Kinsta Review (2023) – The Key Pros & Cons Of Kinsta Hosting

Considering Kinsta for hosting your WordPress website? In this Kinsta review, I’ll take a look at the key pros and cons of Kinsta’s hosting to help you decide if it would work for you.

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What Is Kinsta?

Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting provider that’s built on the Google Cloud Platform. 

The company was founded in 2013 and now hosts over 24,000 clients across 128 different countries. Kinsta has 34 data centers and an uptime of 99.9%. The company has a strong focus on fast server configuration and performance. 

Kinsta Plans & Pricing

While not the cheapest option, Kinsta definitely excels in terms of variety of hosting packages. From basic plans to more advanced enterprise plans, Kinsta is able to host any type of WordPress site (big or small). 

To be exact, Kinsta offers two standard plans, four business plans and four enterprise level plans. The difference in plans comes down to the number of websites you can host and the amount of resources you get (e.g. storage space, traffic limits). 

Here’s a breakdown of all Kinsta’s hosting plans:

For most, the Starter plan will be a good start. Their Starter plan:

• Hosts a single WordPress site
• Up to 25,000 monthly visits
• 10 GB of storage space
• 100 GB of free CDN

Don’t forget Kinsta offers two months free for paying your hosting bill in full for the entire year. 

To give you an idea of where Kinsta’s price stands, let’s bring up their competitors WPX Hosting and WP Engine. 

	Kinsta	WPX Hosting	WP Engine
Price:	$35	$24.99	$20
WordPress Installs:	1	5	1
Visits/Bandwidth:	25,000 (Visits)	200 GB (Bandwidth)	25,000 (Visits) 50 GB (Bandwidth)
Disk Space:	10 GB	15 GB	10 GB

Keep in mind though, Kinsta charges overage fees for going over visits, disk space, CDN and bandwidth (Legacy plans only). The overage fees are:

• Visits: $1 per 1,000 in additional visits
• Disk Space: $2 for each additional gigabyte
• Content Delivery Network (CDN): $0.10 for each additional gigabyte
• Bandwidth (Legacy plans only): $1 for each additional gigabyte 

I’m not a big fan of overage fees because most websites may only have a temporary surge in traffic or resources used. I’d like to see Kinsta waive any overage fees if it’s not an ongoing issue. Or at least, ask that you upgrade to a larger plan instead of charging overage fees. However, in some cases, the larger plan can cost more than what you’d incur in overage fees. 

Fortunately, Kinsta does have a monthly resource usage chart that tracks visits, CDN, disk space and number of sites hosted. Moreover, Kinsta will send you a notification as you approach specific levels of usage. 

Lastly, Kinsta also offers a 30-day money back guarantee if you change your mind or decide their hosting isn’t good for your website. 

✅ Kinsta Pros

These are the pros of hosting a WordPress website with Kinsta:

1. Kinsta Hosting Is Fast

Speed, speed and speed. We all want it for our sites and Google wants it for SEO.

You’re in luck. Kinsta uses the Google Cloud Platform so speed isn’t a problem here. During our hosting speed test, Kinsta performed very well. Average site load times are typically between 445ms and 660ms. Google, for one, will love that for your optimization score.

In fact, most of Kinsta’s new clients see a performance improvement between 30% to 200%. Obviously, many of these clients are coming over from shared hosting providers such as SiteGround.

Moreover, Kinsta offers a near perfect SLA backed 99.9% uptime guarantee.

I don’t usually like to use speed as a pro because each website is unique and uses different resources. However, when it comes to speed, Kinsta is truly in a league of its own. So, if speed is something that you need, Kinsta is your host.

2. Data Centers Powered By Google Cloud Platform

Kinsta has 35 data centers across the globe that you can choose from. This is very important because it allows you to place your website in a geographical location that’s closest to your visitors. By doing this, it usually results in faster website speed. 

