Wondering which is better between Kinsta vs Cloudways? If you’re unsure which of these 2 managed WordPress hosting to use, then you’re at the right place.
In recent times, managed web hosting has become quite popular among many users. It is, in fact, a great choice if you want to host your WordPress site on a cloud platform for more reliability and performance.
Among the available options, Kinsta and Cloudways are popular and big names in managed WordPress hosting. They both are best in their ways.
But the most important question right now is which one is the better hosting for you? Of course, it depends on what you’re looking for!
So, to help you out, we present you the comparison between “Kinsta vs Cloudways”. We’ll compare them side by side in their speed & performance, customer services, pricing, pros, cons, and more to decide which is suitable for you.
Let’s get started!
A. Kinsta vs Cloudways – Overview
Before we start the main review, let’s try to know a little more about both of them first.
What is Kinsta? – Overview
Kinsta is a popular brand in managed WordPress hosting that was founded in 2013. From its launch till today, it has become a popular choice for WordPress users looking for fast loading times and secure infrastructure for their website.
Being a WordPress hosting provider, it only accepts and hosts WordPress websites. Plus, it’s a managed hosting provider so the hosting company (Kinsta) takes care of everything that’s usually involved in managing a server.
Hence, you don’t have to get your hands dirty and can focus on creating content for your WordPress website. Plus, Kinsta is based on the Google Cloud Platform so no doubt you’ll be running your website on high-quality infrastructure.
However, the pricing starts at $30 a month for the entry-level plan which isn’t cheap though. Yet, it doesn’t fail you to provide a WordPress-optimized environment to host your website.
Main Features of Kinsta
These are the main features of Kinsta that it has to offer:
- Managed WordPress and WooCommerce Hosting
- High-Security Network
- High-Performance Unlimited CDN
- Powered by Google Cloud Platform
- Free Site Migrations
- Multilingual 24/7/365 Support
- 24/7 Monitoring
- Automatic/Manual Backups
- MyKinsta Dashboard
- Free SSL and Cloudflare DDoS Protection
Now let’s take a look at Cloudways, to find out a little more about them.
What is Cloudways? – Overview
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting company based in Malta that was launched in 2011. Over time it has become quite popular and has provided hosting for over 600,000+ sites.
Its goal is to provide a hassle-free hosting service to help set up and run a website in minutes with 24/7/365 support available. It has been providing quality hosting services to agencies, developers, and individuals under the same roof.
The functionality of Cloudways is not just limited to WordPress rather you can install it on other CMS too if you want. Plus, it has a great balance between affordability, flexibility, and great functionality when it comes to cloud-based managed hosting.
You also get to choose and host your WordPress website on different cloud providers – DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, and Google Cloud.
Likewise, the obvious strong point of Cloudways is that its hosting starts from $10/month. It even follows a pay-as-you-go approach that helps you scale your hosting resources as your website grows.
Main Features of Cloudways
These are the main features Cloudways offers
- 5 Cloud Hosting Providers
- Cloudflare Enterprise CDN
- All PHP Apps Supported
- Online Ticketing
- 24/7/365 Customer Support
- Automated Backups
- IP Whitelisting
- 1-Click Free SSL Installation
- Free WordPress Cache Plugin
- Priority Phone Support
- Pay-as-you-go Payment Model
Now that you know the basics about Kinsta and Cloudways, let’s explore their performance, security, pricing, and support.
B. Kinsta vs Cloudways – Speed & Performance
In this section, we’re going to be taking a closer look at how Kinsta and Cloudways perform in terms of speed and performance. So let’s find out which of these hosting companies is best overall!
Kinsta – Improves Your Website’s Performance With the Fastest Infrastructures
Kinsta is built under the Google-based architecture which means it uses Google Cloud Platform’s premium tier network. It uses state-of-the-art technology like Nginx, PHP 8.1, and LXD which ensure that your site loads faster.
Not just that it uses high-performance unlimited CDN that helps you speed up your content delivery much faster. Its HTTP/3-enabled CDN powered by Cloudflare guarantees you to give 99.9% uptime to all the websites you’ve hosted on the platform.
