Kinsta Review: Well Worth Its Price [In 2023]

Premium Hosting at Premium Prices

Kinsta does a lot to differentiate itself from other hosting providers. Instead of operating its own servers, it provides managed hosting on Google’s enterprise-level network. While it only provides managed WordPress hosting for websites, it also offers application and database hosting.

And while Kinsta doesn’t come bundled with a bunch of optional add-ons like typical shared hosts, I appreciated its focus on features that give you more control and a better hosting experience.

It’s also, to put it lightly, not cheap. Mind you, it’s not outrageously expensive for what it offers.

I wanted to know if Kinsta was worth its price or if you’d be better off going with a cheaper host and treating yourself to a nice dinner with the leftover money. That’s why I put in over two weeks of careful testing and research into Kinsta. The verdict? Though it’s not the cheapest option out there, Kinsta’s fully managed WordPress hosting is absolutely worth it.

It’s an ideal choice if you’re running a small-to-medium business, or want to provide your web development clients with high-end hosting, or even if you have loftier ambitions for your personal site. However, it might be overkill for smaller passion projects.

Kinsta’s service is available in Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Is it what you need to take your website to the next level? Read on to find out.

Laser-Focused on Top-Performance Hosting, Without the Classic Extras

There are a lot of popular features offered by other hosting providers that Kinsta simply doesn’t have. There’s no proprietary website builder, search engine optimization (SEO) analysis, or significant marketing tools. It doesn’t even offer domain name registration, free or otherwise. Does that mean that Kinsta’s offering is limited? Not exactly – it’s just more focused.

Instead of bloating its service with a bunch of nice-to-have add-ons that you’d be better off getting through a third-party service anyway, Kinsta’s features are dedicated to giving you the best performance possible.

True Managed WordPress Hosting

When Kinsta advertises managed WordPress hosting, it really does mean managed. Immediately after sign-up, Kinsta takes care of the entire WordPress installation for you. From there, you can activate or deactivate any installed plugins and themes, manage multiple WordPress sites at once, and tinker with your site’s settings, all from your dashboard.

If you worry about security, Kinsta comes with state-of-the-art firewalls and DDoS protection. You also get access to customizable security rules like banning certain IP addresses. To mitigate a worst-case scenario, it autosaves daily backups of your site to prevent losing important data. If all else fails, Kinsta even promises to fix your site for you.

I also liked the option to activate edge and mobile caching. Edge caching duplicates your site’s assets on more than 260 data centers around the world. To improve performance, it uses the copies stored nearest to each site visitor. You can also choose to create cached versions of your site specifically for mobile to improve your loading speeds on those devices.

Though it doesn’t offer domain registration, Kinsta comes with its own domain name system (DNS) that allows you to manage all your domain settings directly. It also provides you with a limited number of free SSL certificates.

Plenty of Monitoring Tools To Assess the State of Your Site

Performance and usage analytics are crucial for optimizing your website, and Kinsta offers two different performance monitoring tools and advanced usage analytics.

If you want to track your website’s performance and identify bottlenecks, you can access the application performance monitoring (APM) and New Relic monitoring (NRM) tools directly from your hosting dashboard. APM is a proprietary tool that captures time-stamped information about your site’s PHP processes. NRM gives you performance information by adding custom JavaScript to your site’s front end.

While my team and I prefer to do all performance tests through our trusted third-party monitoring tools, these features can be useful for fine-tuning your site performance. You can also access detailed usage analytics under the Analytics tab on your dashboard.

Premium Add-Ons for Impressive Performance Speeds

For an extra fee, Kinsta offers a wide range of impressive performance-enhancing add-ons. You can access Redis technology to improve your database read speeds or use NGINX to load WordPress from a subdirectory while your site files load from the main directory.

For extra peace of mind, you can also pay a small fee to store external backups of your site on Amazon’s or Google’s cloud storage centers.

Specialized Plans for Application and Database Hosting

Though managed WordPress hosting is the focus of this review, I’d be remiss not to mention Kinsta’s specialized application and database hosting plans. Application hosting offers unlimited, concurrent builds on a single account. You’ll also get scalable resources and access to Kinsta’s proprietary API.

