Kamatera Review: Powerful Host, but Read This First [2025]

Kamatera at a Glance

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, with coverage across four continents. It provides services in Russian, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and German, as well as English. Unless you’re trying to reach Antarctica or remote parts of Asia, you’ll probably find a server close to your visitors.

With affordable prices starting at $4.00/month plus a 30-day free trial with $100 credit, the goal seems to make cloud hosting accessible to everyone, regardless of budget. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart or the newbie, as it requires some technical skills and knowledge to get the most out of it.

You can choose almost every aspect of your cloud virtual server, from RAM, CPU, and data center location. You can even choose to pay monthly or by the hour. Kamatera also gives you root access, so you can have control over your server and bring in your own control panel and OS. There are managed services, but they’re a monthly add-on. To use Kamatera’s servers without too many headaches, you have to know what you’re doing.

I built and ran a test website to see just how well Kamatera’s hybrid cloud VPS services performed. Spoiler: I was not disappointed by my results. If you want to see why I recommend Kamatera and if it’s right for your business, keep reading.

Kamatera’s Standout Feature Is Its Customizability

With eight different OS options (including Windows), RAM ranging from 1 GB to 524 GB, a choice between 1 and 104 vCPUs, and four server types (availability, general purpose, burstable, or dedicated), you can set up the server of your dreams. And these choices come standard with all plans. Let’s take a look at some other special features.

If You Need More Resources, 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 your preferred OS, or choose from a preconfigured server with a collection of apps and control panels. There are solutions for almost every conceivable situation – including e-commerce websites, web application hosting, and more.

Every virtual server comes with the ability to scale resources individually (and instantly). Need more storage but don’t want to pay for more RAM? No problem. You can scale resources up or down as needed through your dashboard. It takes no time at all.

Kamatera 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.

Versatile Control Panel and App Choices

If you want to do things from scratch, you can start with a simple OS image. Your options include Linux, Ubuntu, AlmaLinux, CentOS, Debian, RockyLinux and, of course, Windows. The OS images are pretty up-to-date, too.

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, CyberPanel, or Vesta. Depending on the OS you want to use, you may not be able to mix and match all the available choices. You may also incur an additional charge or have to buy the licensing yourself. Those might be a small price to pay for the flexibility Kamatera offers.

Preinstalled app 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 store a big old MySQL database or five. Kamatera even has simple, service-based server images to choose from. These include:

Load Balancer, Built-In Firewall, and System Recovery

Well, it wouldn’t be cloud hosting without load balancing, would it? You don’t have to worry about getting hit with loads of traffic all at once because Kamatera’s 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 protocols in place. Besides 24/7 real-time data replication and monitoring that’s included in every server package, it offers a Server Recovery Option (SRO) add-on solution that automatically switches to a backup system in the event of an outage.

Kamatera Features at a Glance

My Hosting Experience With Kamatera

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. 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.

Other Ease of Use Features

Full Server Control With 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 for a Flat Monthly Rate

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 add-on is priced at a flat monthly fee, so whether you’re running a fairly new e-commerce site or a complex server network, you’ll pay the same price every month.

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 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. 24 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. All in all, I think this response was fair and I appreciated the customer service rep’s offer to help.

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.