Choosing the right hosting provider is a critical decision for website owners. Cloudways and Kinsta are two popular managed hosting platforms, each with its unique strengths.
Deciding between Cloudways and Kinsta WordPress hosting can be challenging due to the many factors to consider. Both platforms have advantages that make them top contenders for managed hosting.
By evaluating the detailed aspects of these hosting options, we will arrive at an evidence-based recommendation for which provider best suits your website needs and budget.
What is Cloudways?
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that provides a unique approach by offering a choice of five different cloud providers: DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
This flexibility allows users to select a cloud infrastructure that best suits their performance needs and budget. Cloudways takes care of server management tasks such as security, backups, and updates, allowing users to focus on their websites.
What is Kinsta?
Kinsta is a premium managed WordPress hosting provider known for its high-performance infrastructure, robust security features, and user-friendly interface.
Powered exclusively by Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kinsta is designed to deliver exceptional speed, reliability, and scalability for WordPress websites.
Cloudways Vs Kinsta: Features
Both Cloudways and Kinsta offer premium hosting features essential for your mission-critical WordPress websites. These include optimized performance, automated and manual data backups, website staging, and expert support.
While both hosts are impressive, Kinsta edges out Cloudways slightly in this category. Cloudways offers greater flexibility with its choice of cloud servers, but Kinsta provides features specifically tailored for premium WordPress hosting. Additionally, Kinsta includes the DevKinsta suite for local development and the Kinsta API, which adds extended functionality particularly useful for agencies.
Cloudways Vs Kinsta: Speed and Performance
Both Cloudways and Kinsta deliver excellent website speed and performance, but Kinsta takes the lead by a slight margin.
Kinsta’s optimized servers, enhanced with Edge Caching Technology and a robust CDN, consistently produce outstanding website speeds. Kinsta's impressive performance metrics have set some of the best test results we’ve seen, making them the winner in this category.
Cloudways Vs Kinsta: Website Staging
Both Cloudways and Kinsta provide effective website staging with their hosting plans. Creating a staging environment and deploying changes back to production is straightforward with both hosts. However, Kinsta has a slight advantage due to its more streamlined staging process.
For instance, Cloudways requires you to manually add “wp-login.php” to access the admin side of your staging site, while Kinsta includes this link automatically.
Cloudways Vs Kinsta: Data Backup
Cloudways emerges as the winner in data backup capabilities. While Kinsta offers a solid backup and restore function, Cloudways allows users to set both the backup interval and the retention period, up to 4 weeks. Kinsta's retention period is limited to 14 days.
Cloudways also supports local and offsite data backups, on-demand backups, and customizable backup frequency and retention periods, providing more flexibility and control over your data.
Cloudways Vs Kinsta: Customer Support
Both Cloudways and Kinsta provide excellent customer support with knowledgeable and helpful staff. Response times are equally good for both hosts.
However, Kinsta has a slight edge because it specializes in expert WordPress hosting support. This specialization ensures that their support team is particularly adept at resolving WordPress-specific issues, making Kinsta the winner in this category.
Conclusion on Cloudways Vs Kinsta
While both Cloudways and Kinsta are excellent choices for WordPress hosting, Kinsta emerges as the winner in this head-to-head comparison.
Kinsta focuses specifically on providing top-tier managed WordPress hosting. Features such as Edge Caching Technology, the Kinsta CDN, and a suite of WordPress tools, combined with expert support, make Kinsta ideal for business websites and especially for agencies and developers.
However, Cloudways offers greater flexibility with its choice of cloud servers. If this flexibility is crucial to your needs, Cloudways would be the better fit.
