Kinsta is built for performance and scalability
From day one Kinsta was built for performance and scaling so that your WordPress sites would stay online during traffic surges. Our hosting platform doesn’t fall into any of the traditional hosting categories. Our entire infrastructure is built on the Google Cloud Platform and is very different from traditional shared, VPS, or dedicated infrastructure.
Kinsta utilizes LXD managed hosts and orchestrated LXC software containers for each site. What this means is that every WordPress site is housed in its own isolated container, which has all of the software resources required to run it (Linux, Nginx, PHP, MySQL). The resources are 100% private and are not shared between anyone else or even your own sites. We don’t offer shared hosting.
Migrated a site onto Kinsta that got over 1 million pageviews yesterday with around ~1500 active users all day. Performed incredibly well.
Ben Word
Roots.io, Project Creator
When you come to Kinsta you get the same core infrastructure whether you’re on a Starter plan or Enterprise plan. It makes upgrading and downgrading your plan seamless and painless. On the other hand, when you need more server power at WP Engine you may have to move from a shared environment to a VPS, then to a dedicated server or over to cloud hosting, with site migrations required at every step along the way.
Our auto-scaling infrastructure is ready to handle your sudden surges in traffic and load. With our isolated software container technology, hardware resources are allocated to each site container automatically by our virtual machines on an as-needed basis. The result is a hosting configuration that is secure and private by design while simultaneously allowing server resources to scale up or down as needed based on the demands of the site.
We hired Kinsta’s team to migrate all 100+ websites. In an effort to quickly lighten the load on our WP Engine server through the migration process, we had Kinsta migrate our largest sites first. The first was a 500,000+ visitor/mo blog, the second was a several thousand product e-commerce site, and the third was a resource hog that ran more than 50 plugins (whoa!). Here’s what we found:
Site #1
15%
page load speed improvement
down from 1.38s to 1.17s
Site #2
81%
page load speed improvement
down from 8.91s (yes, it had gotten that bad) to 1.71s
Site #3
52%
page load speed improvement
down from 3.48s to 1.69s
Knowing that the simple migration to a Kinsta server will produce page load speeds that exceed those of WP Engine, a company known for speed, we feel great guaranteeing page load speed improvement for every client—no matter where they’ve been hosting. And more than 100 sites into that guarantee, we’ve never lost.
Chad Barnes
Head Honcho, SkyrocketWP
Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
Kinsta’s platform is also optimized for ecommerce sites which can be very demanding and generate a lot of cache-bypassing dynamic page loads. We help clients using WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads on a daily basis increase the speed of their online stores. A few examples include:
- Fast server-level page caching in place with rules to ensure proper WooCommerce and EDD functionality.
- By default, certain pages that should never be cached, such as cart, my-account, and checkout, are excluded from caching.
- Users automatically bypass the cache when the “woocommerce_items_in_cart cookie” or “edd_items_in_cart” are detected to ensure a smooth and in-sync checkout process.
Kinsta is the fastest WordPress host you’ll find on the web! Review Signal publishes an annual review, where they do rigorous performance testing of the top hosts in the industry. Kinsta has scored “top tier” performance four years in a row. While WP Engine has in fact failed in some of their tests.
Blitz.io Test 1-5000 Concurrent Users over 60 seconds
This test detects whether a website is caching the front page and determines how well the caching system is performing.
Kinsta handled 5000 concurrent hits to the front page without any issue.
WP Engine struggled with this test. Around 20 seconds into the test, there was a substantial increase in response time which continued to slowly increase for the rest of the test. The errors and timeouts started to kick in 5 seconds later at the 25-second mark and also gradually increased until the test ended.
| Kinsta | WP Engine | |
|---|---|---|
| Hits | 135.485 | 108,168 |
| Errors | 7 | 12 939 |
| Timeouts | 0 | 1 061 |
| Average hits/second | 2 258 | 1 803 |
| Average response time (ms) | 85 | 158 |
| Fastest response (ms) | 83 | 6 |
| Slowest response (ms) | 87 | 346 |
Kinsta had essentially perfect LoadStorm and Blitz tests. They also had no flaws in any other tests. I’m at a loss for words to praise their performance.
Unfortunately, WP Engine was the only company in this tier [Enterprise] not to do well. They struggled in both load tests. LoadStorm looked like it may have been security related, but Blitz looked like it really had trouble with the load. I believe the plan I tested cost $600/month, but the sales team wasn’t willing to give me specific pricing for their enterprise tier.
Kevin Ohashi
Founder, Review Signal
Kinsta is developer-friendly
Many of us at Kinsta are developers ourselves, that’s why from day one we’ve built our tools and dashboard with WordPress developers in mind. We provide the following features and accessibility to make your workflow more efficient, not all of which are available at WP Engine:
- SSH access and Git on Business 1 and higher plans.
- We allow you to use custom setups like Bedrock and Trellis, as well as starter themes such as Sage.
- We have one-click staging environments which allow you to easily push changes from staging to production as well as a site cloning feature.
- We allow you to run a different version of PHP for each live site and staging site and switching between PHP engines takes just one-click.
- You can restore automatic backups to production as well as staging.
- We leave post and page revisions enabled by default. While we recommend limiting or disabling these, we believe this should be your choice.
- Loading your site over a reverse proxy is possible, and we have many clients who do so.
