Both Liquid Web (formerly Nexcess) and Kinsta provide premium managed WordPress solutions, aimed at individuals and businesses. But if you’re going to be paying a premium, you should expect very good service, and I’ve evaluated both of these web hosts to find out which gives you the best.
I tested and compared pricing, performance, features, and more. The results? It was tight, but Liquid Web offers more useful, time-saving WordPress features – and it gives you more resources, despite being less expensive.
Click here to check out Liquid Web’s latest deals, or keep reading for all the juicy details on how Liquid Web and Kinsta compare.
1. Plans and Pricing
Liquid Web Offers More Resources for Less Money
If you’re looking for premium-quality managed WordPress hosting, Liquid Web’s managed services and Kinsta are two of your better options. That said, both providers also offer other types of hosting too. Liquid Web offers a wide variety of virtual private server (VPS) plans, dedicated servers, specialized GPU hosting, and managed Adobe Commerce and WooCommerce hosting. Kinsta, on the other hand, offers customizable VPS plans, managed WooCommerce plans, dedicated servers, and managed database and web app hosting.
Though both hosts give you the option to subscribe on a monthly or annual basis, you can also sign up for Liquid Web’s managed hosting plans for 2 and 3-year periods. For both hosts, the longer your billing period, the less you pay on a monthly basis.
In terms of variety, Liquid Web offers three basic managed WordPress plans (which are the same as the three options for WooCommerce), with scaled options for more than one site. There’s also alternatives like managed VPSs and dedicated servers (both optimized for WordPress). Kinsta, on the other hand, offers a much more customizable model, with options broken down by whether you need a “Business,” “Agency,” or “Enterprise” plan. The pricing on all Kinsta plans vary by things like your bandwidth limit and whether you need multiple sites.
Though there’s a lot of overlap when you get to the most customizable plans, Liquid Web’s entry-level managed WordPress is significantly cheaper. You can get started with the “Spark” plan for $17.60 per month (or less, with a longer billing period). Meanwhile, Kinsta’s most basic plan (with the lowest possible bandwidth limit and configured for just one site) costs about $25.00 per month.
Despite costing less, Liquid Web is more generous with resources. Kinsta’s Starter plan restricts you to 10GB SSD storage and 25,000 monthly visits. Conversely, Liquid Web offers 15GB SSD storage and an impressive 2TB bandwidth with no limits on monthly visits.
Kinsta offers two free months of hosting with annual billing, but this isn’t enough to help it win the pricing comparison here. Although Liquid Web’s new customer discount isn’t as impressive, it gives you lower prices overall.
So, who’s the winner of this section? It’s easily Liquid Web – it’s cheaper, yet still offers you more for your money than Kinsta.
2. Features
Liquid Web Offers a Variety of Useful Plugins
Several features come as standard with Liquid Web and Kinsta, such as free SSL certificates, SSD storage, automatic daily backups, and staging areas. But when it comes to WordPress management, these two hosts begin to differ.
Liquid Web’s plans come with a wide variety of useful, premium plugins for things like online courses, ticket selling for events, upgraded Gutenberg blocks, and more. What’s more, Liquid Web offers AI-driven plugin updates. Whenever an update is released for one of your plugins, a clone of your site is automatically generated. Here, the plugin update is tested, and the update is then applied to your live site only if no issues are detected. Liquid Web then monitors your site for performance issues after the plugin has been installed.
Kinsta also allows you to test plugin updates safely, but it’s more of a manual and time-consuming process. It will automatically create a clone of your site with the plugin applied, but you will have to check for issues yourself.
While Kinsta falls short here, it shines elsewhere. For example, Kinsta checks your site for issues every 2 minutes. If it sees that your site is down, measures will be taken immediately to bring your site back online. Liquid Web also offers 24/7 server monitoring, but it doesn’t make promises on how often it checks for issues or how quick its response will be.
If email is an integral part of your business, you might also be better off with Liquid Web. While Liquid Web offers email hosting as a paid add-on, Kinsta doesn’t offer email hosting at all, which means you’d have to find a third-party email provider.
Take a look at this detailed comparison table to compare Liquid Web and Kinsta further:
| Liquid Web | Kinsta | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting Types | Managed WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, cloud hosting, VPS hosting, GPU hosting, enterprise hosting, and dedicated servers | Managed WordPress, WooCommerce, cloud-based application & database hosting |
| Free Domain | ✘ | ✘ |
| Free SSL Certificate | ✔ | ✔ |
| Disk Space | 15 GB – 800 GB | 10 GB – 15 GB |
| Bandwidth | 2TB – 10TB | 40 GB – 750 GB |
| Automatic Backups | ✔ | ✔ |
| Control Panel | WebHost Manager and cPanel | MyKinsta |
| Email Accounts | Unlimited, as a paid add-on | No email service |
| Free CDN | ✔ | ✔ |
| Free Site Migration | ✔ | ✔ |
| Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days | 30 days |
While both hosts are both strong with regards to managed WordPress features, Liquid Web wins this round as its included email hosting is a significantly useful feature.
