Kinsta Review (Too Many Hidden Fees): $100/mo Redis, Low PHP Worker/Monthly Visit Limit, CDN Isn’t Cloudflare Enterprise

Fell for the Kinsta hype?

Once a marketing company, Kinsta’s hosting is superficial and very expensive.

Sure, you get big brands like Google Cloud C2, Amazon Route 53’s “premium DNS” and an “enterprise-level Cloudflare integration.” But their Cloudflare is not Enterprise, Route 53 is slower than Cloudflare’s on dnsperf.com, and you have to pay heavy fees for (what should be free) paid add-ons like $100/mo Redis and $50/mo Nginx reverse proxy. Staging sites only have 1 CPU core unless you pay another $20/mo for “premium staging environments.” I smell a ripoff.

While both Kinsta and Rocket.net only have 10GB storage on their lowest plan, Kinsta uses slower network SSDs with 10x less monthly visits. Plus, they limit PHP workers which gets seriously expensive when you scale. They also have 20 less CPU cores and 120GB less RAM.

Not sure what happened with Matthew Woodward and WPX, but he now lists Kinsta as “the fastest WordPress hosting” along with SiteGround, Bluehost, and GoDaddy in his list. C’mon!

 

1. Low PHP Worker + Monthly Visit Limits

This is the main reason Kinsta gets so expensive:

PHP workers determine how many uncached requests your site can handle at once.

Smaller static sites “might” get away with 2 PHP workers on the lowest 2 plans, but Kinsta recommends WooCommerce/dynamic sites start at 4 PHP workers (the next 2 plans). Which means eCommerce sites are already looking at $115 – $225/mo. Chances are if your store has a decent amount of traffic, you’ll need at least 6 PHP workers for $340 – $450/mo+. And since WooCommerce sites should definitely be using Redis, you’re already looking at about $500/mo.

Visits counts are different than Google Analytics which count human visitors not using ad blockers. Kinsta counts human visitors (with or without ad blockers) as well as unknown bots.

To calculate visit counts, take your average Google Analytics monthly visitors and multiply it by 143% since around 42.7% of people use ad blockers. Then add monthly visits from unknown bots (you can reduce this using Cloudflare’s firewall and IP/user-agent banning rules in Kinsta).

 

2. Paid Add-Ons Are Ridiculously Expensive

Kinsta’s add-ons are good enough reason not to use them.

I don’t know any host that charges for Redis or Nginx reverse proxy. And to “save money” by optimizing PHP workers, Kinsta recommends using Redis. You pay more to save less? Since staging sites only use 1 CPU core, you’ll likely also need to pay an extra $20/mo to get 8 cores.

 

3. Not An Enterprise-level Cloudflare Integration

Kinsta says they use an “enterprise-level Cloudflare integration.”

However, it’s far from it. You only get full page caching with Cloudflare’s layer 7 firewall. You don’t get WAF, prioritized routing, Argo Smart Routing + Tiered Cache, Mirage/Polish image optimization for (which are arguably better than plugins), load balancing, and other features.

	Kinsta Cloudflare Enterprise	FlyingProxy Cloudflare Enterprise	Cloudways Cloudflare Enterprise	Rocket.net Cloudflare Enterprise
Full page caching	✓	✓	x	✓
Priority routing	x	✓	✓	✓
Argo Smart Routing	x	x	✓	✓
Tiered cache	x	x	✓	✓
Load balancing	x	✓	✓	✓
Mirage/Polish	x	✓	✓	✓
Image resizing	x	✓	✓	✓
Enterprise security	Firewall rules only	✓	✓	✓
Bandwidth	Unlimited	100GB	100GB	Unlimited
Price	Free with hosting	$10/mo	$5/mo	Free with hosting

 

4. Amazon Route 53’s DNS Is Slower Than Cloudflare’s

Kinsta uses Amazon Route 53 for their DNS, but Cloudflare performs better on dnsperf.com.

 

5. Slow Network SSDs

Kinsta blogs about different types of storage, but they don’t use faster NVMe SSDs.