Not just that, it automatically optimizes your database weekly so that you can sit back and enjoy the performance boost. Moreover, its inbuilt powerful caching setup makes sure that you don’t have to buy any additional plugins for caching.
In fact, Kinsta has 29 data centers that are geographically located in different places in Europe, Asia, Australia, etc.
Hence, it allows you to choose the data center geographically closest to your audience for your WordPress sites. In this way, you’ll be able to keep latency low and load times faster.
Overall, we can say that Kinsta performs excellently and quite validates the claim that they handle traffic spikes efficiently.
Cloudways – No Compromise in Speed
Just like Kinsta, Cloudways also doesn’t seem to compromise when it comes to loading speed. Its blazing-fast Thunderstack is a PHP stack packed with the world’s best server software that includes NGINX, Apache, Memcached, PHP-FCM, and more.
This perfect combination of software and hardware makes sure that it noticeably boosts your website speed and performance.
On other hand, its built-in CDN support helps to maximize speed on any day and guarantees to give you an uptime of 99.99%. Having said that, it integrates with Cloudflare enterprise CDN which dramatically improves the performance of your website.
This will help to deliver your content faster globally and reduce latency, loading time, and bandwidth costs. Plus, it’s an SSD-based hosting which makes it 3 times faster and reduces page load time for your dynamic websites.
However, to maintain the performance of your website, it comes with auto-healing managed cloud servers. This will make sure that you don’t have to worry about your website crashing. As the issues within the server are resolved with auto-healing restarts.
Besides, it comes with a pre-installed WordPress cache plugin called Breeze to offer better WordPress performance. With this, you also get a dedicated environment, PHP 7 ready servers, Redis support, image and mobile optimization, HTTP/3 support, and more.
Overall, Cloudways is the winner when it comes to uptime with an uptime guarantee of 99.99%. But both of them offer incredible infrastructure and advanced features to keep your website running smoothly.
C. Kinsta vs Cloudways – Security and Backup
In this section, let’s try to explore what different security and backup options each of them has to offer.
Kinsta – Secure WordPress Hosting Solution
With Kinsta, they take security quite seriously and try to provide 24/7 monitoring with a wide range of security features. Their secure WordPress hosting solution tends to implement active and passive measures to stop attacks on your website.
It claims to monitor your website every two minutes for uptime, response time, and DDoS attacks and proactively stop malicious code from entering your network. Also, if the threats and attacks are detected earlier then they’re able to stop them immediately.
The best thing is that all the sites hosted on Kinsta are protected by Cloudflare’s enterprise-level firewall with free DDoS protection.
Moreover, it supports two-factor authentication, IP geolocation blocking, and automatically bans IPs with more than 6 failed login attempts in a minute. Also, it only supports encrypted SFTP and SSH connections to access your WordPress sites directly.
Similarly, if we look at backup options then Kinsta provides 100% hack-proof automatic backups. They’ll automatically create two weeks’ worth of backups so that in case of being hacked or defaced then your site can be instantly rolled back.
Furthermore, you can also create a manual backup for any individual site including one downloadable backup every week. And with Kinsta’s external backup add-ons you can back up your WordPress site to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
Cloudways – Enhanced Security Infrastructures
Just like in Kinsta, Cloudways does seem to support your website with lots of enhanced security and backup features. It provides you enterprise-graded security with Cloudflare integrated.
Cloudways and Cloudflare have come along to help you protect your websites from DDoS attacks, eliminate malicious traffic, and score higher on core web vitals.
Every Cloudways server comes with firewall protection that allows access only to specific ports that are required for applications to function. With that, it also protects your WordPress sites from traffic congestion caused by malicious bots.
Similarly, it allows its users to whitelist IP addresses to set up secure database remote access. Plus, it provides all its users with free SSL certificates to ensure the security of the application’s data in transit.
To ensure the security of your account, Cloudways supports two-factor authentication (2FA). This acts as secondary layer protection to make sure that only you are able to log into your Cloudways account.
