Kinsta WordPress Hosting Review

This post is based off WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2014).

Overview

Kinsta is yet another new comer in our testing with something to prove. Kinsta easily shot to the top of our performance charts. Kinsta's plans have changed quite a bit since we tested them. When our testing was done they offered a $27/month plan. However, they've gone up-market and their cheapest plan is now $157/month. It seems they're targeting people who want serious performance.

The Plan

All testing was done on a shared account, which is no longer available. This plan tested had 1 WordPress site, 1GB SSD disk space, 50GB bandwidth and costs $27/month.

Performance

LoadStorm

The first performance test was done with LoadStorm. Kinsta made it to the final round of testing where 2000 concurrent users were logging into WordPress and browsing the test site. The test was designed to test non-cached performance by logging users into WordPress. It caused many hosting setups to crumble. You can see Kinsta's result in this graph (click on it to play with the interactive results):

Kinsta aced the LoadStorm test. It had zero errors and one of the fastest average response times at 316ms. Kinsta also had the absolute lowest peak response time at 942ms. That's an astonishing feat, that over 30 minutes Kinsta served nearly 250,000 requests and not a single one took over a second to be delivered. Amazing.

Blitz

The second load test that was run on Kinsta was Blitz. Blitz was used to test cached performance. It simply requested the home page from 1-2000 times per second.

I can't draw lines this straight. The response time was flat. As you would expect from a company that aced the cache busting test, they didn't struggle in the slightest. Full Blitz Results (PDF)

Uptime

Two third-party uptime monitoring services (StatusCake and UptimeRobot) tracked the test site for a month. The results for Kinsta were perfect. 100% uptime according to both sources.

WebPageTest

“WebPagetest is an open source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google as part of our efforts to make the web faster.” WebPageTest grades performance and allows you to run tests from multiple locations simulating real users. Kinsta was tested from Dulles, VA, Miami, FL, Denver, CO, and Los Angeles, CA.

Company	Dulles,VA	Miami, FL	Denver, CO	Los Angeles, CA	Average
Kinsta	0.759	0.752	0.947	0.592	0.7625

Kinsta had the second fastest average response time of all the companies we tested. No issues with this test in the slightest.

Conclusion

Kinsta, a new-comer to our testing, jumped straight to the top of the performance tiers. Kinsta’s performance was amazing in the Load Storm 2000 logged in user test. They had the lowest peak response time and zero errors over a 30 minute test. They didn’t struggle with any tests whatsoever and showed zero downtime. Kinsta’s performance was undoubtedly top tier.

Visit Kinsta

Bio
Latest Posts

Kevin Ohashi

Founder at Review Signal

Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.

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3 thoughts on “Kinsta WordPress Hosting Review”

Adam March 20, 2015 at 10:31 AM

I’d love to see some sort of value/price comparison in these posts. For example, the cheapest plan for each host (that I can find) is:

Kinsta: $157/month
Pagely: $64/month
Synthesis: $47/month
Media Temple: $20/month
LightningBase: $10/month

And yet you’ve described every one of these hosts as “top tier” in their respective reviews? I dunno, I feel like I need more information. Why is Kinsta more than fifteen times as expensive as LightningBase if they are both equally good?

Also, if every managed host that you’re reviewing is acing your load tests, uptime tests, and so on, why not compare them on other measure like ease-of-use or support responsiveness?

Reply ↓

Kevin Ohashi Post authorMarch 20, 2015 at 1:35 PM

So Kinsta offered a $27/month plan before, that’s what I tested. Since this was published they decided to go up market. Targeting higher value clients. I’m guessing that leads to much higher $/client, for newer companies who have limited resources that might make a lot of sense.

As far as value goes, that’s difficult because they do offer different values. Some companies, like Pantheon are designed for agencies/large development teams. They’ve built a suite of tools built around a very high end use case. Basically none of the other companies can match that. How would I evaluate the value of that head to head? Some, like GoDaddy are incredibly cheap, it’s targeted at mass-market, automated self-importer, etc.

I’m testing performance, that’s only one aspect of web hosting company. Price, Customer Support, Features and other stuff are important too. These are the top tier performance-wise. Why you would choose one over the other, now you can decide on other aspects.

As far as comparing on ease-of-use and support responsiveness, that’s too subjective. The main thing I do at review signal is measure what people think broadly of web hosting companies and break it down a bit about the more subject aspects like customer support. But that’s based off hundreds or thousands of opinions. In aggregate it’s far more meaningful than one single opinion. So for this type of review/comparison, I don’t think my personal opinion should influence the outcome.

Reply ↓
Tom March 25, 2015 at 6:52 PM

Why is Kinsta more than fifteen times as expensive as LightningBase if they are both equally good?

Hi Adam,

It’s Tom from Kinsta. If you compare LightningBase’s $10/month package to Kinsta’s $157/month package you can clearly see the difference:

LightningBase:
I’m not sure, but I guess your site will be hosted on a shared server
1 WordPress Site
10,000 Pageviews
1 GB SSD Storage
10 GB Transfer
20 GB CDN

Kinsta:
You will get a dedicated VPS
10 WordPress Site
Unlimited Pageviews
40 GB SSD Storage
3000 GB Transfer
100 GB CDN

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Tom

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