms of website data processing, than the regular HDD storage. This reflects directly on the websites loading speeds and overall performance.

Both hosts include free CDN with all their plans. A2 hosting offers CloudFlare CDN, but Kinsta offers Key CDN. CDN or Content Delivery Network is a feature that places your website on a global network of cloud servers. Among other benefits, this boosts the loading speeds of your website from different locations around the world.

Both hosts promise a 99.9% uptime guarantee and no major downtimes were reported from either one. Kinsta showed a 100% actual uptime for most of the time while A2 hosting had very minor hiccups, but didn’t go below 99.5% which is considered not bad.

With Kinsta’s global network of servers, I had high expectations when it comes to loading speeds. When we tested it, it met my expectations with a perfect overall score. Check out the individual location timings in our experts’ full review.

On the other hand, A2 showed a few slow locations, but most of the locations had promising numbers. However, this wasn’t enough to give it a perfect overall score, but still scored better than many other hosts. Find out which locations had the slowest loading speeds in A2 Hosting’s detailed review.

In this round, A2 Hosting’s very good performance was outplayed by Kinsta’s perfect uptime and global loading speeds.

4. Security

A2 Hosting Gives You More Security Features

A2 hosting secures its accounts with a set of standard security features that come with all its plans. This set includes KernelCare (daily, automatic, and rebootless Kernel updates), DDoS/Brute-Force protection, dual web hosting firewall, HackScan, Auto-Heal hosting protection, Barracuda spam filtering, and virus scanner.

Kinsta’s security, on the other hand is limited to DDoS protection, hardware firewalls, and uptime monitoring which also is one of A2 Hosting’s security measures as well.

A2 Hosting uses CloudLinux OS with its plans which securely isolates your account from other accounts on the same server in order to protect it from any threats targeting these accounts, in addition to ensuring the fair allocation of the server’s resources among all its accounts.

As previously mentioned, both hosts offer free CDN with their plans. Other than its performance-boosting capabilities, a CDN acts as an additional layer of DDoS protection.

Both hosts have free automatic daily backups and are included with all their plans.

A2 Hosting offers a wider range of security features/measures than Kinsta, making it the winner in this round.

5. Support

A2 Hosting Offers More Ways to Get Support

Even though both hosts have large Knowledgebase sections, A2 Hostsing’s Knowledgebase is more organized than that of Kinsta making it easier to navigate and find the information you require.

A2 hosting has 24/7 customer support and can be contacted through live chat, phone, email, or support ticket. It even has several local phone numbers for different locations around the world. Even though it can sometimes take a few minutes to connect to a live chat agent, once connected they’re quite informative and helpful.

Kinsta also offers 24/7 customer support via live chat, email, and support ticket. However, it doesn’t have phone support. Also, you can only use the live chat if you’re already a customer. If you have any pre-sales questions, you can only send them by ticket or email. Once you’re a client though, it’s easy to get in touch with the live chat from anywhere in your dashboard and the agents are well-trained and very helpful.

The winner? A2 Hosting, thanks to its more organized Knowledgebase and wider range of communication channels.

A2 Hosting Has a Slight Advantage Over Kinsta

Both A2 Hosting and Kinsta are featured in our expert list of the best web hosting services. They’re both dedicated to providing quality managed WordPress hosting to their clients. Kinsta remains unmatched in terms of performance and page loading speeds. It also offers generous storage for its target clientele (large businesses and enterprises).

On the other hand, budget-friendly A2 Hosting succeeds in providing top-quality managed WordPress hosting at a highly affordable cost for small to medium-sized businesses. It managed to beat Kinsta in three out of five tests earning it the winning title of this battle.

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