Moreover, it includes application isolation, user role management, end-to-end encryption, GDPR compliance, and more. Also, it supports encrypted SFTP and SSH logins to help you deal with brute-force login attacks.
If in case any brute-force login is attempted, then Cloudways checks all devices that attempt to access your account. Then, it notifies you with a device flagged as “Suspicious” for false login attempts by email, and appropriate actions are taken to verify your identity.
Furthermore, Cloudways comes with worry-free automatic backups options. It offers you two options to choose either automatic backups or use a 1-click backup and restore.
All the backups are created and stored at another location so that you’ll always have access to a backup when you need it.
With a single click, you can have a fresh copy of your entire site (including files, themes, plugins, and database) restored in a matter of minutes. However, unlike Kinsta, Cloudways doesn’t seem to provide you with manual backups.
In nutshell, both Kinsta and Cloudways don’t seem to compromise the security aspect, so we’ve to announce that both provide awesome security features.
D. Kinsta vs Cloudways – Pricing
When it comes to pricing, things can get a bit confusing. Based on pricing, you can also decide which of the managed web hosting services is suitable for your needs
Now it’s time to look at the pricing and plans offered by Kinsta and Cloudways and find out which hosting platform is better for your website?
Kinsta – Premium Managed WordPress Hosting Pricing
At first, when you look at the pricing plan of Kinsta, you might be quite confused. Because Kinsta has 10 different tiers of plans available to suit businesses of all different sizes.
Unlike Cloudways, Kinsta has only one option when it comes to cloud servers i.e. Google Cloud Platform. And has a data center at 29 different locations to choose from for each of your sites.
However, if we divide the pricing plans into subcategories then it has 4 pricing plans – Starter, Pro, Business, and Enterprise.
- Starter ($30 per month) – With this, you’ll get one WordPress install, 25,000 visits, 10 GB of disk space, 1 premium migration, 14 days of backup retention, and more.
- Pro ($60 per month) – It offers two WordPress install, 50,000 visits, 20 GB of disk space, 2 premium migration, site, site cloning, 14 days of backup retention, and more.
- Business ($100 – $400 per month) – This plan comes with four Business plans and with its Business 1 plan you’ll get five WordPress install, 100,000 visits, 30 GB of disk space, 3 premium migration, site, site cloning, 14 days of backup retention, and more.
- Enterprise ($600 – $1,500 per month) – Similarly, it also comes with four Enterprise plans, and with its Enterprise 1 plan you’ll get 60 WordPress install, 1,000,000 visits, 100 GB of disk space, 5 premium migration, site, site cloning, 30 days of backup retention, and more.
Moreover, with all these plans, you’ll also get free CDN, automatic daily backups, PHP 8.0 support, SSH access, self-healing technology, Google Cloud Platform, 24/7 support, a multi-user environment, and more.
Lastly, it also comes with a 30-day full money-back guarantee on all plans, so you can try Kinsta and get a refund for the services without financial risk.
Cloudways – Flexible, and Pay-as-You-Go Plan
Similar to Kinsta, Cloudways also comes with multiple pricing plans i.e. 60+ plans across different providers. Unlike Kinsta only has Google Cloud Platform as its cloud hosting service, Cloudways has 5 different cloud hosting services.
Here are five different cloud hosting services to choose from, including
- DigitalOcean – 16
- Linode – 10
- Vultr -14
- AWS – 18
- Google Cloud Platform – 11
Besides that, the best thing about Cloudways is that it follows a pay-as-you-go approach. This means that you can choose any of its cloud hosting plans and can always scale up/down to optimize your operational costs.
Moreover, in comparison to Kinsta, Cloudways has the cheapest starting plan starting at $10/month for the DigitalOcean server. Following that, the pricing goes up from there depending on how much RAM, storage, and bandwidth you need.
And the best part is that you don’t need to pay separately for cloud hosting. All the prices that you see at Cloudways include both cloud hosting and the charges for Cloudways.
