Earlier this year I took a close look at the managed WordPress hosting company Kinsta. I was really impressed with the service.
A few weeks ago Kinsta had a large revamp which introduced many changes to their service. The company has a new look, new features, and more resources. However, the change that will catch the attention of many people is the addition of new entry-level plans.
Previously, the lowest priced hosting plan for Kinsta was $100 per month. Now you can become a Kinsta customer for only $30 per month.
I talk about all of the changes in the video below.
Let's delve deeper and see how Kinsta has been improved.
A Fresh Lick of Paint
The first thing you will notice about the new Kinsta is its new look. The website and customer interface has been completely redesigned with a new logo and new colour scheme.
I believe the new colour scheme will help attract new customers. It has a less corporate feel to it now with blue and white colours being used.
The new colour scheme has been applied to the customer area too, though the structure of the customer dashboard remains the same.
Other additions include an advanced features page that explains how their servers and plans and infrastructure are set up and a brand new resources area.
The resources area has an extensive knowledge base, articles that teach you WordPress, and of course, the popular Kinsta Blog that my friend Brian Jackson regularly writes for.
A Growing Network
Kinsta have added a new data centre in Mumbai, India. This improves the delivery of websites and services in India and brings their total number of Google Cloud Data Centres around the world to 13.
The Google Cloud team advised Kinsta that:
“Hosting applications in the new region can improve latency from 20-90% for end users in Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and of course Mumbai, compared to hosting them in the closest region, Singapore.”
Apart from Africa, Kinsta now have a data centre in every major continent in the world.
Kinsta have also partnered with content delivery network specialists KeyCDN. Every Kinsta hosting plan now comes packaged with a large amount of bandwidth allocation at KeyCDN.
KeyCDN host content from one of nearly 30 data centres across the world and are adding more locations within the next year.
KeyCDN hosts cached copies of your website on servers that use solid state drives. The service offers features such as HTTP/2, origin shield, RESTful API, real-time stats, instant purge, and more.
All of these additions will help speed up the performance of Kinsta hosted websites across the globe.
New Pricing Structure
Kinsta's hosting plans use to start at $100 per month and were based on how much bandwidth you use every month. Customers who signed up on bandwidth-based plans can continue to use them and upgrade and downgrade as required (if they desire), however new Kinsta hosting plans will be based on monthly visits to your websites.
Monthly visits is an easier metric for website owners to understand and track, so I think this is a good decision.
All plans include KeyCDN integration, SSL security certification, and free website migrations (except from the starter plan). More expensive hosting plans have a larger CDN bandwidth allocation, but this isn't something to worry about as even the lowest price plan comes with a 50GB monthly bandwidth allocation at KeyCDN.
Their new starter and pro plans are geared towards bloggers and small business owners. The starter costs $30 per month and offers one website 3GB of SSD storage, 50GB of CDN bandwidth, and traffic up to 20,000 visits per month. The pro plan costs $60 per month. It costs twice as much as the starter plan and doubles everything you receive with the lower priced plan.
Website cloning isn't available in the starter plan and neither the starter or pro plans offer SSH access.
The business plans start from $100. These plans are suitable for websites with more traffic and those who want to host multiple WordPress installations.
If you choose to pay yearly, you get two months free. This effectively drops the rate of their entry plan to an equivalent of $25 per month. That's a fairly low entry point for managed WordPress hosting.
And the Features…
Since I have reviewed Kinsta in the past, this article has mainly focused on the recent changes to the service.
It is, however, worth remember what Kinsta provides when you choose to host your websites with them.
Firstly, Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting service. That means that the whole hosting environment has been optimised to host WordPress websites. It also means that you get access to a team of WordPress experts who can provide help with WordPress related website problems.
The service also provides uptime monitoring, website backups, DDoS detection, hardware firewalls, automatic scaling to help your business grow, and a guarantee that they will fix your website if any hackers manage to get through their security measures.
Website staging also ensures that you don't make any dangerous changes to your live website. You change your website initially in a test environment and then deploy those changes once you know they are safe.
Final Thoughts
Kinsta has always been a high quality hosting service, but the recent changes show that the company is taking the right steps to improve.
Their new colour scheme is all good from a marketing point of view, though the real focus should be on the fact that they have added a new data centre in India and integrated a professional content delivery network into their hosting plans free of charge. All these changes increase the speed of websites hosted on Kinsta.
The inclusion of lower priced hosting plans is welcome too and open up Kinsta to a lot of website owners that wouldn't have considered them when their lowest plan was $100 per month.
Be sure to check out the official Kinsta website to find out more about what they offer.
Good luck.
Kevin