Here are all the data center locations:

• Changhua County, Taiwan (Asia)
• Hong Kong (Asia)
• Tokyo, Japan (Asia)
• Osaka, Japan (Asia)
• Seoul, South Korea (Asia)
• Mumbai, India (Asia)
• Delhi, India (Asia)
• Jurong West, Singapore (Asia)
• Jakarta, Indonesia (Asia)
• Sydney, Australia 
• Melbourne, Australia
• Warsaw, Poland (Europe)
• Hamina, Finland (Europe)
• Madrid, Spain (Europe)
• St. Ghislain, Belgium (Europe)
• London, United Kingdom (Europe)
• Frankfurt, Germany (Europe)
• Eemshaven, Netherlands (Europe)
• Zurich, Switzerland (Europe)
• Milan, Italy (Europe)
• Paris, France (Europe)
• Tel Aviv, Israel (Europe) 
• Montréal, Canada 
• Toronto, Canada
• São Paulo, Brazil (South America) 
• Santiago, Chile (South America) 
• Council Bluffs, Iowa (USA) 
• Moncks Corner, South Carolina (USA) 
• Ashburn, Virginia (USA) 
• Columbus, Ohio (USA)
• Dallas, Texas (USA)
• The Dalles, Oregon (USA)
• Los Angeles, California (USA)
• Salt Lake City, Utah (USA)
• Las Vegas, Nevada (USA)

More data centers are planned to be added in the future. 

Moreover, Kinsta uses CDN through Cloudflare, which has a network that’s in 200 cities across 100 countries. 

3. Kinsta Hosting Is (Nearly) Hands-Off

Managed WordPress hosting is just that. Like the name suggests, this type of hosting “manages or automates” many things that a shared web hosting provider doesn’t. It’s made for you to spend less time worrying about your site, and give you more time growing it instead. 

Kinsta has a wide range of features to help keep an optimized environment so that you can improve your website without worrying about technical issues. 

Useful site management tools include:

Try Kinsta For Free
Use Kinsta’s demo account to test out their hosting dashboard free for 60 days. You just won’t be able to push a site live. A credit card is not needed. 

4. Kinsta Offers 10 Different Hosting Plans

Kinsta offers 10 different hosting plans which makes it easy to find a plan that fits your needs. Each plan has a set number of resources (e.g. installs, visits, disk space) so be sure to match it up to your needs as close as possible to avoid any overages. Moreover, Kinsta offers higher Enterprise plans for larger agencies and enterprises. 

Kinsta has a simple process for upgrading and downgrading between plans. 

Having more plan selections is a plus because you can go with a smaller plan in the beginning and upgrade to a larger plan as your website grows. 

5. Free Website Migrations

If you already have a WordPress website with another web host (any host), Kinsta migration experts will transfer it for free. This service transfers the entire WordPress website (e.g. databases, content, etc.) with little to no downtime. The entire process is completed within 24-48 hours, which is a fast turnaround. 

Kinsta offers unlimited website migrations, so you can transfer as many websites as you need, free of charge. 

To request a free website migration, login to your MyKinsta dashboard, add a site and then select “request migration” from the dropdown. 

6. Powerful Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Kinsta includes Cloudflare’s CDN with all of its hosting plans. This means that you’ll be able to use a premium CDN at no additional cost. 

The benefits of Kinsta’s CDN are:

• HTTP/3 support (Kinsta’s CDN will automatically fall back to HTTP/2 if browser doesn’t support HTTP/3).
• Cached assets will be server from primary domain instead of a secondary CDN domain.
• The option to enable code minification to remove unnecessary elements from JavaScript and CSS files. 

Alternatively, you can disable Kinsta’s CDN and use your own, if need be. 

7. Multilingual Support

Unlike many other hosting providers, Kinsta offers a multilingual support and sales department. Kinsta’s support team is available in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. 

On the other hand, their sales department takes it a step further by offering two additional languages: Japanese and Dutch. 

Moreover, MyKinsta dashboard and the Kinsta homepage can be translated to English, Italian, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, and Danish. 

Considering they have customers all over the world, it’s nice to see that Kinsta is looking out for the needs of its’ customers. Other web hosts should take notes. 

8. Support Is Incredibly Fast

Support is something I always look at when trusting someone with my business. This being said, Kinsta’s support is beyond amazing.