For now, let’s look at the pricing plan for the DigitalOcean Standard –
With all these pricing plans, we’ll also get 24/7/365 support, a staging environment, dedicated firewalls, free SSL, Cloudflare add-ons, auto-healing, free migration, automated backups, team management, and more.
After looking at these all, we can say that Cloudways is not only cheaper but offers more flexibility than Kinsta.
E. Kinsta vs Cloudways – Customer Support
Having good customer support is one of the most important features when it comes to choosing a good hosting provider. Because with web hosting, now and then you’ll always be needing good customer support to take care of your issues
Let’s find out whether Kinsta is better at providing customer support or Cloudways can top it off.
Kinsta – Solid 24/7 Support
Kinsta offers world-class 24/7 support on all hosting plans when you need it. They’ve got a team of highly experienced support staff that has excellent knowledge in troubleshooting, server maintenance, theme and plugin building, and more.
Unlike Cloudways, Kinsta doesn’t offer multiple support channels like priority tickets, phone support, and community forums. However, Kinsta does come with 24/7 live support that helps you connect with a support engineer in real-time.
The best thing about this live support is that it offers support in multiple languages. To get support in your language, you can see the available time slots on their support page.
Moreover, its Knowledge Base and Help Center are the perfect places to help you get valuable guides, technical overviews, and troubleshooting materials. Besides that, their proactive site monitoring checks the status of all the sites every 2 minutes which helps you avoid problems in the first place.
Above all, no matter what plan you’re on, you’ll get the same level of fast, friendly, and expert support.
Cloudways – Quicker Response Time
Cloudways does seem to offer you different levels of 24/7 support. It comes with three levels of support to choose from – Standard, Advanced, and Premium Support Add-on.
Now let’s look at what different support features you get with all these support add-ons.
- Standard (Free) – 24/7/365 access to the professionally-trained support team, initial response within 12 hours, or 3 hours for high priority tickets, infrastructure support, and platform support.
- Advanced ($100/mo) – 24/7/365 access to senior support team members, initial response within 6 hours, or 30 minutes for high priority tickets, infrastructure support, application support, and platform support.
- Premium ($500/mo) – 24/7/365 access to senior Support Team members, unlimited chat duration, initial response within 2 hours, or 10 minutes for high-priority tickets, private slack channel support, and phone support.
Besides that, with advanced and premium support, you’ll also get plugin/theme troubleshooting, a dedicated account manager, server error investigation, proactive monitoring, customization, etc.
With this all, it also comes with a highly productive Knowledge Base and Blogs. In these, you’ll get everything starting from step-by-step guides to tips and best practices from experts.
Likewise, you can also join their Community Forum and get connected with their customers all around the world. Plus, if you want to know more about how Cloudways has contributed to the success of other businesses, check out their Case Studies.
Although Cloudways provides multiple support plans, they’re quite expensive. Whereas, live chat is the primary way to get support which is free and available with all Kinsta plans.
That being said, both the companies don’t disappoint you when it comes to the response time. Both are quick to provide expert knowledge to solve any problems that may arise.
F. Kinsta vs Cloudways – Customer Reviews
By far, we’ve already discussed different aspects to find out whether Kinsta or Cloudways is a better-managed hosting provider for your WordPress website.
But a better way to understand which is best is to look at customer reviews. Hands down this will definitely give you a well-rounded review of both the hosting providers.
Here, we’ll be using Trustpilot and G2 Reviews to see what people are saying about Kinsta or Cloudways.
Kinsta – Happily Satisfied Customers
If we just look at Kinsta’s customer review from G2 Review then, it has a 4.7 out of 5-star rating which is pretty amazing. Similarly, you’ll get 4.4 out of 5 stars given by 450+ users on Trustpilot Review.
Similarly, most of the users praised its excellent security features and customer service. Even more, they’re amazed by their migration feature, quick speed, user-friendly dashboard, and best performance.
The customers even gave a big fat thumbs-up to its easy-to-use staging development area too.
