Kinsta review – 6 months of use, is it the best Managed WordPress hosting?

All right, guys, I have such a big treat for you guys today. As you know, I am a huge fan of WordPress and I have used WordPress for many, many years with WordPress to be able to run it. You need a hosting platform and there are a ton of options out there. You know that already.

I started by using very generic WordPress hostings, and lately I found out that there’s something called managed WordPress hostings and oh my God, that is amazing. It will take your WordPress to a next level in terms of speed. It’s so fast in terms of support, it’s perfect. And today I will take you through a product called Kinsta let’s get started.

I have been using it for around six months now and now I thought it’s time to give my review on Kinsta, tell a little bit about what it is, what I have experienced and why I maybe like it or not. Let’s dig into it.

So Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting, and how it differs from a normal hosting is that it only focuses on WordPress. A normal hosting platform can host everything as long as you just keep the languages within what they support, which is basically everything. Whereas Kinsta only focuses on WordPress and it has its cons and pros, I will explain just in a second. Kinsta is known for their loading time ,and they also brand themselves as being the fastest managed WordPress hosting.

I will show my test where I tested them up against their competitors so you can see for yourself whether they are correct or not. All right.

Some of the pros, by using a managed WordPress hosting is that you get an environment where you completely get rid of have to be able to code. You can do everything either within their dashboard or within your WordPress hosting. And when you contact their support, you know, 100 percent that they know how to fix your WordPress problems because it’s basically WordPress experts you are chatting with. And that’s also why that I have experienced that my problems has gone away by within a few minutes, every single time. It’s fantastic.

Their loading time. As you can see here. What I did was I took one website and then I tested this website on five different locations everywhere, from Australia to London to the United States of America. And in general, a website hosted on Kinsta, I have to say it’s the same website, not the same URL, the same website. So it’s the same package that the browser catches and needs to load. At Kinsta it loaded in average 1.6 seconds of these five locations.

So by my test they are correct, saying that they are the fastest loading managed WordPress hosting. On a second place we have WP Engine. I personally thought the WP engine would be number one. They have always been so powerful in this game, but Kinsta has just taken over. It’s so good to see. But WP Engine loads at the same time as Flywheel in average one point nine seconds. The reason why WP Engine is above is because of some milliseconds.

But yeah flywheel on a third place, which is where I thought they would be, and then Presslabs on a fourth place. I’m a bit surprised they’re not further behind. They are only 2.0 seconds in average on the five different locations. So they’re definitely also a competitor to all this. They do, however, differs. But let’s dig in to Kinsta’s features because Kinsta has servers in 24 locations. This means that when you create your website, you can choose between 24 locations and it’s very important that you choose the server closest to your audience.

If you’re European by law, you need to choose to place your data in a server in Europe, but other than that you can choose whatever you want. Furthermore, then they have a staging area.

I love this and I use it so much. Every time I have to update a plugin or I have to do some changes in the design that might break my website.

What I do is I clone my live website to a staging area and then I basically just work on it there and then I can do whatever I want and nothing will happen to my live website. I can completely crash it and nothing will happen by working with this. And it makes me stand out more professional as my live website is never, ever down. It’s always up. Furthermore, Kinsta takes care of the more boring stuff like backups. You know, we need to take care of backups, but we hardly never do.

But Kinsta has gotten you back here. Then they give you a free CDN, which. Is perfect, a free CDN makes it possible for you to load your website fast wherever you are in the world because a CDN and make sure that the server, there is closest to the visitor is the one where your website is loaded for this means just to explain it briefly. Your website is put on a ton of different servers in the world. And if a guy from the United States of America visits your website, then the closest server to him in the United States of America will be the one loading your website.

But if a girl in Australia goes to your website, then it’s a different server that’s loading your website. Last but not least, they have Analytics on your website where you can see everything about how your server is performing to the visitors that comes to your website. I am in Kinsta here for you to see their dashboard and their are different graphs.

And furthermore. So just to show you briefly at my website here, I can see my visits, then I can see how much data transfer and so on and so on. They have a resource center. What’s important for you to see is sites, Kinsta DNS and Analytics. Kinsta has publicly said that they are making an integration to Cloudflare. Cloudflare is the fastest DNS in the world. So it’s so good news to hear this and it will be coming within the next few months.

Analytics, as mentioned in here, you can see everything from what takes a lot of requests from your website. Here you can see its often images. You can see how your website is performing in terms of PHP and MySQL. And your throughput. This is more technical. I will not dig into that. You can see the response times, how it’s going here, how many errors you have on your website this is important for SEO to go through this and much more.

When I go into my website, you can see some different details here.

I have my environment up here where I can choose between the staging and the live in my environment. As I mentioned earlier, the staging environment makes it possible for me to work on whatever I want without I have to fear that I’m breaking anything.

Then you have some different tools out here.

Here you can see that they have site cache for you. It’s another layer of cache that just makes it faster for you to work with your website. Then they have different features, like if you experience an error, you just can’t fix it. Maybe a restart will fix it. And what I like really like is you can easily change the PHP version. PHP 8 just came out. It’s up to 60 times faster than PHP 7. So I would definitely recommend you taking a look at that.

However, a lot of plugins are not ready for PHP 8. So here a staging environment would be a perfect option to try to on the staging environment. Update your PHP version to see whether or not your website is breaking. Last but not least, they have a Kinsta APM. Kinsta APM I have not enabled on my live environment as it takes resources from the server, but here you can basically see what plugins are using a lot of resources from your server so you can either contact the plugin developers to make them fix that so your website can go faster again.