For databases, Kinsta offers support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Maria DB, and Redis, as well as automatic daily backups and up to 5 manual backups per day.

Kinsta Features at a Glance

Fantastic Overall Ease of Use, With Some Room for Improvement

Kinsta does everything in its power to ensure that setting up and running your website is as easy and fast as it can be. I can’t argue with the results. Kinsta offers one of the smoothest hosting experiences I’ve had with any provider.

Since it doesn’t offer domain name registration, I’ll admit I was a little frustrated trying to point my domain name to Kinsta’s servers. While it does offer a full DNS service, it’s odd that such a we’ll-do-it-for-you service doesn’t have one of the most basic web hosting features. But even then, most of my troubles came from my own confusion. You can’t blame Kinsta too much for that.

Creating a New Account with Kinsta

Creating your Kinsta account could not be more straightforward. All you have to do is go to Kinsta’s homepage, select the plan that sounds best to you, and click choose.

After that, you’ll have to input your billing information and select any add-ons you want (you can also add these later). Then, you’ll have to choose a name for your site and select your data center location. Once your payment goes through – it took less than a minute for me – you’ll be the proud owner of a ready-to-use Kinsta account.

Connecting a Domain Name and Installing WordPress

As soon as you finish creating your account, you’ll get your first taste of the Kinsta dashboard. From there, all you’ll have to do is click on the create site button under the WordPress Site option. If you already have .zip files for plugins and themes, you don’t even need to go to your WordPress dashboard to add them. You can do it directly from the Kinsta dashboard.

The process of connecting my domain name was a little more involved. I had to start by changing the nameservers to point to Kinsta’s servers. Once a “nameservers point to Kinsta” message appeared, I went to the Domains tab on my dashboard and clicked on Add a Domain. Then… nothing happened.

Even though my domain was pointing to Kinsta, Kinsta didn’t recognize it as a valid address for my WordPress site. I spent a good while trying to figure out how to fix this problem, until I realized I needed to add an “A” DNS record from Kinsta.

Though that’s a rookie mistake, I was a bit annoyed that Kinsta didn’t provide enough instruction to help me identify my problem, let alone solve it.

Kinsta Offers a CDN Straight Out of the Box

If you want to reach a global audience, you’ll need a content delivery network (CDN) to avoid very long load times in parts of the world that are far away from your server. Many hosts make you connect a CDN as a separate service – but not Kinsta.

To my delight, the enterprise version of Cloudflare CDN comes pre-installed on all your WordPress sites. This saves you the trouble of manually connecting to a CDN, but more importantly, it improves your global loading speeds away from your chosen data center (more on that below).

Easy-Access Tools To Improve Your Hosting Experience

You can access a variety of useful features for managing your WordPress site directly from the Tools tab on your dashboard. There, you’ll be able to clear your cache, debug your site, change PHP versions, and more. The best part is that none of this requires complicated installs, as you can activate or deactivate any of Kinsta’s tools with the click of a button.

Deploy WordPress Sites Locally With DevKinsta

DevKinsta provides a downloadable environment for stress-free WordPress site development. This might not seem impressive compared to the rest of Kinsta’s premium offerings, but unless you’re only migrating your site, being able to design and develop your WordPress site locally can be a huge timesaver. Once you’re satisfied with the result, DevKinsta integrates seamlessly with the Kinsta staging environment to make your site live whenever you wish.

Kinsta Delivers Impeccable Performance

Kinsta has more than 30 data centers across the world, meaning you’ll be able to find a location near your target audience wherever they are. Not that it matters much – due to its built-in CDN, Kinsta promises fast loading speeds just about anywhere.

To test if Kinsta was really worth all that, our team built a full landing page. This included HD images, scrolling effects, and just about everything you’d expect from a modern site. Then, we hosted it using Kinsta’s base plan and ran continuous tests for a little over two weeks. If you’re interested, you can read a full breakdown of our testing methodology for hosting providers.