To put this in perspective, Kinsta’s support department handles about 150,000 support requests per year. Their average response time is 1 minute and 22 seconds, which is a little slower than WPX Hosting. The average positive (or satisfaction) rating was around 97%. That’s some crazy numbers.

How does Kinsta do this you ask? 

Kinsta frequently hires additional support engineers to ensure prompt response times to customers across the globe. 

Moreover, the support department is very knowledgeable and knows all the ins and outs of WordPress. Their support department can be reached via phone, e-mail ticketing, chat and text messaging.

I can’t find a lot of other web hosts that offer support via standard text messaging.

❌ Kinsta Cons

While Kinsta is without a doubt one of the best managed WordPress hosting providers, there are obviously some important cons that you should consider:

1. Some Plugins Are Prohibited

Kinsta prohibits the use of certain plugins because according to them, they will not work properly with their hosting services.

More specifically, Kinsta doesn’t allow caching, backup, or related posts plugins. 

In their defense, Kinsta is already optimized for high performance, reliability and security, so there may not be a real need to actually use those plugins anyways. 

However, it’s obviously a deal breaker if you have a plugin that you want to use in one of those categories. 

2. Uploading Files To Website

Kinsta has one option to connect to your WordPress website via Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). While this method keeps your data safe and encrypted, it requires the use of an SFTP client like FileZilla and Cyberduck. 

Moreover, the max file size to upload is 2 MB, which is still fairly large for a website file.

So if you’re coming over from a web host that allowed you to upload and edit site files using the hosting dashboard, you’ll probably find this a bit annoying. It’s not difficult to learn but the initial setup may have a slight learning curve. 

3. Kinsta Is Expensive

No matter how you measure it – by WordPress installs, allocated storage, traffic – Kinsta is going to be competitive but an expensive option.

For example, Kinsta’s Starter plan costs $35 per month, which hosts a single WordPress website. This plan limits your website to 25,000 visits and 10 GB of disk space each month.

A website with somewhat normal traffic will easily surpass those limitations. Their next plan isn’t any better, costing you $70 per month for two WordPress websites (still $35 per website, though). However, the monthly visits and disk space are 50,000 and 20 GB respectively. Although if you end up hosting two websites, you run into the same problem of easily surpassing those limitations.

To put things in perspective, their close competitor WPX Hosting costs $24.99 for five WordPress websites (about $5 per site), 15 GB of storage and 200 GB of bandwidth.

Now, in no way am I saying forget about Kinsta and go right to WPX Hosting (see this WPX Hosting Review). Each host has its’ strengths and weaknesses. Just something to thing about when making a decision.

4. Slight Limitations

Much like most other managed WordPress hosting providers, Kinsta implements limits or “caps” on website visits, storage space and WordPress installs. If you run a rapidly growing website, you’ll quickly realize how visits, storage and bandwidth needs escalate.

Depending on the plan selected, Kinsta has the following limitations (this is a range from cheapest plan to most expensive plan):

• WordPress Installs: 1 to 150 installs
• Monthly Visits: 25K to 2.5M
• Disk Space: 10 GB to 250 GB

Again, this is a disadvantage of most hosting providers, not just Kinsta. That’s why is important to compare apples to apples.

Kinsta Review Conclusion

In comparison to other managed WordPress hosting providers, Kinsta is very competitive. This is especially true when comparing hosting speed. A typical WordPress website hosted by Kinsta loads between 445ms and 660ms.

Kinsta has a diverse plan selection ranging from $35 per month to $1650 per month. Installing WordPress with Kinsta is a breeze. Their unlimited free website migrations will come in handy if you already have an existing WordPress website that’s hosted elsewhere.

If you’re ready to take advantage of the 35 data centers powered by Google Cloud, 99.9% guaranteed uptime, and multilingual support options, Kinsta is a solid choice in the world of managed WordPress hosting.

Find out more about Kinsta hosting…

However, if you find Kinsta is expensive or you don’t need the power of high-performance managed WordPress hosting, I’d recommend a high-quality shared hosting provider like SiteGround or InMotion Hosting. You’d probably find a better value out of those providers.

Kinsta Review: FAQS