This week, we had the opportunity to speak with Andrea Zoellner, Head of Growth and Brian Li, Website Content Manager of
Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that helps take care of all your needs regarding your website!
What is Kinsta? Please describe the story behind the company – what sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
AZ: Kinsta is a web hosting company that specializes in WordPress hosting
powered by Google Cloud Platform’s Premium Tier Network. It was founded in 2013, by a group of friends who spotted a gap in the market. They wanted premium quality WordPress hosting that offered businesses and developers access to superior managed hosting, along with great support and intuitive tools.
After several months of planning and development, Kinsta officially launched in 2014. Fast-forward to today and Kinsta is powered by Google Premium Tier and their compute-optimized C2 machines, is available in 10 languages and has more than
150 employees worldwide.
How does Managed WordPress Hosting work, and what services do you offer?
AZ: There are a couple of types of hosting available for someone looking to get their website online. On the cheaper end of the spectrum, there are all-in-one website builders and shared hosting providers. For these hosts, your site will be on a server alongside hundreds of other sites, which means you’re susceptible to performance issues based on the sheer volume of resources being consolidated together.
For DIY users, they may choose to pay for a Virtual Private Server (VPS), where they set up and manage their own hosting servers. While this may be more flexible for developers who have more experience, it can also be very time consuming to set up, optimize, and maintain.
Managed hosting offers access to high-performance technology that’s fully optimized and managed for you. At Kinsta, our hosting is powered by Google Cloud Platform, and uses the Premium Tier network and C2 machines. This is the best in Google cloud hosting and every customer gets expert support, security maintenance, automatic backups, staging sites, Application Performance Monitoring (APM), dev tools like
SSH, Git, WP-CLI, and Premium DNS.
We’ve heard that you recently launched a brand new product called DevKinsta – could you please provide some more information about it?
AZ: DevKinsta is our new local development suite designed to help people build, test, and debug WordPress sites on a local server. DevKinsta is totally free, available in 10 languages, and made for macOS and Windows. Docker powers DevKinsta which makes it super fast and secure. Spin up a single or multisite WordPress site with Nginx and MariaDB. It also includes powerful tools like a built-in database manager, SMTP server, WP_DEBUG toggle, and more. DevKinsta is not just for Kinsta customers, but if you have Kinsta hosting, you can push and pull directly from the MyKinsta dashboard.
How is Kinsta better than other WordPress Hosting providers?
AZ: There are a few things that
make Kinsta unique. The first one is our incredible speed. Back in 2016, we made the decision to move our entire infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform. This made us the first managed WordPress host to exclusively utilize the platform. Then, in 2019, we started migrating all clients to the more robust C2 machines,
making customers’ sites up to 200% faster, more stable, secure, and completely isolated.
The second reason our customers love us is our support, which is thanks to our team of experts. The support team here at Kinsta are all WordPress developers and Linux Engineers who contribute to WordPress Core and other open-source projects, and use WordPress on a daily basis.
And in my opinion, the third factor that makes us unique in the marketplace is our multilingual presence, not just for our website and tools like DevKinsta, but also our chat support.
How secure is your platform, and is it user-friendly?
BL: At Kinsta, we use a containerized infrastructure to secure sites hosted on our platform. Each site, including its Nginx, PHP, and MySQL stack, lives inside its own container powered by LXC, and managed by LXD. This means your site will never interact with another site hosted on Kinsta. This is important because it means malware on another site won’t be able to infect your site on Kinsta – this cross-site infection is very common on traditional shared hosting.
All sites on Kinsta are also protected by Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a leading Internet security company, and they provide DDoS protection and sophisticated firewall rules for all Kinsta clients. Lastly, our comprehensive security guarantee includes free malware cleanups. This means if your site is ever infected with malware on Kinsta, our expert support team will remove the malware for free.
In terms of user-friendliness, we pride ourselves in providing the best hosting dashboard for WordPress sites. Unlike cPanel, our unique MyKinsta dashboard was custom-built with WordPress users in mind. MyKinsta contains a variety of useful tools for adding redirects, restarting PHP, blocking IP addresses, creating free SSL certificates, website analytics, and more. Lastly, if you ever need assistance with your WordPress site, you can reach out to our support team right in the MyKinsta dashboard.
Do you offer any add-ons that could be useful to an end-user?
BL: All Kinsta plans also come with a free APM tool, which lets users monitor the performance of their WordPress sites without having to install a third-party service like New Relic. However, if you do prefer monitoring with New Relic, we support that as an add-on as well.
In terms of other add-ons, we provide a Redis add-on for extended object caching functionality, ElasticSearch for high-performance search, and reverse proxy functionality for clients that require a proxied setup for their site. Lastly, we also have a variety of useful backup-related add-ons – high-frequency snapshots (1 snapshot/hour), as well as external backups to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
How do you envision the future of your industry, and how will Kinsta evolve in years to come?
АZ: My hope is that the evolution of hosting and cloud computing brings faster, highly-secure, and less cost-prohibitive technology to more people worldwide. Kinsta is dedicated to innovation, so our path includes more intuitive, high-performance tools and hosting products that meet the needs of developers, business owners, and enterprises. We keep a close watch on the latest technology and embrace the best the web has to offer. And if it doesn’t exist, we build it! Keep an eye out, Kinsta has lots in store for 2021.