- Faster search with the Elasticsearch add-on and faster database performance with the Redis add-on.
Feature comparison overview
Here is a quick overview of some of the key differences between Kinsta and WP Engine.
+ Frequency Add-on
As of March 1, 2018 WP Engine’s re-structured plans fall into five primary tiers: Personal at $35/month for one site, Growth at $115/month for 5 sites, Scale at $290/month for 15 sites, and then higher premium and enterprise plans. They no longer offer lower-tier plans in-between.
Kinsta offers eight different tiers at $30/month, $60/month, $100/month, and more all the way up into our Enterprise plans. We also offer additional custom solutions for those that demand even more.
WP Engine has both a total visits and bandwidth limit in place across all of their plans. If you exceed either of these you are charged an overage fee or are required to upgrade to a higher plan. Kinsta’s plans are only limited by total visits. Of course, like any host, we do have acceptable use policies in place, but there is no hard bandwidth limit.
It’s also important to note that overage charges at Kinsta are billed at $1 for every 1,000 visits over your plan’s limit, while overage charges at WP Engine are $2 for every additional 1,000 visits.
Free migrations
Except for the Starter plan, all of our plans include one or more free migrations. WP Engine doesn’t offer free migrations but rather includes a do-it-yourself plugin. For larger and more complex sites this can easily result in data loss or fail entirely if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Unless you’re a developer with time to burn, it’s much safer to let our expert migration team take care of everything for you. Moving your site to Kinsta usually won’t incur any downtime and we’ll help you inspect your migrated site prior to going live.
Expert Support
We don’t have level 1 or level 2 support reps. Our entire support team is made up of WordPress developers and Linux hosting engineers many of whom have managed their own servers, created themes and plugins, and contributed back to core. This ensures you’ll receive expert advice from someone who actively uses and develops with WordPress. In fact, we hire less than 1% of applicants who apply. You won’t find better support anywhere else!
Kinsta also monitors your sites’ uptime every minute which means that our slowest response time is 5 minutes to any downtime that may occur. Our staff is alerted instantly and quite often we start resolving the issue before you even contact us.
LattePress@lattepressIf you’re using #WordPress I highly suggest you check out the @kinsta blog, as well as follow them on twitter, even if you don’t use them to host your site (gasp!). There is such a tremendous amount of value in the articles they’re posting for any WP User. Check it out!
Kinsta has a global presence
Kinsta is exclusively powered by the Google Cloud Platform and offers 15+ data centers around the globe, extending across five continents. At Kinsta all data centers are available across all plans, starting from as low as $30/mo! You can also choose a different data center of each of your sites. Current locations:
- Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA
- London, UK
- Sydney, Australia
- St. Ghislain, Belgium
- Changhua County, Taiwan
- Mumbai, India
- The Dalles, Oregon, USA
- Ashburn, Virginia, USA
- Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA
- São Paulo, Brazil
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Jurong West, Singapore
- Tokyo, Japan
- Montréal, Canada
- Eemshaven, Netherlands
WP Engine offers three data centers by default and three additional international locations available for a monthly fee. For example, if you choose WP Engine’s Scale plan, the base cost is $290/month (As of March 1, 2018). If you wanted to host your site outside of their standard 3 locations, say in Germany or the UK, it would be an additional $70/month. Their Australia data center is an additional $100/month. Depending on which plan you choose this can add up to a 40% increase in your monthly price. Providers also vary based on what plan you choose.
Everything at Kinsta is interconnected over the highly reliable Google Cloud Platform premium tier network. This is designed to minimize distance and hops, resulting in faster and more secure global transport of your data. Beware, some hosting providers might opt for Google’s “standard tier” network service without telling you to cut costs, but we believe in only utilizing the best here at Kinsta.
Turbocharging your content delivery
Kinsta cares about the performance of your site, not just from our data center, but at every point around the globe. That’s why we partnered up with KeyCDN, an HTTP/2 content delivery network (CDN), and include free bandwidth across all of our plans.
KeyCDN’s content delivery architecture was built from the ground up with a focus on high-performance and designed for high throughput and low latency. When enabled, your content will be delivered and cached from their 30+ POPs around the globe, this includes all regions: America, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia!
WP Engine currently uses MaxCDN as their CDN provider and it only has 19 locations. Some regions aren’t included.
Our CDN also automatically helps protect against bad bots as well as checks all the boxes when it comes to industry standards such as GZIP and HPACK compression.
Best affiliate program in the industry
Kinsta has become one of the fastest growing managed WordPress hosts thanks in part to the many happy customers helping to spread the word. Whether you’re an agency, freelancer, or blogger, Kinsta is proud to offer true profit sharing with one of the highest paying affiliate programs in the hosting industry.
You earn $50 to $500 after every signup based on the type of plan you refer. On top of that, you get a 10% monthly recurring commission for the lifetime of the customer you referred, enabling you to build passive income.
We never settle for anything less than perfection at Kinsta. That’s why we built our WordPress hosting affiliate dashboard from the ground up, meaning you don’t have to mess with another confusing and cluttered 3rd-party platform. This allows our developers to easily build in new features as needed to help you earn even more.
WP Engine offers $200 per new customer or 100% of the customer’s first monthly payment (whichever is higher). They don’t offer any way to build passive income and utilize the third-party and cumbersome ShareASale affiliate dashboard.
