Kamatera Review: Powerful Host, but Read This First [2024]

Global Cloud Hosting for All (Well, That’s the Plan)

Kamatera Pros, Cons, & Things That Could Be Better

Kamatera offers cloud-based VPS-style hosting, with data centers all over the world. And I do mean all over. The goal seems to be making cloud hosting accessible to everyone, with affordable prices (starting at $4.00 plus a 30-day free trial) and easy server setup.

But does Kamatera live up to this lofty goal?

Actually… yes. Well, somewhat. Listen, it’s a whole thing, and while I was impressed with the service in some aspects, others might well let you down. It depends entirely on what you need for your website and how familiar you are with managing servers.

I built and ran a test website to see for myself just how this cloud hosting/VPS hybrid performed. Unfortunately, doing so required some advanced knowledge that isn’t common to the average user. However, if this isn’t an obstacle for you, Kamatera’s low pricing and free trial make signing up with this host a risk-free, money-savvy move. To see how Kamatera compares.

To see how Kamatera compares with the competition – and decide whether or not it’s the host for you– read my full, detailed review below.

Whether You Need a Website or an “Internal” Network, You’ve Got Options

I hope you don’t easily get decision paralysis, because you are going to be loaded down with options here. You can start up an instance with most major server operating systems (OSs), or go for a preconfigured server with a whole host of different apps and control panels to choose from.

Now, you don’t really get to mix and match the OS and control panel options unless you want to set it up yourself or hire Kamatera to do it for you. But still, the options are plentiful.

There are solutions for almost every conceivable situation – including e-commerce websites, web application hosting, and more. Oh, and did I mention that you can try Kamatera for 30 days for free?

Every virtual server comes with the ability to scale resources individually. Need more storage but don’t want to pay for more RAM? No problem. You can scale resources up or down as needed with a simple form. It takes no time at all.

It should also be noted thatKamatera neither offers a free SSL nor sells SSLs. But if you pick a server image with a control panel, you can just generate your own certificates via Let’s Encrypt or a paid provider, so that’s not too big of a problem. You just need to know what you’re doing.

Speaking of server images, that’s how this whole system works. You can choose from a pretty darned large number of server images. Choose one, everything gets installed for you automatically, and you just go on from there.

If you want to do things more or less from scratch, you can start with a simple OS image. Your options include Linux, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, TrueNAS, FreeNAS, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and, of course, Windows. The OS images are pretty up-to-date, too. You can install CentOS version 8, Ubuntu 22.04, Windows Server 2022; the usual good stuff.

Now, if you’d rather not spend a perfectly good afternoon configuring all your own software, you can install an image that already includes server software and an app of your choice (like WordPress, Joomla, or even MediaWiki).

If you want more flexibility, you can pick an image with a control panel like cPanel, Plesk, or Vesta. Mind you, you have to pay for any licenses yourself, and that could cost a pretty penny.

These preinstalled app/control panel options include:

Now let’s say you don’t need a server to have much beyond PHP or Node because you want to write your own app from scratch. Or maybe you just need somewhere to put a big old MySQL database or five.

Kamatera even has simple, service-based server images to choose from. These include:

So those are all the standard features. Now let’s have a look at some of the big-ticket items:

Load Balancer, Built-In Firewall, and System Recovery

Well, it wouldn’t be cloud hosting without load balancing, would it? The point is that you don’t have to worry as much about getting hit with loads of traffic all at once, because the underlying server tech will be able to handle it.

As for potential attacks, the built-in firewall system at Kamatera helps to ease some of the strain. You’ll still have to manage your server’s security yourself, for the most part. You know, keep your ports locked, don’t give your root password to beautiful spies, don’t click any links about enlarging appendages, that sort of thing.

And if everything does go wrong, Kamatera has disaster recovery written into its hosting – and that’s included in every server package. Besides 24/7 real-time data replication and monitoring, it offers a Server Recovery Option (SRO) add-on solution that can help keep your website or server online through it all.

Cloud Private Network

So there might be times when you want a server that’s not for the rest of the internet to see. In that case, you can choose a sort of LAN networking option when the server is created. This should, in theory, allow you to patch this remote server into your local network.