 

6. 256MB Memory Limit

Kinsta’s standard plans only have a 256MB PHP memory limit.

As one reviewer points out, you have to contact support to upgrade. And when you do, Kinsta will likely recommend upgrading to an agency plan which still only has a 512MB memory limit.

 

7. 12 CPU Cores + 8GB RAM

This is what Kinsta gives you on standard plans (listed on this page).

For comparison, Rocket.net gives you 32 cores + 128GB RAM. And on staging websites, Kinsta only uses 1 CPU core + 8GB RAM while Rocket.net gives you the full 32 cores + 128GB RAM. This means Kinsta has 16x less RAM on live sites and 32x less CPU cores on staging sites. While this doesn’t exactly impact speed, it can result in your site temporarily slowing down or 500 errors.

	Kinsta	Rocket.net
CPU Cores	12 Cores	32 Cores
RAM	8GB	128GB
Staging CPU Cores	1 Core	32 Cores
Staging RAM	8GB	128GB

 

8. No Participation In Kevin Ohashi’s Test

If Kinsta is as fast as they claim, why don’t they compete in Kevin Ohashi’s WordPress Hosting Benchmark tests? Kinsta interviewed Kevin and obviously knows who he is, so where are they?

 

9. Raised Prices When Their Hosting Got Worse

Kinsta raised their prices which were already on the expensive side, although you can get 2 months free if you pay 1 year upfront. What makes Kinsta expensive are limits on PHP workers and visit counts which are the main things to determine when figuring out which plan you need.

 

10. Their TrustPilot Rating Sunk

Looks like there have been quite the influx of complaints on their TrustPilot recently. Like most hosting companies, many positive reviews are solicited. But the bad ones come out eventually.

 

11. Google Cloud C2

At least Kinsta uses Google Cloud C2 which is a compute-optimized machine family offered by Google (as opposed to “balanced” which is used with the N2 family on SiteGround for example).

Kinsta uses C2 standard VM instances which Google has benchmarks for. Note that Kinsta provides 12 CPU + 8GB RAM on standard plans, then numbers get higher on enterprise plans.

Machine Type	CPU Platform	vCPUs	Coremark Score	Standard Deviation (%)	Sample Count
n2d-standard-2	Milan	2	38,897	3.61	2,264
n2d-standard-4	Milan	4	79,682	3.02	2,040
n2d-standard-8	Milan	8	145,022	3.03	1,824
n2d-standard-16	Milan	16	303,974	2.52	1,712
n2d-standard-32	Milan	32	611,375	1.77	905
n2d-standard-48	Milan	48	916,485	2.31	648
n2d-standard-64	Milan	64	1,217,192	2.71	512
n2d-standard-80	Milan	80	1,553,066	3.33	488
n2d-standard-96	Milan	96	1,826,345	4.00	388
n2d-standard-128	Milan	128	2,425,400	3.89	312
n2d-standard-224	Milan	224	3,938,461	1.49	212

 

12. Kinsta MU Plugin

Kinsta’s MU plugin is required for full page caching and Kinsta’s CDN integration.

This enables automatic cache clearing, custom caching rules, and changing the cache expiry in MyKinsta (default is 1 hour). It’s installed on every website hosted at Kinsta by default, but will need to be manually installed if you migrated your website yourself or you installed WordPress.

Kinsta says no WordPress cache plugins are needed at Kinsta and even bans some of them. However, cache plugins do a lot more than just caching and are a key part of addressing core web vitals. Which means you’ll still want a cache plugin (i.e. FlyingPress or WP Rocket). Kinsta automatically disables caching in WP Rocket, but you’ll have to check this if using FlyingPress.

 

13. No Email Hosting

Kinsta doesn’t have email hosting and recommends Google Workspace instead.

It’s a good idea to keep your web/email hosting separate anyways because resources can be solely dedicated to your website (plus, moving email accounts between hosts can be a pain).

 

14. Banned Plugins

Kinsta has a list of banned plugins. Hosts often do this because these plugins are notorious for increasing memory usage or cause duplicate functionality. For example, since Kinsta already provides Enterprise-level security through Cloudflare, you shouldn’t need any security plugin.

