With offices in the U.S., U.K., and Europe, Kinsta and SiteGround are two of the biggest hosting companies around. Although both providers offer high quality hosting solutions, SiteGround has more experience in the market.
They’re so similar that choosing between them could be tough, so here I take the strain of trying to decide which one wins in the battle of the web hosts.
Features
One of the key differences between the two providers is that
Kinsta focuses primarily (if not exclusively) on WordPress hosting, whereas
SiteGround offers a wider range of hosting types. A second differentiator is that Kinsta’s hosting sits on the Google Cloud Platform that provides a global network of more than 20 data centers.
However, they do have the following features in common:
- Free SSL certificate
- SSD storage
- Daily backups
- Free CDN
- Website builder
- Free migration
Both providers’ plans come with a free CDN – KeyCDN for Kinsta, and Cloudflare for SiteGround – to enhance website performance. If you prefer the more popular Cloudflare, you can use this with Kinsta too, for an extra fee.
Both hosts support a staging area that allows you to create a temporary copy of your website, to test new features before publishing the changes to your live site.
Manual and automatic daily backups are available with both providers, but Kinsta also lets you configure backups to take place every hour.
Ease of Use
While SiteGround utilizes the widely-adopted cPanel control panel, Kinsta employs its proprietary control panel known as MyKinsta. This leads to the distinction that Kinsta lacks support for the Softaculous installer, which enables seamless one-click installations of various CMS and applications like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, and PrestaShop.
SiteGround does support Softaculous, so it steams ahead on ease-of-use.
Pricing
Since
Kinsta specializes in WordPress hosting plans, it’s only fair to compare these providers’ WordPress hosting prices. While Kinsta would win in terms of offering a wider range of WordPress plans,
SiteGround’s WordPress hosting plans are more affordable.
Both providers provide the reassurance of a 30-day money-back guarantee that should get you out if anything goes wrong within the first few weeks, and both providers accept major credit cards, but
SiteGround also lets you pay by PayPal.
Support
Contacting Kinsta for support is not as immediate as with SiteGround since there is no live chat, but
Kinsta’s ticket support secures rapid responses during office hours.
In addition to the advantage of live chat,
SiteGround’s more extensive knowledge base provides a better self-support experience, although both hosts provide self-support resources including tutorials and FAQs.
SiteGround Wins!
SiteGround and Kinsta put up a good fight for the title of the world’s best WordPress hosting provider.
Although it offers a wide range of WordPress hosting plans sitting on the Google Cloud Platform,
Kinsta can’t compete with SiteGround in several other respects.
SiteGround beats Kinsta into the ground when it comes to lower prices, payments methods, and industry-standard tools such as cPanel, Softaculous, and the Cloudflare CDN. So,
SiteGround wins!