The short answer: Kinsta is designed to give you the best performance and reliability it can offer. And boy-oh-boy does it deliver.

GTmetrix

To test the local performance of our site, we set hourly tests for two weeks using GTMetrix with a source center near our site’s data center in Columbus. The results were excellent across the board. Our site achieved a typical loading speed of about 0.9s. Even the slowest results were better than most, clocking in at about 1.4s.

To give our readers the most accurate representation of what they will get when signing up, we tinker with the site as little as possible when testing the performance of a hosting plan. Kinsta was no exception.

That said, I should mention that the first time I ran Kinsta through GTMetrix, it achieved a Performance score of 100%. It would appear this was because Kinsta had automatically installed the Yoast SEO plugin on my site, which disabled my test site’s scrolling effects.

After deactivating the plugin, our site’s typical loading speeds saw very little loss in performance. Even without all the optimization plugins at our disposal, Kinsta’s Performance scores were regularly above 95%.

Sucuri Load Time Tester

We use Sucuri’s Load Time Tester tool to test a provider’s global performance score. Now, most shared hosting providers can integrate with the free version of Cloudflare’s CDN service. That said, the signup and configuration process can be a bit of a headache. And since Cloudflare is usually a 3rd-party service, we don’t use it with our test sites. It’s what’s fair, but it does mean that even the best providers tend to struggle with global performance.

Each one of Kinsta’s WordPress plans are connected to the Enterprise level of Cloudflare’s CDN. This means that I didn’t have to do anything to maximize the site’s global performance. And the results were outstanding all over the world.

UptimeRobot

On its service agreement, Kinsta offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. To test if it lived up to its promises, we ran our site through over two weeks of continuous monitoring using UptimeRobot. The result was an impeccable uptime of 100%. Which doesn’t leave all that much more to say, really.

Good Support, but I Expected Better

My experience with customer support was subpar, to put it mildly. Kinsta offers live chat and email support for all paid customers, as well as phone support for sales inquiries. To test Kinsta’s support quality, I tried contacting it through every available channel. Tried being the operative word here.

The first time I sent a message through live chat, I waited for a long time without getting an answer, then missed the eventual reply – a rep’s request for my hosting address.

Thankfully, the second time I reached out, I received a much more prompt and comprehensive answer. However, I should point out that Kinsta’s customer support hours are misleading. While advertised as being 24/7, the actual availability is Monday to Friday from 5AM – 10PM UTC.

I also sent an email to test the quality of support there. No point going into too much detail because I didn’t get an answer from email support. Finally, I tried calling the sales number to ask about the e-commerce plans. My experience was much better.

The first thing I noticed is that since I called with a number registered in Mexico, Kinsta connected me to a Spanish-speaking support representative. They not only provided answers in my native language, but were very knowledgeable about the topics I asked about.

In the end, support was kind of a mixed bag. When I was able to get an answer, that answer was completely satisfactory. But I expected better, especially considering Kinsta’s prices.

Kinsta Involves a Serious Investment

There’s no sugar-coating it: Kinsta is quite expensive. There are 10 different plans for WordPress hosting alone. Even the entry-level plan, Starter, comes in at $24.00 per month, or a little less if you pay annually. That’s more than the price of most other hosts’ mid-range plans, even after renewal.

After that, the plans come packaged together based on functionality. The Pro plan gives you tools for multi-site functionality, while the Business plans give you access to e-commerce features. The Enterprise plans, as you might expect, include a range of resources for large company sites.

That’s not even mentioning Kinsta’s paid add-ons, which can increase your site’s performance but also your monthly fee. Much like the main plans, these features are worth it if you have the budget.

At the very least, I have to commend Kinsta for its pricing transparency. Unlike some other hosts on the market, Kinsta doesn’t charge more after the first renewal period. It also doesn’t charge extra for features it advertises as part of each plan, nor does it use hidden upsells. With Kinsta, what you see is what you get. It also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on all its plans. This way, you have plenty of time to decide if it’s the right investment for your needs.