Choosing the Right Web Host Can Make Or Break Your Website
You have a business. And you have a website (or you need one).
I’m going to demonstrate why choosing the right web host will make all the difference between having a website that hums along hassle-free making you money, and a website that runs like my grandpa’s old Pinto.
Essential Needs For Every Website
As a website owner, you want (must have) four things:
The Right Web Host Will Be Fast
If your website crawls, you’ll lose conversions. Your website will waste money, not make money. Customers will experience frustration and leave.
Kinsta provides ultimate speed. Kinsta is built on the GCP (Google Cloud Platform). The GCP is one of the fastest networks in the world. It comes in two tiers: standard and premium. Kinsta uses the GCP’s premium tier (Google’s best machines) for all plans. Most web hosts don’t utilize the GCP, and if they do, they use the standard tier (or utilize the premium tier only on select plans).
Remember that phrase: all plans. It’s going to keep coming up and it’s a major differentiator between Kinsta and their competitors.
Kinsta also provides Cloudflare’s enterprise-level service at no extra charge for all plans. Cloudflare (a content delivery network or CDN) accelerates website performance while ensuring reliability.
Cloudflare also protects websites from:
Kinsta provides built-in optimization (caching) for every website. WordPress, while popular, runs slowly without caching. Configuring a third-party caching plugin takes time and technical know-how. Kinsta does it all for you, for all plans.
With Kinsta, speed matters. Very much. Every customer gets:
The Right Web Host Will Be Reliable
Look at clients. That’s one way to determine reliability. Kinsta hosts Ricoh, GE, Ubisoft, Workforce, Tripadvisor . . . you get the idea. Big companies that absolutely require consistency use Kinsta. That says something.
Kinsta also offers a 99.9% SLA-backed uptime guarantee. Many hosting companies say “99.9% uptime” in their marketing, but have no service level agreement entailing the guarantee’s details.
The Right Web Host Will Be Secure
All plans are protected by two firewalls: the GCP’s firewall, and Cloudflare’s enterprise-level firewall, including real-time DDoS protection.
Kinsta supports two-factor authentication and IP geolocation blocking. They implement strict software restrictions and require current PHP versions. Kinsta bans IPs with multiple successive login failures, and enforces strong passwords on all new website installations. They do not allow nulled plugins and themes.
Kinsta also provides free daily backups for 14 days. Typically WordPress website owners install third-party plugins to handle backups. These plugins are often fee-based subscription services, require configuration, and are often difficult to use when it comes time to restore a backup.
Kinsta’s backups happen automatically in the background. You can restore your website to an earlier version in an instant.
Lastly, Kinsta provides a hack guarantee (yes, for all plans). If your Kinsta website gets hacked, Kinsta will work with you to unhack it.
The Right Web Host Will Provide Expert Support
Most web hosts offer tiers of support. Your first contact will be the lower tier. You may or may not get the help you need from this low-paid employee. If you do, consider yourself lucky. If not, you will be escalated to the next tier of support. This will continue until you get the help you need. This could happen quickly or it could take days.
With Kinsta, there is one tier of support for all plans. Kinsta offers 24/7 technical supports from WordPress experts. When you contact support, you’ll talk to an expert. There’ll be no wasted time, no endless tiers, and no low-paid employees reading troubleshooting steps out of a manual.
No Web Host Is Perfect, Including Kinsta
Kinsta is not the right web host for everyone.
Kinsta’s cheapest plan is $30 per month. You get 1 WordPress install and 25,000 visits per month. Overage fees are modest, which is positive. If you have one WordPress website and don’t get more than 25,000 visitors per month, this plan would be excellent. $30 per month is not cheap compared to shared hosting, but you’re getting the best of the best.
Kinsta does not offer email service. Instead, they choose to focus on one thing: WordPress web hosting. Their hosting service is second to none, so if you want the best, don’t think twice. You can try Google Workspace for email service. It’s cheap and more fully featured than any email service offered by any web host.
Kinsta’s traffic and bandwidth allowances aren’t the best in the industry. If you exceed your website’s limitations, you’ll be charged overage fees. Kinsta’s overage fees are modest and well in line with industry standards. But if your website gets a lot of traffic, Kinsta won’t be cheap.
Kinsta Verdict
Kinsta is the right web host for your business if you:
Kinsta isn’t the right web host for you if you:
My Own Website & Kinsta
My own website isn’t hosted by Kinsta. Why?
I run seven websites. To use Kinsta, I would have to pay $200 per month. That simply isn’t cost effective for me.
I run my sites on a VPS with Inmotion. With my current plan, I can have up to 30 WordPress installations. I pay about $35 per month.
However, my website is not on the GCP. I’d have to pay extra for a CDN like Cloudflare. So, my sites are slower and more vulnerable to malicious attacks.
And yes, I’ve been hacked twice in the past and both times (since Inmotion does not have a hack fix guarantee) had to pay a significant fee to a developer to have my websites restored. Not only that, since my websites are on the same server, the last hack affected all of them. What a mess.
None of my websites are backed up automatically. I have to install and configure a third party plugin. And I have to create a Dropbox (or another storage service) account and sync them. It’s complicated.
None of my websites are optimized for speed. I have to install a third party plugin (like W3 Total Cache) and configure it. It’s complicated.
None of my websites have comprehensive security features built in. I have to install a third party plugin like Sucuri or Wordfence and configure them and pay extra for more features.
When I need support, Inmotion is decent. They offer 24/7 technical support. However, my first contact is a basic tier of support, and typically I need to be escalated to a higher tier. Sometimes I have to wait until the following day for a response.
If I had just one website, I’d migrate it to Kinsta in a heartbeat.
