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Why you should consider Managed WordPress Hosting?

When you hear the term “Managed WordPress Hosting“, this is slightly different from the $2.95 a month shared hosting plans you see floating around the web.

With managed hosting, all technical aspects of running your site are handled by the hosting provider. Sometimes it varies, but this usually includes WordPress security, malware, and hacking cleanup, backups, responsibility for your uptime, WordPress updates, scalability, and a host of other things.

These aspects of your website are things that many of us don’t consider until something really goes wrong. As if your WordPress was hacked.

Managed WordPress hosting is of course ideal for those with less technical training, as well as businesses or website owners who don’t have time to manage their website, play around with the technical stuff, and are ready to pay a premium for it.

Our review will show exactly what benefits managed WordPress hosting will bring to your website and your business.

Related Post: Managed WordPress Hosting: Is it Good for your WordPress Site

What is Kinsta?

Kinsta is a premium WordPress hosting provider and offers you powerful and easy-to-configure web hosting. It has a powerful Google Cloud Platform to offer you unique WordPress hosting with excellent uptime and site security.

Kinsta’s WordPress hosting service was launched in 2013 by a WordPress developer, Mark Galvada, and a small team of WordPress experts. Since then, it has quickly become one of the most popular choices for high-performance managed WordPress hosting among businesses, startups, eCommerce sites, and high-traffic blogs.

What does Kinsta offer?

The Managed WordPress Hosting is generally more expensive than unmanaged hosting solutions. That’s why companies like Kinsta include many additional services and features as part of their plans, such as daily backups and an integrated content delivery network service to boost web page delivery.

Kinsta also offers additional features like website staging. This is a fantastic feature that allows you to make major changes to your WordPress website and test them before implementing them on your live website.

The Kinsta platform uses Nginx, PHP 7, LXD containers, and MariaDB, to ensure that all websites on its platform load quickly. Safety is also a major consideration.
In addition to SSL support and uptime monitoring to inform you if your website is down, they offer DDoS attack detection, malware scanning, and hardware firewalls.

Daily website backups are available if something goes wrong and they have a hacking guarantee promising to fix your website if your website gets hacked.

Related post: Best WordPress Hosting in 2021

Kinsta: Google Cloud Platform

Another great advantage that Kinsta’s WordPress hosting service has is that they were the first managed WordPress host to exclusively use Google Cloud Platform, which has one of the largest and fastest networks in the world.

As part of our Kinsta test, we were able to see how customers can even choose which data center location (US, Europe, South America, Australia, Asia) they want per individual WordPress site.

Google Cloud Platform also has many other advantages when it comes to hosting:

• Multi-regional deployment mode enables automated data replication across regions
• Live virtual machine migrations ensure less downtime and better security patches
• State-of-the-art security backed by the Google team
• Rapid expansion into new locations for even lower latency. They currently support 25+ locations!
• Google Compute Engine servers allow automatic scalability for traffic spikes

Kinsta’s hosting is also based on Google Cloud Engine, with the tagline “WordPress at Google’s Speed.” You can choose your data center when you add a site to your Kinsta account: any of the 25+ worldwide data centers. Each site can be hosted on its own server.

View all Data Centers here 

That’s an incredible variety of data centers. To make your site load as fast as possible, always choose a location that is physically closer to where you expect the majority of your visitors to come from.

Kinsta Support Team

The Kinsta team has a 100% resolution rate for customer issues and WordPress experts are on standby 24/7.

When you click on the support icon, you will see a list of all previous support tickets. A new support ticket can easily be created and when you start a new conversation you are advised that most support tickets are answered in just a few minutes.

Premium assisted migration of your site

Migrating a site from one hosting server to another is one of the biggest hurdles. The hassle, potential downtime, risks, and just the fact that there’s so much to do makes even the thought of migrating a burden. Or maybe you are not the most technical person.

Don’t worry, they will do it all for you. Kinsta offers you complete assistance to migrate your site.

So don’t hesitate to switch hosts simply because you may not know how to migrate or are afraid of downtime.

On their Business 1 Plan, they offer 3 free site migrations and more, depending on the plan you select. You can easily monitor the migration status from the Kinsta dashboard.

Migrations can be requested directly through the Kinsta user interface. You just need to provide them with your website’s existing hosting information so they can handle the migration. That’s easy, right!!!

Kinsta Plans

Every Kinsta hosting plan comes with automatic daily backups, free SSL certificates, website staging, and experienced WordPress technical support whenever you want. You can also choose to host your website in one of 25+ worldwide locations.

You are assigned a defined amount of SSD storage and CDN bandwidth on each plan, however your plan is also limited by the number of WordPress installations you have and the number of unique visits your website receives.

Their entry-level Starter Plan costs $30 per month and is suitable for a WordPress website that receives less than 20,000 visits per month. The provided 3GB of storage and 50GB of bandwidth should be sufficient for most small websites.

The starter plan doesn’t come with free website migration, while the Pro Plan only provides one. Neither of these plans gives you SSH access and the Starter Plan does not include website cloning or multi-site WordPress support.

It should come as no surprise that a managed WordPress hosting service like Kinsta charges more than an unmanaged website hosting solution. If you compare the price of Kinsta’s hosting plans to other managed WordPress hosting services, they are certainly competitive from a price point of view.