However, a few users also complained and criticized Kinsta’s work and feature too. And for those, Kinsta has responded to them with a sincere apology and has promised to look into their issues and problems ASAP!
Cloudways – Happy and Supportive Customers
According to G2 Review, Cloudways has received an average of 4.8 out of 5-star reviews from 290+ users. Whereas with the Trustpilot Review, Cloudways has been reviewed by 1280 users and has been given a rating of 4.7/5 stars. Isn’t this amazing?
Similarly, if we look into some of the reviews of their customers then, most of them loved how it provided superfast cloud hosting service at a cheaper price. Following that, some of the users didn’t stop praising its amazing customer support.
They found that Cloudways is quite quick with their responses and never disappoints you with their services.
However, in almost all the reviews, users somehow found they didn’t have a user-friendly interface. They seem to feel that it has a bit of a steep learning curve if you’re a new user.
Overall the customers are extremely happy with both the cloud hosting providers even with their few flaws. Also, in the end, both of them have a really good star rating too.
G. Kinsta vs Cloudways – Comparision Table
| Kinsta | Cloudways | |
| Hosting Type | Fully Cloud Managed WordPress Hosting | Cloud Managed Hosting (WordPress, Laravel, Magento, Drupal, WooCommerce, PHP) |
| Pricing | Starts at $30 per month | Starts at $10 per month |
| Hosting Platform | Google Cloud | DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, and Google Cloud |
| Free SSL Certificate | Yes | Yes |
| Backup | Automatic, Manual, External Backup Add-ons | Automatic, 1-click backup and restore |
| CDN | Yes – Powered by Cloudflare Integration | Yes – Integrated with Cloudflare Enterprise |
| Email Hosting | No | No |
| Free Site Migration | Yes | Yes |
| Staging Environment | All Plans | All Plans |
| Support Type | Live Chat | Phone, Live Chat, Ticket |
| Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days | No |
H. Kinsta vs Cloudways – Pros and Cons
In this section, we’ll look at the pros and cons of both the managed WordPress hosting providers. Let’s start off with Kinsta.
Kinsta – Pros and Cons
Pros of Kinsta
- 99.9% uptime guaranteed
- Built on Google Cloud Platform
- Highly experienced and excellent support
- Robust security features
- Free migration and easy to set up
Cons of Kinsta
- Competitively expensive pricing; especially for small businesses
- No premium support plans like tickets and phone support
- Doesn’t offer email hosting
Cloudways – Pros and Cons
Pros of Cloudways
- 100% uptime guaranteed
- Even its cheapest plans offer excellent performance
- Offers flexible pay-as-you-go plan
- Provides 3-day free trial
- Offers phone support
Cons of Cloudways
- Doesn’t include email hosting
- No manual backup option
- Doesn’t have a money-back guarantee option
- Overwhelming and confusing choices of cloud service
I. Kinsta vs Cloudways – Final Verdict
Both Kinsta and Cloudways are powerful hosting platforms that come with their own robust features. And don’t disappoint you with their powerful functionality, speed, performance, and security.
Hence, even after all these you’re still stressed out about choosing the hosting of your website then let’s help you a bit more on this.
According to us, Cloudways is far ahead of Kinsta when it comes to pricing, flexibility, and performance. It’s quite affordable and its base price even starts at $10/mo which even follows a pay-as-you-go approach.
Another best thing about Cloudways is that they’ve got a range of prices to suit different types of businesses and different website needs.
Similarly, Kinsta is also a good alternative if you’re looking for user-friendly managed WordPress hosting. However, in comparison to Cloudways, it isn’t quite flexible yet it’s easy to use.
Not just that, it has one of the best super-fast reliable customer support and comes with both automatic and manual WordPress backup options.
Eventually, it’s all up to you! Make sure you do good research and be clear about what kind of services you want for your website.
Conclusion
At last, we would like to say that both of these managed WordPress hosting services are at the top of their game.
If you have any further queries about Kinsta vs Cloudways, then please leave a comment below. We’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible.
Also, let us know which one you are going to choose from both? You can share your pick in the comments section below.
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