WPX vs Kinsta 2022 – Best Managed WordPress Hosting?

In this article we’re going to compare two of the best managed hosting services around: WPX and Kinsta. I’ve been using WPX for years, but I also recently tried out Kinsta when I bought a site which was hosted on there. So what do I think?

Both WPX and Kinsta provide super-fast hosting and offer excellent customer support. One is a bit faster than the other, and one is that bit easier to use. That said, both are highly recommended.

You’ll see which one comes out on top as we go through this article. 🙂

An Introduction to WPX and Kinsta

WPX and Kinsta are WordPress hosting services that offer various website solutions, such as helping scale your website for higher traffic, managing cybersecurity risks, and optimizing website speed. However, their primary function is to store all of the data and files that make up your unique website. This information is stored on servers that they rent out to anyone who wants to build and host a website on the internet.

There are a ton of different web hosting services which all have their own bells and whistles. AWS is Amazon’s website services platform, which is a behemoth in the industry. Other common web hosting services are GoDaddy and Hostinger, which let you buy domain names and project your website to the masses.

Why Do You Need a Web Hosting Service?

Every website on the internet requires a hosting service. This piece of the puzzle allows you to broadcast the website you built to the masses. The WPX glossary gives an excellent metaphor for what web hosting is:

“[Hosting] is essentially like renting property (server space), onto which you can build your house (website) and give your house a name and address (domain name and IP address).”

Have you ever tried to buy tickets to a popular concert, but when you get to the webpage to buy the tickets, the whole thing crashes? This common (and annoying) occurrence is because the website’s hosting platform did not stand up to the sudden increase in user traffic.

In essence, you need a good web hosting service if you want your website to operate smoothly. Wherever you are hosting your website will dictate the speed, accessibility, and volume of users that your website can handle.

There are also many features that hosting services like WPX and Kinsta provide to make your life a whole lot easier. Managing the content of your website will require a comprehensive and ever-growing knowledge base which these services are designed to assist with. It will give you details about your website’s performance over time, keep your website protected from cybersecurity attacks, and allow you to build and expand any existing features on your website.

About Kinsta

Kinsta is one example of a WordPress content management system done right. You can do so much with this service, yet it is functional and easy to use even if you do not have a background in programming.

Kinsta allows users to host various WordPress websites in a single place to manage their performance and gain insights via detailed analytics. It is supported by the biggest and most secure infrastructure network around, meaning your site is less prone to hacks or crashes. This will optimize the performance of your website, making it faster, more reliable, and securing you better returns on searches.

Features

The foundation of Kinsta’s whole deal is their use of Google Cloud’s network and platform to power their hosting services, combined with an expert team of WordPress developers and software engineers to provide round-the-clock support for any of your needs.

If you use Kinsta, you get all the same performance and security benefits of companies like Spotify, Best Buy, and Coca Cola thanks to the use of the Google Cloud platform. Google Cloud has 25 server locations worldwide, and through Kinsta, you can pick where your websites are hosted from so that you can be in close proximity to most of your customers. This greatly increases the speed and reliability of your website across networks.

Kinsta is solely used for WordPress, meaning they have experience and know-how in pretty much every aspect of managing these types of websites. You can build on, de-bug, and optimize your existing WordPress site, or you can even build a whole new one in the Kinsta platform.

Costs

There are several levels of membership for Kinsta. This is one of the key facets of their service: you get so much control over how much access you get for the money.

• The Starter Plan is only $30 per month for one website, 25,000 visits, and 10GB of disk space.
• Thenext step up is the Pro Plan which starts at $60 per month for two websites, 50,000 visits, and 20 GB of disk space.
• Business Plans range from $100-$400 per month for 5-40 websites, 100,000-600,000 visits, and 30-60 GB of disk space.
• For the big guns, there’s the Enterprise Plans. These range from $600-$1500 per month for 60-150 websites, 1,000,000-3,000,000 visits, and 100-250 GB of disk space.

Each of the plans comes with a thirty-day money-back guarantee just in case you are unhappy with the services. They all also come with free SSL and Custom Delivery Network access included.

Is Kinsta Worth It?

Simply put, Kinsta is an excellent choice for a WordPress hosting service. The reliability of the Google Cloud network is a huge plus and will provide you with top-of-the-line performance compared to most of the other web hosting services out there. There are also a few other major benefits to Kinsta:

• Features like automatic daily back-ups are vital for ensuring that all your hard work won’t randomly bite the dust.
• Their MyKinsta Dashboard feature is a fantastic way to track how your website performs, both in its operating performance and in its reach and impact on your audience.
• As noted above, huge companies rely on Kinsta to manage their web hosting, which should give you some assurance that their services are up to snuff.

You can see more details in this Kinsta review.

About WPX

Another web hosting service that is quickly gaining esteem in the industry is WPX. Much like Kinsta, WPX has one main mission: to make your website performance faster and more reliable. They just go about it a slightly different way.

The main thing lacking in WPX as opposed to Kinsta is the name recognition of the Google Cloud-enabled platform. But WPX is no slouch when it comes to speed and performance capabilities. In independent performance tests, WPX was 45% faster when compared to a similarly priced budget competitor. So there’s no need to worry about the speed with WPX.

Features

WPX is a streamlined and low-cost option for hosting your WordPress website. They offer competitive website speed capabilities and a host of other features aimed at improving how your website is managed.

