We have looked inside one of the best premium WordPress hosting providers in the world, Kinsta.

Yes, it is EXPENSIVE. But you won’t regret after seeing its performance.

It is one of our most anticipated managed WordPress hosting reviews.

And Kinsta didn’t fail us. That’s why we are hosting our site on it.

Although there are other managed WordPress hostings (A2, DreamPress) impressed us. BUT we have our reasons. We will discuss what hosting fits for whom someday.

Before we start let us tell you the KEY things that make actually the difference. CDN and Google Cloud Platform.

Kinsta teamed up with KeyCDN and used Google cloud computing platform to run their services on cutting-edge technology.

These two collaborations actually make WordPress site a blazing fast.

We will show you the page speed results before and after activating the CDN.

Let’s get into our review criteria one by one.

Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting Plan and Features

There are 4 types of hosting plans- Starter, Pro, Business, Enterprise. AND custom hosting.

Business and Enterprise plans have sub plans like Business 1 Business 2 etc.

We have purchased the starter plan to check out its performance.

Price is expensive BUT it’s too good. We will tell you our impression in the Pricing section.

The main features of CDN and Google cloud computing platform come with every plan. There is no discrimination.

The actual difference between all plans is WordPress installs, storage, number of visitors, CDN bandwidth, free migration, and other features.

Our starter plan has 5 GB SSD storage which fine for a single website. Also, the backups and staging files are excluded from the total disk calculation.

According to Kinsta

All of our servers utilize lightning-fast persistent SSD storage on Google Cloud Platform with built-in redundancy to ensure data integrity. Backups and staging environments are excluded from total disk calculation.

The starter plan’s monthly visitors are limited to 20k. If you are running a portfolio or a small blog, the fixed visitor numbers will be enough.

Although you can buy if you hit your plan visitors’ capability for $1 / 1,000 visits which is reasonable.

With every plan, you can choose a data center from 20 different locations in the world. Also these locations can mirror your site data when you activate CDN feature.

Regarding CDN, the Kinsta and KeyCDN partnered up to boost up delivery of your assets (images, JS, CSS) around the world. With the starter plan, we got 50 GB CDN bandwidth. Cool for the small site!

Now, the most important feat of Kinsta, Google Cloud Platform, which comes with every plan. It will ensure your website data security and of course, the speed. Cause Google Cloud is the top tier cloud computing platform in the universe.

Free SSL installed on every plan. Besides, you can import your custom SSL cert in Kinsta.

You can select the PHP version. The PHP 5.6, 7, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 are available within the MyKinsta dashboard. By default, it has PHP 7 activated.

There are automatic and manual options. And the backup data is not calculated to its SSD storage threshold limit.

For the developers who love the command line, there is SSH activated so it allows you to use WP-CLI, Composer, and Git to automate your workflow.

Inside the Kinsta Hosting Dashboard

Kinsta is running on the Google cloud platform which is well-configured with Nginx, LXD containers, PHP 7.3, and MariaDB for lightning speed.

Let’s have some looks into the hosting environments.

In hosting dashboard default page you will see summary of Visitors, Site resource usage, Billing etc.

Then in Sites tabs, you see the details about your website.

For the first time when you set up the site, you will be opted to select a data center. we have selected Mumbai, India. It’s better to select the nearest location.

You don’t need a domain first. Your site can be installed on one of Kinsta’s subdomain. When the site will go live, you just need to perform setup in Kinsta DNS. Kinsta is one of the best premium DNS service provider.

You will see Kinsta CDN option to activate or deactivate it. After activating, it takes a few minutes to complete the CDN set up. Then could take a couple of hours to be effective. Cause in this meantime your site data will be mirrored to data centers around the globe.

You can take back up. Generally, Kinsta takes backup every day. Besides, you can make backup manually.

Regarding the staging site, you are allowed to create it. So you can make tests before going live.

You can’t browse files from file manager like on A2 or DreamHost. You will have to use sFTP or SSH to get access.

Kinsta doesn’t let you create email addresses. That’s the only con. Although they suggest using Google’s G Suite.

Inside the Kinsta WordPress Dashboard

There’s no plugin stuffing in Kinsta. Just there’s a caching plugin built-in. Even you can’t deactivate or delete it. It is in the file directory.

You just need to clear the cache when you want to. No big deal.

Uptime Monitoring

 

We monitored the uptime for a week and it was great. EXCEPT for a 10-minutes downtime.

We looked into the root cause analysis. It was a server-side maintenance issue. Probably it happened to my data center.

The average response time is 778ms. It means GREAT.

We saw response time from the Scandinavian countries took around 1000ms. That is no BIG deal.

So we can tell you Kinsta has better response rate so your site can load faster.

Page Speed Tests

We have tested us test pages with CDN and without CDN on Pingdom, GTmetrix and Google PSI.

Without CDN, we have got an average result.  Although we got a pretty good result when we tested pages near the data center, Mumbai.

With CDN it was VERY FAST. Blazing FAST.

A 14 MB size page which contains a 10 MB self-hosted video and some high-resolution images just loaded less than 3 seconds!

That’s the integrated power of the Google Cloud Platform and KeyCDN content delivery.

Let’s check it out.

Pingdom Speed Test

We have tested our default pages without CDN and with CDN to see the difference.

We got a very significant difference.

