Nowadays, setting up and running a site (especially if it’s an international/worldwide) requires a massive amount of work, dedication, and infrastructure. Now, when we’re talking about all the work that needs to be put, you’re on your own – you will usually get out what you put in.
On the other hand, when we’re looking into the infrastructural aspect of it all, you’ll want to use something that’s as painless as possible. None of us have time (apart from developers who actually do solely this) to worry about the technical things. One of the key aspects concerning the “technical things” is your site’s hosting.
Premium price
Before going any further, it’s very important to point out that Kinsta is a premium service. The fact that there isn’t a free trial hammers this point home most than anything else. The service does, however, give the money back guarantee if you cancel your subscription within the first 30 days, so it’s still risk-free to try it out. The pricing plans are really diverse (there is a total of eight of them) and really do provide every customer exactly what they are looking for. You can see part of the overview on the picture below, and we invite you to check out all the details on their official site.
Kinsta offers a variety of different pricing plans for every need
As you can see, it’s a pretty straightforward monthly subscription model, but the great thing is that if you opt for the yearly payment, you’ll get two months for free (as of writing). Taking all that information into account, it’s plain to see Kinsta isn’t something you’ll use for your test/local sites where you’re taking your first steps and still learning about WordPress. It’s a serious service for serious sites run by serious people – a fact all the features they provide can attest to.
Premium features
MyKinsta – the dashboard
When managing a site, you’ll spend most of your time traversing various windows, menus, and tabs. While using Kinsta, you’ll be presented with a very effective, but simple to use dashboard (appropriately named MyKinsta). Of course, this is not the first time a dashboard is used in this way, but here you’ll have a plethora of options. On just the main page you’ll be able to track all your pages that are hosted by Kinsta along with stats for bandwidth and disk usage, as well as info concerning invoices and visitors.
MyKinsta offers all the statistical information on your site right on the homepage
Moving down the menu we get to the tools tab, that lets you install and set up free SSL directly from the dashboard with the Let’s Encrypt option. Other options relevant to site maintenance can also be found here (PHP and cache management and monitoring).
All the dashboard tools are really easy to use – just a few clicks, and you’re done
No user interface is complete without detailed analytics feedback, and Kinsta is no different in this regard. Keeping track and managing your visitors with your resources is essential for a site to run optimally and here you’ll get all the information you’ll ever need.
Get detailed stats in the analytics tab
Among other things, MyKinsta is also the place where you’ll manage users and their access to all the sites Kinsta is hosting. It’s really great to have one place to keep track of all the users on all your sites and customize them accordingly.
Grant and manage access to your sites in just one page
Apart from the core information mentioned, you’ll also be able to access and control options regarding migrations, DNS, billing, etc. You can check out the comparison of this MyKinsta and all its features with other similar dashboards from other services here.
With MyKinsta everything you need is just a click away
Free migrations
Speaking of migrations, Kinsta offers at least one free migration to their hosting service in every price tier (except the starter tier). For you this means just filling out the migration form and choosing the Google Cloud Platform data center you want to use – then the Kinsta migration team takes over, and before you know it, your migration is done.
Migration to Kinsta is a simple two-step process
When the migration is done this way, you don’t have to worry about the loss of data, spending hours and days doing it manually, or experiencing downtime on your site if problems arise, which, we all know can be frustrating, especially at those delicate times.
Security
In recent months, we’ve all been bombarded with various updated privacy policies, personal information conditions, use of cookies, etc. This tells us how, in this day and age, data security is more and more paramount in any kind of online business and at Kinsta they’re well aware of this fact.
Regarding user login, they use a two-factor authentication method (optional), automatic IP banning (after six failed attempts in a minute) and GeoIP blocking; also, strong passwords are enforced on all sites (upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols).
We’ve already mentioned the free certificates available through the Let’s Encrypt option to enable HTTPS in the dashboard, but it’s also worth noting the support for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections.
Site protection is proactive and updated constantly so you can be sure nobody is waiting for things to go wrong to fix them, they’re actively trying to prevent it. If, by any chance, your security is breached fixing it is placed on top of the priority list and on top of that anything that’s required for the fix is absolutely free. There shouldn’t be any downtime for you because all sites using Kinsta are backed up daily (or even hourly if you need it – for an additional fee). The backup database goes back two weeks so if any problems arise you’ll get to roll back the site instantly.
Speed and infrastructure
Speed. In today’s fast-paced world nobody has time to spare – therefore any site that wants to be competitive needs to be fast. A second or two can be like a minute or two if you’re slower than the competition.
With Kinsta everything is run on only the best hardware
In order to prevent these unnecessary situations, you’ll want to go with a hosting service that uses something like the Google Cloud Platform premium tier network that, among other things, lets you choose your data center for every site you’re running. There are 17 of these strategically located throughout the US, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America which guarantee blazing download and upload speeds, with no latency no matter your location.
Combine that with Amazon Route 53 premium DNS, KeyCDN and an optimized WordPress stack of PHP 7, Nginx, HTTP/2, and MariaDB, and you’ll never have to worry about your sites speed ever again.
Now that we know speed isn’t an issue, what about traffic? Commercial sites tend to have fluctuations in traffic with occasional spikes that coincide with launches of new products, sales or something similar. It’s good to know that the aforementioned premium infrastructure has enough resources to provide you with automatic scaling that can cover any spike you throw at it.
Support
Sooner or later something will go wrong; it’s just inevitable in these kinds of systems. When things do go wrong, you’ll definitely want a support staff like the one Kinsta offers. The customer service is available 24/7, and every agent you’ll contact is fully knowledgeable in WordPress programming and all aspects of hosting. This means you won’t first be redirected a couple of times before you got to the “right person” that’s able to help you.
The 24/7 business hours is not limited to just the customer service; it also extends to monitoring – your site’s uptime is checked every 2 minutes which means if it’s down people are already working on a solution even before you contact them.
Probably the most important thing that every potential client wants to hear is the solving rate – well have no fear it’s 100%. Absolutely every issue that arises is a priority to solve no matter how small and this kind of approach goes a long way toward complete customer satisfaction.
Premium service
We’ve mentioned it at the beginning, and after reading through everything, you’ll have to agree that Kinsta is serious business. This isn’t your run of the mill hosting service where you’ll put up your blog for $1,99 a month. This is a complete service that caters to all your hosting needs, and that comes with a price.
If you’re serious about your online presence and are prepared to pay for top quality service, then you’re in the right place. With Kinsta it isn’t just about the great infrastructure, features, and support – for your money you’ll get a piece of mind that comes with the knowledge that you’re completely taken care of and all you need to do is figure out what content you want on your site.