Last but not least, the Kinsta CDN. It’s super easy to set up. You basically just enable it. Then you have your DNS zone which you plug into. If you’re using a cache plugin. Otherwise, Kinsta actually enables this on your website automatically. Furthermore, they have recently released a tool for you. This tool is called DevKinsta and basically it makes it possible for you to work with your WordPress website locally on your computer.

What that means is you get a program down on your computer, whether you’re using Mac or Windows, it supports both. And then basically you have your WordPress website to work down there on your computer.

It makes it faster as it doesn’t have to load any resources online. And again, it’s just an extra layer of security. It’s like a test environment for your test environment. As I see often people use the test environment to build articles. And furthermore and then they push those articles to the production environment, which is also why a test environment before the test environment is great if you have changes you don’t want to ruin. Just to a quick note on the test environment, if you have comments or you have subscribers or you have data on your production environment, you don’t have on your staging environment, make sure to copy this data to your staging environment.

Otherwise, when you merge those two environments together, the stage environment, which is your test environment, will override your production environment and you will lose all the data. I will say DevKinsta, I have been working briefly with it and I will make another video about this, but DevKinsta it takes too much to install, if you ask me it. It requires a lot of other programs to run for this to run, whereas Flywheel, which we took a look at earlier.

They have developed a tool called Local WP, and all it requires is Local WP, then you can basically work with your website and I think it’s much easier in that tool to basically just work with your website. It’s so easy to set it up to work with it and further. But I will dig into this in another video. The support, I mentioned it briefly. Their support is so, so good at Kinsta. I took a look at their support page and they claim to have 97 percent cases closed as success, which means three percent they couldn’t solve.

They usually respond within 15 seconds or less. They mention one minute and 27 seconds on the website, but based on my test, I did 10 support tickets where I wrote in their live chat, and they in the average responded within 15 seconds. Often they respond within two seconds. It’s very great.

And all my cases has always been solved. They say they solve a case on average between on 39 minutes. I think my was solved in an average on 12 minutes. So of course some issues can take longer time.

But you really know when you chat with these guys that they know what they’re talking about, it’s really, really great.

So the competitors to Kinsta, as you also saw in the loading tab, is WP Engine, Flywheel and Presslabs. WP Engine and Flywheel, are very, very similar to Kinsta. Presslabs differs a bit in the functionality that I might dig into in another video, but Flywheel. Sorry. Presslabs is also a platform that just loads slower than Kinsta. It’s a fact we saw that.

Pricing. So when you talk about managed WordPress hosting, it’s often more expensive than normal hosting.

The reason why is they only support WordPress. They only have experts in WordPress. They only focus on WordPress. They don’t have this wide palette of different things they support and they are maybe 10 percent expert in everything. They are 100 percent expert in WordPress. And I have never experienced they couldn’t answer a question. That’s also why you see the plans can be a little steep when you compare to hosting. However, I don’t think it’s enormous. Some of the pros also by using managed WordPress hosting, as mentioned earlier, is that you just get a server that’s 100 percent optimised to run WordPress.

It’s not optimised to run all different types of CMS systems or different programming languages. It is optimised only to run WordPress. Kinsta, in their pricing plans, differs on five different elements. Here you can see 4 them, how many WordPress sites, how many visits per month, how much disk space you get, and then all of them you get free SSL and CDN. One more thing that you have to notice when you take a look at their pricing is the different amount of PHP engines.

As you can see here I am on the pricing plan. And as I have mentioned, some of the plans here they have, wordPress installs at WordPress websites, the monthly visits, how much space and the CDN, and you can see they have a lot of more plans, then they have premium migration’s, which means that if you have a website already, they will migrate it for you to the Kinsta service, completely free. But the one you need to notice is down here.

It’s called PHP workers, the more PHP workers you have, the more powerful is your server, often two is enough. If you’re running a Webshop, I would recommend you going with business one at least. But I think you can always see the more visitors you get, the more you actually need to upgrade your server to be able to still maintain a great loading time.

OK, guys, we have now been through all of Kinsta, and you probably think, wow, this is amazing. However, there are cons by using Kinsta and I’ll explain some of them right now. When you push your staging environment to your production environment, that means your test environments to your live environment, then you have to push everything.

You cannot take bits and pieces and push to the production environment. That means, for instance, if you have comments on blog posts on your production environment, then when you push a staging environment to your production is going to overwrite. And if those comments are not both places, you’re going to have a problem. Furthermore, using a managed WordPress hosting means a bit higher prices than you’re used to. The reason why is because they are only there for WordPress.

If you’re using a generic web hosting, they need to be able to support everything, which means they’re not expert within WordPress.

They don’t spend resources. And the amount of time on getting expert in WordPress, they need to know everything, but only a little bit.

Kinsta, furthermore, doesn’t have a domain provider or an email hosting, so you need to have that elsewhere. Last but not least, they do not have unlimited space and they do not have unlimited visitors. What that means for you is that when you’re on a plan, you have a certain amount of visitors there are in that plan that can visit your website. If you get more visitors, you have to pay extra. Remember that. And here in the end plugins, they do not allow all types of plugins because Kinsta have their own cache plugin, which means that some plugins will conflict with this.

And that’s why some plugins are not allowed to use when you’re hosting with Kinsta you should check this out before choosing whether you want to use Kinsta or not.

All right, guys, thank you for watching. Please like and comment the video for the YouTube algorithm, let’s catch up on the next one.