Kinsta vs. WP Engine

Kinsta is perfect if you host with WordPress, which means the team there totally understands every aspect of the CMS and they even suggested changes to the way we host subdomains I hadn’t thought of before. As far as I know, they don’t offer hosting for non-Wordpress websites.

New users to WordPress can rejoice with a very hands-off hosting approach. If 100% uptime is not essential, you can get breakneck speeds with minimal tinkering using their platform. If you need to get up and running quickly and scale as required, the cost-benefit is here, although you need to pay a lot to get the most from it.

Incentivized

• Developer friendly; WP-CLI; SSH access
• Amazing support - I never have to wait more than a minute or two to get a response!
• Kinsta is also willing to troubleshoot issues that are not their own. They don't just say "It's not our problem" without helping to debug the issue.

Incentivized

• I love the database backups and how quickly & easy it is to restore from an old backup point. This gives me & my clients confidence that any change can be rolled back.
• The built in caching & CDN mean that I have to spend less time worrying about the speed of the server & site. The caching has some side-effects that take getting used to (on-page dynamic PHP code sometimes needs to be moved to API endpoints), but this is true for most caching systems.
• They have really good support for multiple environments. It's very easy to have separate production & staging environments. It's also very simple to deploy from staging to production, making product launches and large scale website copy changes much easier to coordinate.

Incentivized

• The ability to restore database only or files only (selection) from a backup
• Only single staging environments are offered and it would be good to have multiple
• More control over Cloudflare features within the Kinsta control panel

Incentivized

• The user interface is not very intuitive, which means new staff members require more training than I'd like.
• The way they manage production/development servers and FTP access is somewhere between nebulous and tragically unique.
• Their premium pricing is surely worthwhile, but it is significantly higher than virtually all of their competitors, without much obvious distinction in feature sets.
• Some very basic features like spinning up a second instance require a PHONE CALL to their BILLING department to enable. What is this, 1990?

Incentivized

This is an extremely solid hosting product that I have yet to find clients who use it disappointed. I have had clients move from other competitors several times in search of something more reliable and scalable but not after they moved to Kinsta.

Incentivized

I was in a situation where I had to bolt Wordpress on to an existing infrastructure that could not support it. If I ever end up in that situation again, please kill me. Other than that reasonably common use case, I don't think it offers a lot of value over robust shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated servers.

Their dashboard is really well layed out and simple to use for most users. I also really appreciate the fact that our clients are able to collaborate with us by granting us access. Their site migration tool is straightforward and painless to use as well!

Incentivized

From the onboarding and in the days afterward, it was very easy to get into the platform and begin creating important websites and configuring user options. The interface is easy to navigate, and the platform pages load quickly. Since the platform is built for Word plus press, it has features including backup, staging, maintenance mode, and direct WP-Admin login to make configuration and site management faster. We have never had any issues on the billing side of the account.

Incentivized

We never had any major downtimes with our service, and I believe that's because it's based in a cloud-based network so therefore our system is being shared amongst multiple points.

Incentivized

As mentioned before the performance was amazing and pages were loading quickly. They also provide other tools to help you improve further.

Incentivized

They are quick to respond, very knowledgeable and I don't have to be escalated to get my problems resolved quickly. They have an efficient chat system that allows for support requests to be handled quickly and easily picked up by another specialist if the need arises. They are always there when I need them.

Incentivized

Support is generally great. Enterprise support is fantastic, with little to no wait times. I find that chat support can almost always take care of the problem without escalating to a ticket for a higher level of troubleshooting. The chat support for many other hosting providers can only handle basic issues. This is a big bonus for us to get quick and helpful answers.

Incentivized

Not really it's a really easy to use system and straightforward!

Incentivized

Whilst SiteGround can be cheaper, it uses a lower-tier Google Cloud server infrastructure for hosting compared to Kinsta. SiteGround's support is inferior (it used to be very good) and the new SiteGround UI is not as easy to use or as intuitive as Kinsta. SiteGround also does not offer as many server-side tools.

Incentivized

For Acquia and AEM the major differentiator was the cost for WPEngine was significantly lower and we could use the more common WordPress CMS. AEM is better for large marketing sites that integrate with the Abobe Marketing Cloud and we didn't feel we could support Drupal on Acquia. AWS EC2 is a viable option if you are going to self support and maintain your own WordPress experts. We felt that the value from WPEngine was they handled the support and the WordPress security patches and knowledge beyond simple theme usage. Pantheon was the closest in matching but we felt with our large installs that the hosting model for WPEngine was more cost-effective than the Container architecture for Pantheon

Incentivized

We worked with clients who have major surges of visitor hits on a Buddhist website, and Kinsta was definitely up to the job. They were able to handle this and still provide excellent performance. As well, it was easy to track down other barriers for Google Ratings using their system to further improve the performance of these clients.

Incentivized

• Our website was up and running in less than a day
• Despite not doing a huge advertising drive yet (we're still not ready at the moment), we've noticed a steady increase of organic visitors to the site, at least by 30%, which still isn't a lot in overall numbers at the moment, but that is expected
• Cost is higher, so we've had to separate a budget just for Kinsta

Incentivized

• Positive: We've been able to scale up more easily as adding new sites has been easier.
• Positive: The load speed improvements we saw were immediate and have not let up.
• Negative: Adding advanced security and other tools to a multiple sites is expensive.

Incentivized