This is great if you want to run things like Mattermost (a Slack alternative), or other team-focused software on a server that you control but don’t have to physically maintain.

Or, I dunno, use it for the super-secret company blog?

Remote Desktop Images

So this is interesting as all heck: You can actually install a desktop OS on your server at Kamatera. You have the choice of Ubuntu or Windows 10, and you can use virtual network computing (VNC) to access it. Well, if you choose Ubuntu, you also have the option of using remote desktop protocol (RDP).

In any case, you get a remote desktop. Why would you want that? Well, if you only have a small laptop at home, you could use the remote desktop to run tasks and programs that are too CPU-intensive for, say, a Chromebook.

Kamatera Features at a Glance

Well… It’s Easy to Start a Server

This is the section where things went a little downhill, if I’m honest. Don’t get me wrong, actually using the service is pretty easy. Check out the image below. The UI is clean, clear, and usable. Starting up a new server (and managing your existing servers) is simple stuff. I literally have no complaints.

Creating a New Account with Kamatera

The problems I ran into involve all those handy preconfigured server images I mentioned above. Basically, creating a new account and connecting a domain are no easy feat with Kamatera. I’m an I-can-Google-this-maybe sort of system administrator at best, and to use this hosting service, you’ll want an expert. Let me explain:

Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress

I wanted a WordPress site, so I figured, just grab the WordPress image, right? Well, the pre-built WordPress image comes with Ubuntu 18.04, NGINX, and PHP 7.2. A little dated, but not too shabby. It all installed fine, and everything was easy to set up.

Except the domain name. Turns out to get that working right, you have to point your domain name at the server (easy), configure the NGINX server to listen on that domain manually in the config files (uhhh… less easy for me), and then… get WordPress to stop telling you that it can’t find the database when you change its URL settings (pain in my butt).

See, I’m sure all of these problems have perfectly reasonable solutions, and if I knew more about the inner workings of both the NGINX server and WordPress, I could probably have gotten my domain working.

But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to start up a website and have it work without me thinking too hard.

Eventually I just deleted that server and started a new one with the Plesk control panel, which had pretty much the same OS and software installed. I was able to install WordPress and get the domain working for the duration of Plesk’s free trial.

And then the Plesk panel kept crashing, giving me 502 errors, all because something called “sw-engine.service” kept crashing. Fortunately, the WordPress site itself stayed up, and allowed me to keep testing.

And that’s the only reason I didn’t scrap everything, start over with a fresh CentOS server, and do it all from “semi-scratch” with CyberPanel.

The short version is this: Some of the preconfigured servers come with problems baked in. Not only would I not recommend Kamatera for beginners, I wouldn’t touch the service unless I was ready and willing to get my hands dirty in the command line. If you’re looking for something more beginner-friendly, Liquid Web has some decent cloud/VPS solutions.

Full Server Control + Low Pricing to Match

The above won’t be a deal-breaker for everyone. If you’re the kind of person who likes building your own server from scratch, Kamatera’s affordable pricing and solid performance might well be what you want. And you don’t even necessarily have to do it yourself… if you’re willing to pay.

Server Management Services (Cost a Lot Extra)

If you want a server that’s configured and maintained, and generally kept working by someone else, you have that option. For a pretty substantial fee every month (well, substantial for people on a budget), you can have the Kamatera team do everything for you.

That includes setup, server installation and configuration, troubleshooting, everything. For a medium-sized business, or even a small business that’s making money off its site, this is a perfectly reasonable way to do things and could save you a lot of trouble.

This, you could say, is the “beginner option.” Being a beginner has its costs, I guess.

Customizable Server Dashboard (Everyone Gets This)

With Kamatera, you can set up your own custom main server-management dashboard to tell you how many resources your servers are using, what kind of traffic they’re getting (but not analytics), and all that good statistical stuff.

It’s a small thing, maybe, but I like being able to configure exactly what information I can see at a glance.

This Is Good Stuff, I’m Glad to Say

Kamatera’s biggest selling points are that its cloud infrastructure is fast, and it has servers everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. 21 data centers that cover Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East is nothing to sneeze at.

