Kinsta vs GoDaddy – Hard to Choose, but I Did [2021]

You may have seen GoDaddy ads recently as part of its marketing campaign to stay in the spotlight. Meanwhile, Kinsta is gaining more popularity due to its unmatched performance and page loading speeds, even though it only offers high-end managed WordPress hosting.

In this Kinsta vs GoDaddy contest, I compared the WordPress hosting offers by evaluating them across multiple categories, including pricing, performance, and features. GoDaddy still holds its reputation as a budget-friendly host, whereas Kinsta won in every other category.

Click here to see Kinsta’s best plans or keep reading to see what makes Kinsta the winner of this comparison.

1. Plans and Pricing

Kinsta Can’t Beat GoDaddy’s Budget-Friendly Prices

GoDaddy isn’t only a leading domain registrar; it also offers an array of hosting solutions such as shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS, reseller, and dedicated servers. On the other hand, Kinsta provides premium WordPress hosting and WooCommerce hosting.

Kinsta has ten managed WordPress hosting plans, one for beginners, one for professional individuals, and eight for businesses of all sizes. GoDaddy offers eight WordPress hosting plans, four managed, and four unmanaged.

GoDaddy for WordPress hosting is cheaper than Kinsta, but it also comes with its limitations (more details in the Features section).

With GoDaddy, you get a free domain name with annual terms, and it only initiates a charge at the end of your subscription period. Kinsta doesn’t provide free domain name registration.

Both Kinsta and GoDaddy offer a 30-day money-back guarantee and free website migration with WordPress hosting plans.

The winner? GoDaddy. Given the large price gap between GoDaddy and Kinsta, GoDaddy is cheaper, despite its slight limitations.

2. Features

Kinsta Is More Geared Towards WordPress – GoDaddy Has Some Limitations

In this section, I’ll compare Kinsta and GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting plans.

With Kinsta, you get from 1 to 150 hosted websites, 10 GB to 250 GB SSD storage, and 20,000 to 3 million monthly visits. All plans come with free SSL, free KeyCDN, automatic daily backups, a staging area, a multi-user environment, site cloning, and a white-labeled cache plugin.

With GoDaddy, you can only host one website and get from 30 GB to unlimited disk space. All managed WordPress hosting plans also come with daily backups (up to 90 days), free CDN, free business email (for one year), SEO optimizer (not included with the basic plan), and thousands of pre-built themes. Unlike Kinsta, GoDaddy only provides a free SSL certificate with its higher-priced plans.

Explore more differences between Kinsta and GoDaddy using the table below:

When it comes to WordPress hosting, Kinsta is the winner.

3. Performance

Kinsta Has Better Uptime and Slightly Faster Loading Speeds

Kinsta delivers its services via a global network of servers in more than 20 locations, including the U.S.A., Canada, Brazil, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, and Switzerland. GoDaddy only has servers in the U.S.A. and India.

Kinsta uses SSD storage with all its plans, while GoDaddy only uses it with specific plans. SSD storage reflects directly on the loading speed, stability, and overall performance of your website. It performs much faster than regular HDD storage in terms of website data processing.

All of Kinsta’s plans come with free CDN – a feature that GoDaddy only includes with its WordPress hosting plans. A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, boosts your website’s loading speed, among other benefits, by placing it on a global network of cloud servers.

Kinsta and GoDaddy both promise a 99.9% uptime guarantee. During testing, Kinsta achieved a perfect uptime of 100%, while GoDaddy’s users reported some downtimes. Nothing major, just an occasional hiccup.

When testing the loading speeds, both hosts scored perfectly. While Kinsta had no slow locations, GoDaddy showed slower speeds from its India server.

You can check out the detailed performance test in this full Kinsta review.

When comparing these results with GoDaddy, you’ll see a very slight variance, but not enough to create a difference in the global score.

Kinsta has more performance-related features, more global server locations, better uptime, and slightly faster loading speeds, which is why it wins the performance round.

4. Security

Kinsta Provides More Security Features

Both Kinsta and GoDaddy use 24/7 server monitoring, strong firewalls, DDoS protection, and free SSL certificates to secure your website.

GoDaddy uses CloudLinux OS with all its plans, while Kinsta uses a similar system known as LXC containers. Both systems securely isolate your website from other accounts on the same server, protecting it from external threats to different accounts. At the same time, it ensures the fair allocation of server resources among all accounts.

As previously mentioned, Kinsta provides free CDN with all its plans, and GoDaddy only offers it with WordPress hosting plans. Other than its performance-boosting purpose, a CDN acts as an additional layer of DDoS/Brute-Force protection.

You’ll get automatic daily backups with all of Kinsta’s plans, but only with some of GoDaddy’s.

Security is a tough round, as both hosts offer a limited range of security features compared to other hosting providers. However, Kinsta wins with its inclusive CDN and automatic backups.

5. Support

Kinsta’s Support is More Responsive

Both Kinsta and GoDaddy have comprehensive and organized knowledgebases with countless articles and tutorials.

You can contact Kinsta’s customer support 24/7 via live chat, email, or support ticket. However, the live chat is only available for subscribed customers. If you are a customer, then you can access the live chat from anywhere in the dashboard. I got instantly connected to an agent who was very professional and helpful.

On the other hand, GoDaddy only offers 24/7 support via phone and live chat. Unfortunately, the live chat isn’t as reliable as I would expect. It took me more than 50 minutes to get connected to an agent. However, once I was connected, the agent answered all my questions and resolved all my issues.

Both hosts have limited communication channels, but Kinsta’s higher responsiveness makes it the easy winner of the support race.

Kinsta Is the Champion

GoDaddy has a better pricing structure since it targets budget-conscious consumers, whereas Kinsta offers premium managed WordPress hosting for demanding businesses. Nevertheless, Kinsta outperformed GoDaddy in almost every battle.

Kinsta is also featured in this exhaustive list of the best web hosting services.

FAQ

Does GoDaddy use SSD?Not with all hosting plans. You can get SSD storage from GoDaddy if you sign up for VPS or dedicated server plans. Want to explore more SSD hosting options, check out the best cheap and fast SSD hosting services.Does Kinsta offer shared hosting?No. Kinsta doesn’t offer web (shared) hosting solutions. It only sells managed WordPress hosting packages and WooCommerce solutions for medium to large websites. If you’re looking for budget shared hosting, don’t miss our list of the best shared hosting services.Does GoDaddy offer VPS hosting?Yes, GoDaddy has VPS plans, four Standard RAM plans and four High RAM. The RAM across all packages ranges between 1 GB and 32 GB. Need an alternative to GoDaddy for VPS? Take a look at these cheap and reliable VPS hosting services.Does Kinsta offer a free domain?No. Kinsta doesn’t offer a free domain name with any of its packages. If you’re undecided about which domain name to choose, see our ultimate guide to choosing and buying a domain name.