3. Performance
Liquid Web offers a total of 10 data centers, with six in the US, three in Europe, and one in Australia. That said, only two of the US data centers support the managed WordPress plans. On the other hand, Kinsta offers an impressive 27 data centers, with four across the US, two in Canada, eight in Europe, two in Australia, seven in Asia, one in Africa, and two in South America.
To improve its coverage further, Kinsta includes access to the premium Cloudflare Enterprise CDN (content delivery network) free with all plans. Your site’s assets are then cached on Cloudflare’s global server network in 275+ cities across the world. This means visitors far from your chosen data center will still be able to load your site quickly.
While Liquid Web also offers the proprietary Edge CDN, it doesn’t quite measure up to Cloudflare Enterprise in terms of coverage, but it will give your site a boost with 20+ locations in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.
Kinsta’s services make use of Google Cloud’s C2 machines – some of the best infrastructure available for web hosting. Liquid Web’s plans use a shared hosting environment with an NGINX reverse proxy, and although this includes autoscaling to manage traffic, you’ll have to share server resources with other users.
While Liquid Web’s speeds weren’t bad by any means in our tests, the limitations of shared hosting were made clear. Our test site loading time bounced between 1.1s and 2.8s, with an average of 1.6s. That said, there was no downtime, meaning Liquid Web fulfilled its 100% uptime guarantee. See the results for yourself in our expert Liquid Web review.
Kinsta offered consistently faster loading speeds for our test site, averaging out at an impressive 1.2s. Furthermore, it managed to deliver this great performance throughout the world without much slowdown. Kinsta also achieved 100% uptime, outdoing its 99.9% uptime guarantee. Check out these impressive results in our Kinsta review.
Kinsta’s global server locations and faster loading speeds make it the clear winner in the performance round.
4. Security
Kinsta Offers More Advanced Security Features
To protect your site, Liquid Web uses the ModSecurity web application firewall to block online threats. In addition, it includes the premium iThemes Security Pro plugin for free with all plans. This is a WordPress security suite that monitors your core files for any unauthorized changes, automatically blocking malicious IPs, and protecting against brute force attacks.
Kinsta goes a step further. It uses a combination of Cloudflare’s enterprise-level firewall and the Google Cloud Platform IP-based firewall to block many attacks before they even reach your server.
While both hosts use their CDNs to mitigate DDoS attacks, Kinsta’s CDN offers unmetered enterprise-level DDoS protection that’s aimed at halting even major attacks. While the Liquid Web CDN can definitely deal with smaller-scale threats, it may not have the resources necessary to mitigate the largest of attacks.
Kinsta also offers a dedicated malware team that monitors all servers 24/7 for malicious activity. This team will respond to and take care of any threats for you, and if your site is ever compromised, Kinsta guarantees it will fix it for free. With Liquid Web no such guarantee exists.
All in all, Kinsta offers a much more impressive security suite, making it the winner of this section.
5. Support
Liquid Web Has More Support Channels than Kinsta
Both Liquid Web and Kinsta include extensive knowledge bases that contain numerous guides and tutorials on the basics. These can help you get started, but if you get stuck or run into issues, you may have better luck contacting support.
Liquid Web support is available 24/7 through live chat, phone, tickets, and email. I decided to test its live chat for myself by asking whether it was possible to switch my website over to a different data center. Despite my initial query being rather unclear, the Liquid Web support agent quickly linked me to relevant documentation after I provided further clarification.
Next up, I tried Kinsta’s support. Like Liquid Web, Kinsta offers 24/7 support through live chat, tickets, and email – but there’s no phone support.
I found this disappointing. Although live chat is unquestionably convenient, contacting a support engineer by phone enables you to expeditiously convey your issue. This subtle distinction can prove pivotal during a site downtime emergency. Furthermore, in the event that Kinsta’s live chat support service were to become unavailable, you would only have access to the slower ticketing support.
With that said, I always did get a rapid response to my queries on live chat. The Kinsta support agents were polite, knowledgeable, and always happy to help.
As both hosts’ agents provide responsive and helpful support on a 24/7 basis, it was hard to pick a winner for this section. However, I have to say Liquid Web just barely gets the win here, thanks to its inclusion of 24/7 phone support.
Liquid Web Beats Kinsta by a Slim Margin
In this neck-and-neck battle, Liquid Web beat Kinsta in three out of five categories. Liquid Web offers better value for money because of its lower prices, more generous resource sets, and slightly better WordPress management features.
Indeed, Kinsta provides superior performance. If each millisecond of your site’s loading time is critical to your business, Kinsta might still be a better choice over Liquid Web.
While Liquid Web is the winner this time, both of these hosts offer an impressive platform for WordPress. Both made our list of the top web hosting services for 2026. If you wish to continue comparing hosting options, I’d recommend starting there.