• Cache plugins
• Backup plugins
• Image optimization plugins
• Video conversion plugins
• Certain performance plugins
• Security plugins

 

15. OK Support, Not The Best

Kinsta’s support used to be good, but how good can it be when you constantly run out of resources? With all their limits, I imagine you get the “upgrade your plan” response quite a bit.

 

16. Unlimited Free Migrations (From Some Hosts)

Kinsta offers unlimited free migrations from the hosts below, then 1 premium migration.

 

17. 35 Data Centers

Kinsta currently has 35 data center locations. Obviously you want to choose the data center closest to your visitors (for a faster TTFB) which you can do inside your MyKinsta dashboard.

 

18. Kinsta Alternatives

Rocket.net is significantly better than Kinsta.

They use 16x more CPU cores, 3x RAM, free Redis, NVMe SSDs, LiteSpeed’s PHP, and their Cloudflare Enterprise has more features like full page caching, Argo Smart Routing, image optimization, and load balancing. Plus, they allow 10-25 times the monthly visits with no PHP worker limits since only about 10% of traffic actually hits the origin server (the rest is offloaded to Cloudflare). Support is better, prices are cheaper, and they also have better TrustPilot rating. Kinsta is more popular due to marketing, but Rocket.net’s specs blow Kinsta’s out of the water.

	Kinsta Starter Plan	Cloudways Vultr HF (2GB)	Servebolt Pro Plan	Rocket.net Starter Plan
Type	Google Cloud C2	Cloud	Private cloud	Private cloud
Server	Apache + Nginx	Apache + Nginx	Apache + Nginx	Apache + Nginx
Nginx reverse proxy	$50/mo	✓	✓	✓
Cores/RAM	12 cores/8GB	1 core/2GB	Unmetered	32 cores/128GB
Staging cores/RAM	1 core/8GB	1 core/2GB	Unmetered	32 cores/128GB
Storage	10GB / SATA	64GB / NVMe	4GB / ???	10GB / NVMe
PHP processor	FastCGI	FPM	???	LiteSpeed
PHP workers	2 PHP workers	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Database	???	MariaDB	MariaDB	MariaDB
Redis	$100/mo	Redis Pro	Redis only on Business plan and up	Redis + Redis Pro on Business plan and up
CDN	Cloudflare free + full page caching + layer 7 firewall rules	Cloudflare Enterprise – APO ($5/mo)	Cloudflare Enterprise (Accelerated Domains): $299/mo	Cloudflare Enterprise
CDN bandwidth	Unlimited	100GB	Unlimited	Unlimited
DNS	Amazon Route 53	DNS Made Easy ($5/mo)	x	Cloudflare
Memory limit	256MB	Adjustable	Adjustable	1GB
Plugin	x	Breeze	Servebolt Optimizer	x
Bandwidth or monthly visits	25k visits/mo	2TB	1M dynamic requests	50GB + 250k visits/mo
Email hosting	x	x	x	x
Major incidents	None	None	None	None
TrustPilot rating	4.2/5	4.5/5	4.5/5	4.9/5
Migrations	Free (most hosts)	1 free + $25/site	Unlimited free	Unlimited free
Price	$29-35/mo	$26/mo	$99/mo	$25-30/mo

 

They have a perfect TrustPilot rating and you can find several people who posted results:

I was previously using Cloudways Vultr High Frequency who also has Cloudflare Enterprise, NVMe storage, and Redis Object Cache Pro. However, Rocket.net has a lot more CPU/RAM with no limits on PHP workers (CPU limits). Plus, Rocket.net’s support is likely the best you’ll find if you reach out to Ben Gabler and his team. The main benefit of Cloudways is they allow more storage/bandwidth, but I can tell you the jump from Cloudways to Rocket.net was a nice boost.

Final Thoughts: Kinsta was a marketing company that decided to get into hosting. If their marketing was as good as hosting, I would recommend them. Unfortunately, it’s superficial.

Cheers,
Tom