Hostinger vs Kinsta – Close Match, but Only One Winner 2021

You know it’s going to be a challenging comparison when you put two powerful and popular hosts like Hostinger and Kinsta against each other, especially when they cater to different needs.

Hostinger is an all-around host that offers a variety of services for personal and business use, whereas Kinsta focuses on offering top-of-the line managed cloud-based WordPress hosting solutions.

To properly compare Hostinger and Kinsta, not only did I compare their WordPress hosting offerings, but I also tested both services across multiple parameters. Despite the close results, Hostinger came out a winner mainly for combining both budget-friendly rates and robust performance.

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

1. Plans and Pricing

Hostinger Gives You Lots of Options and Keeps Your Budget Afloat

We’ve already established that Hostinger offers a wide variety of hosting solutions such as shared, VPS, cloud hosting, managed WordPress hosting, email hosting, e-commerce hosting, CMS hosting, and MineCraft hosting. On the other hand, Kinsta offers managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting.

Hostinger offers three WordPress hosting plans for beginners and businesses, whereas Kinsta offers ten WordPress hosting packages suitable for professionals and demanding enterprises.

With Hostinger, you can subscribe monthly, annually, biennially, or quadrennially (48 months). With Kinsta, you can choose to be billed monthly or annually. In addition, you get two months for free when you sign up for the annual term.

Hostinger offers significantly cheaper prices (with and without discounts) than Kinsta. For example, Kinsta’s smallest plan costs more than double the regular price of Hostinger’s WordPress Starter plan.

Hostinger offers a free domain name with all WordPress hosting packages, but Kinsta doesn’t. However, both hosts offer a free website migration and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The winner? Hostinger easily wins the pricing challenge. It delivers everything you need from a hosting service without blowing your budget. However, if you have a heavily trafficked business and enough room in your budget, then you can go with Kinsta.

2. Features

It’s a Tie! Both Hosts Offer Feature-Loaded Plans Depending on Your Needs

When you go through the managed WordPress hosting packages offered by both Hostinger and Kinsta, you could get overwhelmed by the amount of features included. Let’s discuss some of their most notable features.

Starting with similarities, both Hostinger and Kinsta offer SSD-based storage, free CDN, free SSL certificate, site staging, custom control panels (hPanel with Hostinger and MyKinsta admin with Kinsta), and SSH access with all their packages. Now, let’s move on to the key differences between them.

With Hostinger, you can host from 100 to 300 websites and get 100 email accounts, from 20 GB to 140 GB disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited FTP accounts, and unlimited Cron jobs.

All plans are also equipped with LiteSpeed Cache, WordPress acceleration, WooCommerce, GitHub integration as well as a variety of themes and plugins.

In addition, Hostinger offers JetPack plugin (free, Personal, and Premium) depending on the plan. The smallest package comes with weekly backups, whereas the other two plans include daily backups.

On the other hand, Kinsta lets you host from 1 to 150 hosted websites, and gives you from 10 GB to 250 GB disk space, and from 20,000 to 3 million monthly visits. Unlike Hostinger, all plans come with daily backups.

Kinsta also offers a multi-user environment that enables you to assign and manage users by giving them access to your websites and billing. All of Kinsta’s WordPress packages are hosted on Google Cloud Platform.

With Kinsta’s 1-click site cloning feature, you’ll be able to clone any of your live websites or staging environments to build a template for your client.

Discover more differences between Hostinger and Kinsta using the following comparison table:

3. Performance

It’s Another Tie! Both Hostinger and Kinsta Deliver Top-Notch Performance

Hostinger operates through its server locations in the U.K., Brazil, U.S.A., Indonesia, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Lithuania. On the other hand, Kinsta has servers in more than 20 locations all over the world.

Both hosts offer a free CDN (Content Delivery Network) with all their plans. CDN is a feature that, when activated, places your website on a global network of cloud servers. This, among other benefits, boosts the loading speed of your website from different locations around the world.

Both Hostinger and Kinsta use SSD storage, instead of the regular HDD storage, with all their plans. The advantage of using SSD storage is that it performs much faster, in terms of website data processing, which, in return, reflects on your website’s loading speed and overall performance.

Hostinger and Kinsta both have a 99.9% uptime guarantee and, when the actual uptime was tested, both exceeded their promises and showed perfect uptime over the long run.

Even though both hosts differ greatly in the number of server locations, when testing their loading speeds from different locations around the world (without CDN), they both scored perfectly with no locations showing slow load times.

Check out Hostinger’s detailed performance test results in our expert’s full review.

Now, if you compare it with Kinsta’s results, in its detailed review, you’ll find that the global loading speed score is identical.

Both hosts are tied up in that both of them show excellent performance in all related aspects.

4. Security

Hostinger Offers More Advanced Security Features

Even though both Hostinger and Kinsta secure all their services with DDoS protection, Hostinger applies this on multiple levels – Wanguard anti-DDoS traffic analyzer and intelligent firewall rules on switch level, BitNinja or Immunity360 (Web Application Firewall) on each server, and custom web server rules.

In addition to DDoS protection, Kinsta also implements 24/7 server monitoring and strong firewalls.

WIth their Linux-based shared hosting plans, both hosts use container technology systems. Hostinger uses CloudLinux OS, but Kinsta uses a similar system called LXC containers. Both these systems are responsible for two things – securely isolating each account from other accounts on the same server to protect it against threats targeting the other accounts and making sure that all server resources are allocated fairly among all accounts.

Free SSL certificates are included with all plans offered by both hosts, in addition to free automatic regular backups. However, Kinsta performs its backups on a daily basis with all plans, but Hostinger takes backups on a weekly basis with most of its plans and some plans come with daily backups.

It’s clear that both hosts take security very seriously, but Hostinger’s security measures are more advanced and are applied on more levels. This makes it the winner of the security round.

5. Support

It’s Easier to Get Help from Hostinger

Both Hostinger and Kinsta enjoy extensive Knowledgebase sections. However, Hostinger’s Knowledgebase is slightly more categorized and organized, making it easier to navigate and reach the information you require.

Hostinger offers 24/7 support through live chat and support tickets. While the live chat can sometimes be time consuming, in terms of getting connected to an agent, the support staff are well-trained and knowledgeable. In other words, at the end of the day, you’ll be getting the help you need.

Kinsta’s support is also available 24/7. It’s available through live chat, email, and phone. However the live chat is only available once you’re subscribed and the phone channel is one-way only, meaning you can request a call-back, but there isn’t a clear phone number on the website. Once you’ve passed these complications, the support staff is very responsive and helpful.

Even though Hostinger’s support can take some time to get connected to, it’s much easier to start talking to an agent than with Kinsta’s support. Plus,  Hostinger’s impressive Knowledgebase leaves little room for questions.

Both Are Great Hosts, but Hostinger Wins by a Hair

Although both Hostinger and Kinsta are among the top 10 web hosting services, it’s a win for Hostinger in this neck-and-neck comparison.

Hostinger offers an array of hosting plans from simple shared hosting to VPS and cloud hosting, whereas Kinsta specializes only in WordPress and WooCommerce hosting. Kinsta also couldn’t beat Hostinger’s cheap prices and support.

Nevertheless, both services proved to be equal when it came to performance and the features they provide with their managed WordPress hosting packages.

Even though Hostinger wins this battle, Kinsta is an excellent option for highly demanding business websites. So, it all depends on your hosting needs since you can’t go wrong with either host.

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