Kinsta is pricey but an amazing performance and security boost for every penny you pay!
September 21, 2021

Kinsta is pricey but an amazing performance and security boost for every penny you pay!

Shane Bill | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Kinsta

Kinsta is presently being used in several of our clients systems for their entire organization. Kinsta provides a solid and fast web hosting solution that lets you ensure that you can simply focus on getting your website right while the hosting is solid. I honestly have never had any issues, and in the times that I have the support staff have been really responsive.
  • All websites are managed from one dashboard
  • Provide secure hosting
  • Easy-to-use dev site deployment
  • Contributes to the open-source community through honest articles
  • No email solution provide resulting in having to find some other solution
  • Some clients find the price point difficult
  • Some clients find the lack of phone support difficult (although we find their online support great)
  • Staging deployment
  • High Google Page speed ratings (for higher rankings)
  • Good technical support
  • Easy to create backups
  • SSL Support
  • E-commerce optimizations
  • Definitely with some of our clients we have seen a direct positive impact in their ability to receive better ratings
  • We have seen with many clients the ability to perform staging changes which are later deployed on the live site
Both of these two competitors provide different options in terms of comparison to Kinsta. EasyWP is a cheaper option but I have found with shared hosting that our company has spent way more time debugging strange issues b/c of the limitations of shared hosting. We are either told that we can't fix the issue and/or that we need to add certain configurations that don't always result in great performance or resolving the issue. This ends up costing our client more and in the end it would have been better to use Kinsta.

In terms of WP Engine they provide a great service, but I find that their support isn't as great as Kinsta's. I also feel that while they have more range of price points, unlike Kinsta, they don't necessary offer every client to have their site up in a cloud-based service. This can result in varying results in terms of performance and ratings. Since I am also really passionate about Wordpress being open-source I find that Kinsta is much more invested in helping the community know how to tweak and/or enhance their website with different tools and plugins than WP Engine.

Do you think Kinsta delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Kinsta's feature set?

Yes

Did Kinsta live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Kinsta go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Kinsta again?

Yes

If your WP site requires fast and secure performance then I think that Kinsta would be a good bet. They provide a lot of performance tweaks to suit most needs. I also really appreciate the ease of throwing up a staging site in a matter of minutes to test out certain features. They also provide their sites on a cloud-based infrastructure so this ensures that you will get great Google Page speed ratings.

Using Kinsta

1 - The present person working with Kinsta is a software engineer whose primary role is to either tweak existing Kinsta clients websites and/or analyze existing clients needs to determine if Kinsta is a good match. So far, most of our clients have been extremely satisfied with our analysis and also the services provided by Kinsta.
1 - Basic IT knowledge and also Wordpress knowledge. But the backend is extremely user friendly and unless the person requires more technical modifications, which doesn't happen that often we think that someone with basic Wordpress skills could easily manage a Kinsta hosting.
  • Fast hosting
  • Hosting that allows for more scalability due to higher page hits and higher demands (increased traffic)
  • Reasonable and easy interface for providing backups and security
  • Shared hosting between small not-for-profits through on Kinsta account
  • Woocommerce deployment
  • CDN deployment
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.

Evaluating Kinsta and Competitors

Yes - They replaced a previous hosting of BlueHost that our client was previously on and had constant scalability issues (not to mention issues getting the site to just work). As they began to increase in popularity the site on Bluehost just couldn't handle the load.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
The product features were certainly a factor, and the fact that they really have and offer an extremely secure system to their clients without a cost on your performance! Their reputation for a great product is also extremely evident!
Certainly, I think assessing long term needs with our clients at the start is essential. Also, determine their pricing needs alongside these long term goals. I think that sometimes we tend to shoot for a cheap solution because this might save money, but in the long run it has cost our clients so much more in the long run unfortunatley.

Kinsta Implementation

Not really it's a really easy to use system and straightforward!
Yes - First we determine if the clients website had plugins that weren't supported by Kinsta, which are clearly defined on their website. Then we performed a migration, modified the DNS entries, and made the site live. Afterwards, we were able to setup other configurations to enhance speed, etc.
Change management was minimal
  • Time required to determine which plugins would be supportted
  • Appropriate timing for a migration to their services / Downtime

Kinsta Training

There is plenty of documentation on their website and given the amazing dashboard UX I didn't really need training.

Configuring Kinsta

There are some plugins that Kinsta doesn't allow to be installed. When deciding to migrate to their system it's important to be aware of these plugins and either remove them or find alternatives.
There are some plugins that Kinsta doesn't allow to be installed. When deciding to migrate to their system it's important to be aware of these plugins and either remove them or find alternatives. We would also recommend using their list of suggest plugins for ANY Wordpress website because they are heavily researched. They also provide tools that increase performance, including caching, redis, and CDN.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code

Kinsta Support

The few times we needed to contact support they were extremely responsive and helpful (almost above and beyond the call of support)
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
No, none of my clients had the budget for this.

Using Kinsta

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!
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Migration of websites
  • Modifications of existing website
  • Analytics

Kinsta Reliability

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

Integrating Kinsta

  • Cloudflare integration
  • SSL certificates
  • Membership based system
It was not difficult to integrate the first systems as they are easily provided through Kinsta. A membership-based system required that we thoroughly researched which plugins could be supported on Kinsta and then used those to integrate within our WP site. They also have recommendations in terms of the how many PHP workers should be used on such sites.
  • Woocommerce
  • Learning Management System
Some of our clients have an interest in setting up future Woocommerce and LMS systems, which are supported by Kinsta. They have recommendations on how to appropriately manage such sites given that a lot of content cannot be cached properly which is great!
  • File import/export
  • Javascript widgets
Make sure to check the Kinsta documentations and knowledge base to ensure that you are choosing appropriate plugins that they support. They also include advice on what kind of plan you should use depending on what goal you have which I find really useful!