Kinsta Review: My Experience Using Kinsta

Looking to launch a WordPress website for your small business, e-commerce store, or even a blog? Maybe you already have a website but want to change to a managed WordPress hosting solution. Whatever the case, Kinsta is one of the providers around that may come up for consideration.

But how does Kinsta compare with the competition? Does it offer any significant advantages? How does Kinsta even work, and what does it cost? Read on to get answers to these and other questions, and whether Kinsta might be the right hosting platform for you.

Choosing a Managed WordPress Hosting Provider

When it comes on to managed WordPress hosting providers, there are quite a number of options to choose from. But picking the right solution is highly important. The perfect hosting platform will ensure you have phenomenal uptime and that your site runs smoothly, as well as remains secure.

On the other hand, the wrong one can spell disaster for your business website. So, which is the right one to pick for your individual needs?

Top Managed WordPress Hosting Solutions

Doing a Google search for managed WordPress platforms will return a bunch of names, including the following three platforms:

• Kinsta
• SiteGround
• Bluehost

Each of these hosting sites offer their own pros and cons. You would be advised to do a thorough research on each before selecting one. In the meantime, however, you can keep reading this article to find out all you need to know about Kinsta, so you can decide if it is a good option for you.

What is Kinsta?

Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting company created by WordPress experts. Unlike many of its competitors, it is a cloud-based hosting platform. In addition, by focusing on a single website architecture it is able to give WordPress users a more user-friendly and dependable experience, which may be superior to other hosting providers that cater to multiple web architectures.

Kinsta was launched in 2013 by former WordPress developer Mark Gavalda. It has offices in UK and Hungary, with headquarters in California, United States. Since it is built on top of Google Cloud, it is able to operate from more than two dozen data centers around the world.

Some of the most powerful websites in the world use Kinsta to host their websites, including General Electric, Buffer, Ubisoft, TripAdvisor, and Intuit. Among the features offered by Kinsta that are sought after by these and other companies include: excellent uptime of above 99.9%, ease of use, ability to handle high page loads, good customer support, and a high standard of security.

Despite this association with large websites, Kinsta is not only for big-name brands with tons of traffic. The platform offers hosting plans for small businesses, e-commerce platforms, and even blogs.

My Kinsta Review (TL;DR)

Overall, my experience running Blogging Guide on Kinsta has been extremely positive, and I recommend it to anyone who is serious about taking their WordPress website to the next level.

Yes, Kinsta will seem expensive if your are used to paying for shared WordPress hosting services.

But there is no question that Kinsta has improved my WordPress website, in terms of site speed, high site uptime, file compression, security, and overall scalability. And because of the amazing built-in features, I actually didn’t end up spending much more on Kinsta than I did on “cheaper” shared WordPress management services.

My Personal Experience Using Kinsta to Host My Own Website

I switched Blogging Guide to Kinsta from a fairly typical shared WordPress hosting plan, a few months ago.

I was pretty skeptical of paying more for hosting, but there were a few key issues that were hard to correct on my website:

My site was slower than I wanted it to be, and there were few options to significantly improve it without a total overhaul.

Prior to using Kinsta, my site was slow. I was producing high quality content that was ranking highly in Google, but had pretty high bounce rates, which I attributed to page speed.

I wanted to keep using Divi as my WordPress theme.

Some of this struggle to increase page speed across desktop and mobile, came from my use of the WordPress Theme Divi. To be clear, I love Divi! It is one of my top three favorite tools. But part of the reason why I love Divi so much is that it allows non-coding site owners to control and improve the appearance of their website.

When I would talk to various full-time web developers, there answer was generally “stop using Divi, hire a full time developer, focus on writing, and let someone else worry about website design/optimization for speed.” And for some people this is a good answer.

But for me personally, I love being able to control virtually all aspects of my website without needing regular support from an expensive website developer as I grow/expand my site. So I wanted to keep using Divi, a WordPress theme which is basically codeless, but makes WordPress websites look amazing. But I also realized that all the cool features that came with Divi naturally made my site a bit slower/harder to improve certain metrics.