• The real selling point of WPX is how great they are with customer support. Unlike many of its competitors, WPX prides itself on giving fast and trusted advice in language that makes sense. The amount of confusing jargon and complex information in the web hosting world makes it difficult for the layman to understand what is going on. This is not the case at WPX.
• WPX support question response times are thirty seconds on average. That means you won’t be stuck waiting around for help on a frustrating issue and can get back to the important stuff. WPX’s support team is available 24/7/365 via a live chat feature.
• You can register domain names through the WPX service, so no need to go through a third party. WPX also comes with a free email service, free website migration, and provides daily website back-ups.
• WPX employs a custom-built user admin panel that brings all of the various strands of website management into one easy-to-use platform. This will be your basecamp to build, gain insight, and optimize how your website performs.
• The technical capabilities of WPX are impressive as well. They use several server and site hosting functions like CDN, SSD, PHP 7.X, and optimized caching to keep your website running fast, and they intentionally under-load their servers so that you will never experience back-ups due to high server demand.
• WPX is also home to the non-profit animal rescue service Every Dog Matters, which helps find suitable homes for over 1000 at-risk dogs every year. So not only are you getting excellent web hosting, you are giving back to your furry little friends as well!

Cost

Thankfully, WPX is quite cost-effective. While you will get a more exhaustive array of membership options with Kinsta, WPX’s services are low-cost as a whole. Each of these options is more affordable to buy for a yearly membership than paying for it monthly, so keep that in mind when thinking about which plan works best for you:

• The Business Plan comes in at $24.99 per month for 5 websites, 10 GB of storage, and 100 GB of bandwidth.
• Next is the Professional Plan. For $49.99 per month, you get access to 15 websites, 20 GB of storage, and 200 GB of bandwidth.
• The top tier for WPX is the Elite Plan, which nets you 35 websites, 40 GB of storage, and infinite bandwidth for $99.99 per month.

WPX is quite inexpensive for everything that comes included. Beyond all of the features mentioned above, with every plan on WPX, you get access to their cloud CDN along with a host of other features like:

• Free Malware scanning and removal
• Unlimited SSLs
• 1-click WordPress installs
• 30-day money-back guarantee
• Access to website staging areas

Is WPX Worth It?

If you are looking for a great, low-cost option for web hosting, then WPX might be perfect for you. WPX is a professional quality service built for the non-professional web developer. They nix the highly technical hosting admin language that is all too common in most hosting services to instead provide a service designed for business owners and other folks simply trying to get a website off the ground.

But just because WPX is simpler and less costly doesn’t mean they skimp on the service. You can expect blazing fast website speeds and optimal server performance even with heavy web traffic. Their site performance is comparable to other web hosting platforms via independent testing, some of which are much pricier than WPX. And with their commitment to fast and effective customer service, WPX will never leave you hanging if you are stuck with a problem.

If you are relatively inexperienced in the web development world, WPX is absolutely worth it. The range of features you get for the price is hard to beat, and the performance capabilities are in line with other high-end options.

We look at them more in our WPX review.

WPX Vs. Kinsta: Which One is Better?

Now that you are familiar with what Kinsta and WPX have to offer, it is time to break down which service is better for your specific needs. There is a good amount of overlap between WPX and Kinsta in terms of the general services they offer, and really both are great options for web hosting and content management for your website.

But if you are splitting hairs, here are some questions to ask yourself before you pick a platform:

• How many websites are you looking to host? Are you a bandleader and simply want a fast website to promote a new album or a tour? Or are you a blogger with multiple different websites dedicated to various topics? Or are you a record label that needs to host websites for all of the groups you represent?
• What is the average traffic you are expecting? Obviously, your needs will be different if you are an artist just starting out versus a well-established artist with a big following. Try and find a rough number of views you expect every month.
• Where are most of your fans located? Are you only known in the Chicago area, or are people in Korea viewing your videos on YouTube? Getting on a server in close proximity to your page viewers is crucial for optimal website speed.

WPX Is Great For Smaller, Newer Projects

The platform’s approachability and round-the-clock support make WPX a great pick for any website owner. Overall, the price point and the lack of unnecessary features make WPX a better option for hosting an artist website or personal blog.

You could pay for a lot of storage and high traffic capacity, but this doesn’t make a ton of sense for newer websites. WPX will give you just what you need in terms of tailor-made web hosting in an easy-to-use format. You can rent your domain name in-house, and you can run all of your emails through a single platform. These are great features for those who might be new to the website game.

Kinsta is Perfect For Most Establish Sites

While WPX could handle large web hosting endeavors with ease, the range of features and performance capabilities of Kinsta makes it a more suitable option for larger, more established websites that are already making good money.

Nowadays, it is really hard to beat the size and reliability of the Google Cloud platform, and the fact that Kinsta is built from this network makes it the clear choice for high traffic, globally relevant websites. The fact that there are more payment tiers with Kinsta gives bigger entities like record labels more flexibility with how much money they have to devote each month to website maintenance.

Kinsta vs WPX Conclusion

Having an impressive website is crucial to breaking into a new level of success. Your website is basically your business card. It is the first thing people usually see when they look up your band, and if you are a blogger or record label, you will see a ton of opportunities head your way if you have a clean and optimized website.

Both WPX and Kinsta are excellent choices for web hosting, which is very important if you are seeing an uptick in website traffic or are butting up into the ceiling of that cheap web hosting option that came with your domain name. Generally, WPX is great for upstart projects, while Kinsta is more tailor-made for bigger, well-established projects. But both are perfect if you are looking to upgrade your website and make it run faster.

It’s important to note before we go, there are other competitiors for good managed WordPress hosting. Once such option is WP Engine, who we’ve also compared against cheaper hosting like Bluehost.