Kinsta Price Breakdown:

• Starter Plan — $30 per month
• Pro Plan — $60 per month
• Business 1 Plan — $100 per month

Billing and Payment Options

Any Kinsta hosting plan can be paid monthly or annually. With the annual option, you get small savings.

Kinsta’s payment methods are quite limited. Only major credit cards (or debit cards issued by the same companies) are accepted:

• MasterCard
• American Express
• Visa
• Discover

If you have an annual subscription, you can also pay with a wire transfer.

PayPal is not accepted in any form at this point in time.

Money Back Guarantee

Kinsta has a 30-day money-back guarantee on all of their plans (including add-ons). If you cancel your hosting account during your first 30 days of service they will issue a full refund. This means you can try out Kinsta risk-free for 30 days!

SEO Boost + Free SSL certificates to encrypt traffic

And you can’t forget HTTPS! This is quite a hot topic on the web as Google pushes HTTPS everywhere. Really and truly, anyone who doesn’t use HTTPS is behind schedule.

There are numerous reasons why you should consider HTTPS for your WordPress site:

• Greater security (all your data is encrypted, even the login forms)
• Google has said that HTTPS is a ranking factor
• Better reference data in Google Analytics
• Build trust and credibility with visitors by having that green lock on your browser

Kinsta offers the Let’s Encrypt integration. Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, open certificate authority that was officially launched in April 2016. This, of course, means that you can enjoy the benefits of HTTPS on your WordPress websites for free.

Also, Let’s Encrypt’s integration with the service means that there is no need for a certificate authority to verify and approve your server, then you will have to retrieve the keys, install them on your server, and then make sure everything is working properly. If you’ve done this before, you know that the procedure is quite error-prone. An expired SSL certificate is also quite annoying and a big UX problem.

Kinsta’s direct integration with Let’s Encrypt means you don’t have to worry about any of that. The process is easy, just click a button and it’s completely automated.

User Management

If you are a company or agency, it is very common to work with multiple team members and developers.

As our Kinsta test can show, Kinsta allows you to easily add new “Companies” and then assign additional user accounts per company. This allows you to separate clients and workflows.

Note: There is currently no way to make permissions more restrictive yet, but they are currently working on adding them. Just click on the Users settings for your company and click on “Invite new users”.
You can even enable two-factor authentication individually for each user. What we definitely recommend doing!

Activity Log

The Activity Log is a fantastic new security and monitoring feature that Kinsta just released. The Activity Log allows you to see all of the actions that have been performed on your account, as well as who performed them. To see the new Activity Log menu item, go to your My Kinsta dashboard.

You will also know what changes have been made with “Activity Log”. And when working with multiple people, an activity log is also very useful.

You will no longer have the problem of forgetting who changed which scenario. The activity log will guide you, to all the changes that have been made, when and by whom.

Developer Friendly

Perhaps you are a more advanced WordPress user or developer. Fortunately, Kinsta offers many features that speed up development while still ensuring security. This includes features like SSH access, Composer, HeidiSQL, Sequel Pro, and Git.

Shared hosts won’t normally give you SSH access, which means you can’t use any of the above features.

Kinsta: Pros & Cons

Here’s Our Kinsta WordPress Hosting review structured with Pros & Cons, ideal use cases, and alternatives based on our experience as a customer.

Pros

• Free Migration: Each subscription includes a free migration performed by a WordPress migration staff with years of experience.
• Speed Tuning: Kinsta includes a number of tools that help WordPress run as quickly as possible.
• 99.9% Uptime Guaranteed: In fact, Kinsta offers an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee.
• Free Daily Backup: Daily automatic WordPress backups, as well as system-generated backups, are provided by Kinsta for all sites on your account. These can be seen in the MyKinsta dashboard as restore points and are kept for 14 days.
• Premium Support: You’ll get access to a support team with extensive experience and training in running WordPress sites.
• High Security: The security team at Kinsta is carefully evaluating and fixing any potential security flaws. If a security issue arises, they will resolve it for free.
• Scalable Business: Kinsta hosts both small and large companies’ websites that receive a lot of traffic. With only a few clicks, you can upgrade to a higher-tier plan at any moment.

Cons

• Price: While Kinsta’s price is reasonable for a managed WordPress host, but it is still prohibitively pricey for small enterprises.
• No Email: Surprisingly, Kinsta does not offer any form of email service. (However, this is also true of WP Engine.) They think it’s so they can focus entirely on hosting. You can integrate G Suite, but it will require some more effort on your part.

Kinsta Alternatives

Kinsta is one of the best managed WordPress hosting providers, although sometimes it may not find the ideal for your needs.

Here are some of the Kinsta alternatives:

Conclusion

Kinsta quickly established itself in the market as a professional company offering reliable and secure WordPress hosting along with WordPress technical support.

They offer many great features for WordPress users such as daily backups, website staging, website cloning, and fast performance with the help of Key CDN’s global content delivery network.

Their MyKinsta dashboard is easy to use, although as someone who has always taken a more hands-on approach to website management, we would like to see better WordPress themes and plugin support in the dashboard. A file manager would also be very useful.