Kinsta Backups

One of the key features you want from your WordPress site is the ability to save and restore it at any given point. The good news here is that Kinsta offers quite a lot of options:

• Daily Automatic backups for 14 days, 20 days or 30 days, depending on your plan

• Manual backups possible

• Backups every 1 or 6 hours as a paid add-on

• You can download the manual backups

• Cloud-backups with Google Cloud or Amazon S3 (roughly $2 a month for each site backup, plus $1GB for bandwidth).

Kinsta backups

In my opinion, 14 days isn’t long enough to feel really safe about your site, but I’ll leave that up to you. On the flipside, you can also purchase and install add-ons that save your site every hour, or 6 hours.

I’d also like to note that backing up and restoring is super easy, thanks again to Kinsta’s excellent UX and great online resources. Compared to WP Engine it’s also blazing fast. What takes mere seconds with Kinsta, takes up to 5 minutes with WP Engine. This is because Kinsta only creates an incremental backup – similar to Siteground.

This has one important disadvantage: when your core files are corrupted, you’ll face a major problem. However, we’ve never experienced that and are not intending

Testing Kinsta’s managed WordPress hosting

Uptime tests

Our independent tests ran for 12 months, and as you can see below, it was a 100% success rate. Based on information and comments we’ve gathered online, this is a good indicator of how stable Kinsta is compared to other hosting companies.

And as you see in the table below, Kinsta is the only web host to have consistently achieved perfect 100% uptime scores over the last three years. Very impressive!

To monitor uptime I use StatusCake, a tool that checks each website every 5 minutes.

Don’t forget that if the rate drops below the 99.9%, the Kinsta user agreement guarantees you’ll be refunded some of your hosting charges.

Is Kinsta fast?

Yes, a Kinsta is a fast hosting solution. The 1.82 average in our latest web host speed tests easily clears the 3.00 seconds recommended by Google for best SEO results (read more about the importance of fast website loading times).

However, it’s certainly not the fastest web host that we’ve tested and as you can see in the table below, there are other providers that have consistently outperformed it for speed over the last three years:

Results in seconds

There are many steps you can take to fix a slow website and make WordPress faster.

But while Kinsta is not the fastest, these speeds should be more than enough to not frustrate your visitors.

Kinsta & WordPress

Kinsta is purpose-built to host WordPress sites, and it shows in part thanks to:

• Malware Security Pledge: an interesting security feature, where you get priority in case something goes terribly wrong. You can put your site in maintenance mode via Kinsta, and they’ll run their malware removal service for free.

• Free migrations: they are done by their team of WordPress experts to help migrate complex WordPress installations. It’s not unlimited with the Single-site plan.

• Server-level caching: full-page caching combined with a free CDN and their own Kinsta cache plugin. All of it automates caching based on certain activities, such as publishing a new post.

• WooCommerce optimization: for WordPress online stores, the caching is designed differently, for instance by not caching shopping cart pages, which helps with the checkout process.

• Enterprise-level Cloudflare: this integration is available for all users at no additional cost. When using it, you’ll get a (top-notch) CDN network, wildcard SSL, DDoS attacks detection, Edge Caching and more.

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Kinsta & Developer Features

For developers, you’ll be happy to hear that Kinsta also includes staging, integration with WP-CLI, Composer and Git, and one-click cloning.

Creating a new environment at Kinsta

The staging environments is particularly well-designed, as you can see from the screenshot below:

Staging at Kinsta

Each environment works by creating a one-click copy of your site, but common sense applies when pushing the changes back to the live version (create a backup, double-check wp-config.php, etc…).

Pushing Kinsta staging to live

Final Kinsta Review Comments

Now let’s wrap it all up and gather our thoughts about Kinsta here.

The main takeaway for me is that Kinsta is reliable, fast, and good for business WordPress sites. That includes online stores too. Developers will love all the technical options and, and business owners will enjoy the ease of use and safety features.

But it’s certainly not for everyone. If you don’t need all the bells and whistles, you could look at:

• SiteGround: for unlimited traffic and bandwidth. It’s more affordable and runs at blazing speeds. The only downside (or advantage maybe) is that they aren’t as WordPress-focused as Kinsta.

• WP Engine: probably Kinsta’s closest competitors. They’re extremely similar in terms of pricing and features, but you get a few WordPress extras like free themes, phone support in higher plans and a guaranteed uptime of 99.95% (vs 99.90% at Kinsta).

• DreamHost: one of the most affordable web hosts, with surprisingly good performance for US users. They cut corners on support times and advanced features, but worth looking at nonetheless.