I wanted to give my site a competitive edge over the millions of other WordPress.

I didn’t just want to “catch up” to rival sites; I wanted to enrich my site architecture and hosting so that my content would “win” in terms of technical factors.

If you are investing hundreds or thousands of hours into a blog, regardless how simple, you owe it to yourself to create the best reader experience possible.

And as I came to later appreciate, webhosting was actually a major part of this improvement.

Some of the biggest benefits that I saw after switching to Kinsta:

Kinsta very quickly increased my website speed and page load time within 48 hours of switching over. Even more amazing, this was all accomplished using a few very simple buttons and settings. The main settings I adjusted were enabling Kinsta DNS, enabling Kinsta CDN, and changing the location of my site’s data center.

• All Kinsta plans come with Kinsta DNS, a premium Anycast DNS service powered by Amazon Route53. Route53 consistently ranks among the fastest DNS services in the world, and it even supports latency and geolocation-based routing to ensure fast response times.
• When Kinsta CDN is enabled, all static content (such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files) is loaded through Kinsta CDN. This took care of most of my issues with long load time for image-heavy content and all the extra CSS that is added by the Divi theme.
  
• Kinsta has 28 data centers which it lets customers choose from. This is a very unique feature that I will likely adjust over time, so that regions of the world with the highest traffic can access my content with the lowest latency speed possible.

My website speed before Kinsta:

My website speed after Kinsta:

One of the major limitations of traditional shared hosting providers is that they cannot handle any surges in traffic.

So if you are using a shared hosting platform, such as Bluehost or Siteground, your website might be able to handle a moderate amount of traffic, when evenly spread out throughout the month. However, should your site experience a bump in traffic, due to a viral article, media reference, or even just a quick rise in Google search engine results pages, your site will likely take excessive amounts of time to load or crash altogether.

There is really no worry about traffic surges with Kinsta. Kinsta offers highly scalable infrastructure, at a moderate price point. Yes, you pay more than you would using shared hosting, but you unlock unlimited upside should your site experience surges in traffic, a feature that is normally reserved for extremely high paying clients.

Kinsta charges various overage fees if you have massive spikes, but its site infrastructure will be able to handle the traffic and uptime is guaranteed.

Kinsta provides daily automatic WordPress backups, as well as system-generated backups for all sites on your account. These backups, along with your manual backups, are available as restore points on the MyKinsta dashboard. You can even pay extra for hourly backups, which have saved me enormous amounts of time fixing issues with my website or retrieving unsaved blog post information.

If you make a mistake or notice something strange occurring on your website, you can easily roll back your website to a previous version within minutes.

While there are a number of WordPress plugins that can help backup your website, few work as well as Kinsta’s service.

Given Kinsta’s work with large companies and web developers managing hundreds of websites, I was worried that Kinsta would be too complex for “the average” WordPress user like myself. However I could not have been more wrong about this. Kinsta’s dashboards, menus, settings, and knowledge-base is extremely detailed and breaks down technically complex details into digestible tidbits.

It is far more usable and easy to navigate than most of WordPress or the dated and clunky looking cPanel dashboard, which is intimidating to many people creating their first website. Not only is Kinsta far more powerful than most hosting tools, but it is probably the most user friendly dashboard of any hosting service.

Every detail about your website is displayed in a clear and organized dashboard, which makes tracking your website’s analytics very straightforward.

This is probably one of the features that surprised me the most, as customer service reps for website hosting platforms/WordPress sites are typically terrible. Kinsta doesn’t actually have any “traditional” customer support reps.

Their team is comprised of the best Linux engineers and WordPress developers. This means fewer frustrations, less bouncing around, and ensures you get your problems resolved fast. I have rarely encountered a problem that one of their WordPress experts cannot fix on the spot! They are also available 24/7, which I have personally utilized while making late-night updates to my website.