Those first two areas have servers in Hong Kong, Toronto, New York, Santa Clara, Dallas, Miami, Chicago, Madrid, Milan, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and London. And then, there are just a whole bunch of servers in Israel (Rosh Haayin, Jerusalem, Petach Tikva, and Tel Aviv).

How does that translate into performance? Well, I picked the Dallas, Texas server center, set up my WordPress-based testing site (eventually), and got these results:

If you want to know how we conduct hosting performance tests, have a look here.

GTmetrix

Since you want to keep load times under 2 seconds, ideally, that 1.1s average is pretty great, and the server was very stable. The fastest loading time was 1s, and the slowest was 1.2s – and that’s because my page was a little heavy that time.

I sort of misplaced the optimized images I typically use, and I wanted to check the performance of my site with oversized images anyway. When you take into account the size of the page, even with Gzip compression enabled, the results are really good.

UptimeRobot

You really can’t beat 100% uptime! What’s more, the graph shows fairly little variance in ping times. Oh, that 400ms spike would be hell for a video game… but for a web page? That’s doing okay.

Generally Prompt, Not Always Helpful

The support team is, I think, hampered by the fact that Kamatera wants to sell its server management services. That’s fair enough in some respects, but it led to some disappointment in my interactions.

At least I can say the team is very available. The support team can be reached 24/7. The sales and billing teams are available Monday – Friday, 8:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. EST, in most of the world and Sunday – Thursday, 8:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. IST, in the Middle East.

All teams are available by email and phone, and you can open support tickets from your dashboard.

Here’s how my interactions went:

Email

Well, this one was my fault, really. I emailed the sales team asking, “How easy is it to install WordPress?” Thing is, I emailed them outside of business hours. By the time they got back to me, I had already started up a server because I was impatient to get my testing started.

Therefore, this is about the most reasonable, helpful response I could expect:

Tickets

Then, when I was having trouble with the preconfigured WordPress server, I opened a ticket to ask how I was supposed to set up my domain name. The agent was only minimally helpful, giving me advice that only an actual sys-admin might be able to implement. Then he tried to sell me the management services. I understand that he can’t (and probably isn’t supposed to) help people like me set things up unless I’ve paid for it. However, other hosting services I’ve tested at least linked me to a tutorial when similar situations occurred.

Phone

When I faced issues with my Plesk panel, I reached out to the 24/7 hotline. The support agent, to his merit, was very straightforward with me. Essentially, his role was to assist individuals whose servers were genuinely offline. He admitted my issue was something that needed attention, just not from him.

He told me to call back because the engineers who could actually help me wouldn’t be in until 5 hours later (I called around 6:45 p.m. CST). In the end, I didn’t bother. Still, I give him points for honesty and for not trying to sell me anything.

It’s a Darned Decent Price for the Service

While I’ve encountered many cheaper options in the world of VPS hosting, Kamatera has an advantage most of those other companies don’t: it’s cloud-based. If you’ve ever done any research into cloud hosting, you’ll know that as soon as the word “cloud” shows up, you can expect the price to double or triple.

Well, I’m happy to report that Kamatera doesn’t do that. Simply put, the price is more than acceptable when you consider the infrastructure your site will be running on. It’s a lot of bang for your buck, and my test site ran well on the smallest (read: cheapest) resource plan that Kamatera has. Plus, you don’t have to pay a cent to start, as Kamatera offers a 30-day free trial.

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Of course, you’ll have to pay extra for some fairly important features (like backups), but that’s commerce for you.

If you decide those reasonable prices are for you, you can pay with any major credit card. I managed it with no fuss and no problems with the fraud detection system. I do love it when I give my money to a company, and the company just takes it without whining.

Cancellation & Refunds

This is where Kamatera excels. There is no money-back guarantee, because you don’t need one. There’s a straight-up, no-questions-asked free trial for 30 days. If you cancel your service before the 30 days are up, there’s just no charge.

You do have to provide credit card details for your account, and you will be charged about $2 USD (or your local equivalent – I was actually charged less) to confirm those details. You’re also limited to using the cheapest server configuration, with no extra services. Add those services and you’ll have to pay up.

That said, my small, simple test site worked just fine on this setup, so I can’t complain. I was even able to attach a domain that I already owned to the test servers at no charge.