Kinsta vs GreenGeeks – Hard to Choose, but I Did 2021

Putting two powerful hosts against each other is tough as old boots, but not impossible. Both Kinsta and GreenGeeks are among the most recommended web hosting services. GreenGeeks offers an array of affordable hosting options for small to medium-sized websites and businesses. Kinsta breathes WordPress and offers a truckload of WordPress hosting packages.

To make a proper comparison between these two hosting services, I thoroughly tested them for five main parameters: pricing, features, performance, security, and support. GreenGeeks put a great fight against Kinsta, but lost in two out of three rounds.

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

1. Plans and Pricing

You Get Cheaper Prices with GreenGeeks Even Without Discounts

Unlike Kinsta (which specializes in managed WordPress hosting and WooCommerce), GreenGeeks covers more hosting services: shared, reseller, VPS, WordPress hosting, dedicated servers, and application (CMS) hosting.

That said, I’ll compare Kinsta and GreenGeeks’ WordPress hosting packages. Starting with Kinsta, it offers ten managed WordPress hosting plans from simple to enterprise-level WordPress hosting. On the other hand, GreenGeeks offers three WordPress hosting packages.

With GreenGeeks, you can choose to subscribe monthly, annually, biennially, or triennially. Kinsta allows you to sign up on a monthly or an annual basis. Plus, you get two months for free when you choose the annual subscription.

Nevertheless, GreenGeeks still offers much cheaper rates for WordPress hosting than Kinsta. For example, the most expensive GreenGeeks’ package cost less than Kinsta’s Starter plan. However, Kinsta offers more WordPress-optimized services than GreenGeeks (more details in the Features section).

Both hosts offer free website migration and a 30-day money-back guarantee. GreenGeeks also offers a free domain name, but Kinsta doesn’t.

The winner? GreenGeeks easily wins the pricing round for offering discounted rates and cheaper package renewal cost compared to Kinsta.

2. Features

Kinsta Is More Geared Towards WordPress Hosting – GreenGeeks Sticks to the Basics

There are a couple of common features that come as standard with Kinsta and GreenGeeks’ WordPress hosting plans. These include free SSL certificate, free CDN, SSD-based storage, daily backups (nightly backups with GreenGeeks), and staging environment.

Now, let’s discuss the differences. With Kinsta, you get from 1 to 150 hosted websites, 10 GB to 250 GB disk space, and from 20,000 to 3 million monthly visits. GreenGeeks gives you from 1 to unlimited hosted websites, unlimited web space, and unlimited email accounts.

Kinsta has an edge over GreenGeeks by hosting its WordPress packages on Google Cloud Platform. It also offers a multi-user environment that lets you assign and manage users by giving them access to your websites and billing.

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

Use the detailed table below to further compare Kinsta and GreenGeeks:

The winner? Kinsta. While GreenGeeks offers all the essentials needed for a functioning WordPress site, Kinsta provides more high-end features and tools for serious WordPress hosting users/developers and demanding businesses.

  3. Performance

GreenGeeks Can’t Catch Up with Kinsta’s Impressively Fast Speeds

Kinsta has a global network of servers spanning more than 20 locations around the world. These include U.S.A., Canada, Brazil, U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, and Switzerland. GreenGeeks, on the other hand, has servers in the U.S.A, Canada, and the Netherlands.

Both Kinsta and GreenGeeks use SSD storage with all their plans. SSD storage performs much faster than the regular HDD storage. In return, this reflects directly on the website’s stability, loading speeds and overall performance.

Free CDN is included with all plans offered by both hosts. However, Kinsta includes KeyCDN and GreenGeeks uses CloudFlare CDN. A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a feature that, when activated, places your website on a global network of cloud servers. Among other benefits, this boosters the loading speeds of your website from anywhere in the world.

The uptime guarantee promised by both hosts is 99.9%. No downtimes were reported from either host and both exceeded their promise with the actual tested uptime.

In Kinsta’s full review, the loading speed tests showed no slow locations at all, resulting in a perfect global score.

When testing GreenGeeks, like Kinsta, the global score was perfect, but it had one slow location, the New York server. GreenGeeks’ review shows the detailed results.

Both hosts have a wide range of performance-boosting features, perfect uptimes, and great loading speeds. However, Kinsta wins this one by a thin margin.

4. Security

You Get More Security Features with Kinsta

Both Kinsta and GreenGeeks implement 24/7 server monitoring, DDoS/Brute-Force protection, spam protection, antivirus, antimalware, strong firewalls, and hack protection.

Kinsta also has two-factor authentication, GeoIP blocking, and automatically bans IP’s that have more than six failed login attempts in a minute (IP’s with suspicious behavior).

Container technology is used by both hosts on all their plans, but under different names. Kinsta uses LXC containers while GreenGeeks uses Hosting Account Isolation. Neither host uses the famous CloudLinux OS. These systems securely isolate your account from other accounts on the same server to protect it against any threats targeting the other accounts.

Another benefit of the free CDN is that it has its own DDoS/Brute-Force protection to protect the entire network, including your website, against such attacks.

Free SSL certificates come as standard with all plans of both hosts, in addition to free automatic daily backups.

It seems that both hosts take their security quite seriously, but Kinsta still offers more features to secure your website, making it the winner of the security challenge.

5. Support

It’s Easier to Get Help from GreenGeeks

Both hosts have comprehensive and highly organized Knowledgebase sections that cover most major topics and are easy to navigate.

Kinsta has 24/7 customer support via live chat, email, and an integrated ticketing system. However, the live chat is only available from within the dashboard, meaning that it’s only available to subscribed customers.

If you’re already logged in, you can easily open the live chat from anywhere in the dashboard. The live chat agents are well-trained and helpful. They were able to answer all my questions promptly and professionally.

On the other hand, GreenGeeks’ support is also available 24/7, but through more channels than Kinsta. You can contact them via live chat, phone, email, and support ticket. The phone channel, however, is only available during working hours (Mon – Sun: 9 AM – 12 AM EST.).

Unlike Kinsta the live chat is available from anywhere in the website, even if you’re not yet a customer (pre-sales chat). When I tried it, I was instantly connected and the agent was quite helpful by answering all my questions.

Both hosts have highly responsive customer support but GreenGeeks offers more communication channels and all are available pre-sale. This makes it slightly more reliable than Kinsta.

Kinsta OutPerforms GreenGeeks

Kinsta and GreenGeeks are both listed among the best web hosting services and for all the good reasons. GreenGeeks is great for shared hosting, but when it comes to WordPress hosting, GreenGeeks falls behind Kinsta’s robust managed WordPress hosting packages. As you can see, Kinsta beat it in the features, performance, and security challenges.

On the other hand, GreenGeeks remains a more budget-friendly option for small website owners or less demanding businesses for WordPress.

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