Here are the test results without CDN

As we see the page load time is better in Asia region cause the data center we selected is located in Mumbai, India.

Without CDN it is an average result.

BUT when you have the privilege to activate CDN, then why so worried?

Here is the result after activating the CDN

The page load time after activating CDN is superb!

They all loaded within 3 seconds. If your page is under 1 MB, just IMAGINE!

We believe it will be less than 500 ms.

We were interested to look inside every result.

Check out the details results.

After enabling the CDN, it took a couple of hours to be effective.

Check out our video tour inside the Pingdom results.

GTmetrix speed test

After testing on Pingdom, we have tested our pages on GTmetrix.

As you know GTmetrix follows different criteria to generate the results.

We checked both with CDN and without CDN

Let’s check out the GTmetrix results.

Here is our with/without CDN results

 

 

We looked into both CDN and without CDN results to check the real performance.

Here we are gonna show you the fastest and slowest results of our default Home page.

You can check out our page speed testing process here.

Here is our fastest result (without CDN). It was definitely Mumbai, India. Cause the data center is located there.

We see the TTFB loaded within 16ms!

The first paint and contentful paint loaded within 0.5 seconds.

The DOM loaded within 0.6 seconds.

Then, other resources loaded within 2.2 seconds.

We are pretty convinced about the results as our site data is located in the Mumbai data center.

Here is our slowest load time result (without CDN).

It was London, UK, far away from the data center.

The TTFB loaded within 0.7 seconds or 700 ms.

The first paint and contentful paint loaded in 2.7 seconds which is average.

The DOM loaded within 3.3 seconds.

And all resources[external and internal] loaded up to 16 seconds. It actually depends on the testing location internet speed, website structure like how your CSS, JS is represented.

You can check out our in-depth video on both results.

Now, we are showing the results after we activating the Kinsta CDN.

We are going to show you one of the fastest results.

In GTmetrix, we emphasize on Timings sections results.

Here is our fastest score after CDN activation.

The TTFB loaded within 0.7 seconds or 700 ms. The first paint and contentful paint loaded in 1.2 seconds which is average. The DOM loaded within 1.3 seconds.

Here is our slowest score after CDN activation.

The TTFB loaded within 16 ms. The first paint and contentful paint loaded in 0.8 seconds which is great. The DOM also loaded within 0.8 seconds.

So it appeared that the Home page in Mumbai loaded in 8.2 seconds. BUT actually it loaded far better than it appears.

So again in GTmetrix, you should go HARD on the load time. Better look into the Timings tab to see how fast it could load.

We have looked into every test for every page (Home, Long Page, and Store).

Check out the videos.

Google PageSpeed Insights Result

Google PageSpeed Insights score actually don’t indicate the final page load time. It shows the first contentful and meaningful paint time, first CPU idle time, First input delay time(FID) etc.

Well, here are Google PageSpeed Insights scores before and after the CDN.

 

Both results look GREAT.

This is because the data center might be located in the same place.

So, we can tell you that Kinsta can stun you with its performance.

Kinsta Hosting Security

Kinsta assures with its iron-clad security to prevent your website from getting hacked or attacked.

Kinsta continuously monitors for uptime, DDoS attack detection, software-based restrictions, SSL support, and hardware firewalls.

That means your site will be monitored and secured 24/7.

Kinsta actually checks your site’s uptime in every 2 minutes. That means they will check 720 times per day. That’s awesome. You don’t need to buy any ping testing website subscription!

They make a backup every day. Just in case you made mistakes or got hacked. Then Kinsta can easily reinstate your site within minutes.

As they monitor your website every day, just in case you got hacked or attacked, their WordPress experts will immediately jump in and FIX as soon as possible.

Kinsta WordPress Hosting Support

We have got great hosting support from Kinsta experts.

You can connect them via Chat, Phone Call(not included in starter plan).

As we are on the Starter plan, we have not the phone call privilege.

So tried the live chat option when we felt like to need some help.

There are always 6 people online for you. We got the response within 3 minutes which is GREAT.

Besides, Kinsta has a great knowledge base(resources) to get to know every detail about Kinsta.

You can also get updated with Kinsta system and data center status.

Pricing

Kinsta is pricey. BUT you won’t be disappointed.

WHY?

Because of its superb performance.

Kinsta WordPress hosting price starts from 30 USD per month. That is called the Starter plan where you can host only one WordPress website. If you buy for a year, you will get 2 months FREE.

We recommend if you are an agency, then buy their Business plan.

Also, you can make a custom order if you need more.

Kinsta has “30-day money-back guarantee” coverage.

What are you waiting for?

Conclusion

We are totally pleased with Kinsta. We are hosting our website on it.

Is Kinsta hosting best for you?

Yes, if you care for SPEED, then Kinsta is for you.

If you have a lot of visitors like 1000k per month, then it will be very expensive like 600 USD per month.

We also haven’t seen any downtime after CDN activation. Because of its 20 data centers.

Kinsta is expensive BUT great for business.

We were very excited cause Kinsta uses Google Cloud Platform in its hosting architecture. So it was one of the most anticipated hosting providers we wanted to review.

AND finally, we have been using it for months!

We like it because of  its CDN option which is limited 50 GB though.

Although there’s a CON. You can’t create an email address. We can deal with it using Google Suite or using another email hosting.

Let us know what do you think about Kinsta. Feel free to write in comment box.