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As a blogger, once you keep walking on this path, one big question that arisses for the website builders is, which Hosting is the best one for WordPress?
The thing is, that as you start, you have no clue to decide which WordPress hosting to choose.
There are hundreds of different hosting service providers, that all offer and say to be the best one.
Well, just reading their websites is not the best way to decide.
They all proclaim to have fast connection, good prices and so on.
I am not a full web developer engineer, but certainly I have learned what has worked and what has not worked among the different WordPress Hosting Services.
In this post I will talk about Kinsta vs Cloudways, since those are the hosting services that I have used.
Many cloud services were starting to become popular when I was using Siteground.
Plus, also listenting too much about Google Cloud Platform made me to have the desire to try Google Clouds Platform for WordPress Hosting.
Since I am not any high tech guy, going into GCP was a bit confusing, and there were some Youtube tutorials that showed you how to use Google Cloud for one Year for free.
Even Google Cloud Platform website recommended the managed services for WordPress.
Those websites were WPengine and Kinsta.
I liked Kinsta website, it seem a good service. So I choose to try the first simple plan that costed around $30.
Here I show the results of GTmetrix and PageSpeed of early 2020.
The WordPress website speed was fast. And even to consider that I didn’t have it properly optimized, but for sure it could have even better numbers.
I was happy with Kinsta, until I got to know their business.
Kinsta counts the number of visits that you have on your website. If you exceed the number of visitors they will charge you. Of course, this will make you to consider jumping into a bigger plan.
The thing is that I didn’t like that in that number of visits, Kinsta also take into account Bots Visits so this was a really pain in the ass.
You have to pay for fake visitors.
So I would say that don’t go for Kinsta.
As I noticed this, I contacted their support, and of course they helped me to reduce the number of bots visits so that they are not taken into account.
Eventually my website exceeded the number of visitors month after month, so I dropped Kinsta and went back to Siteground, to figure out what to do.
After reading some Facebook groups comments, I got to learn a bit more about Cloudways.
Cloudways is a managed cloud services that also offer WordPress Hosting.
The advantage of Cloudways is that you can select the cloud service that you want from different provider such as Vultr, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud Platfrom and AWS.
So actually you have the decision to try different cloud services from just one place.
Also, on the Woocommerce Facebook group from Mexico, many web developers recommended Vultr in High Requency.
So again, I jumped to another WordPress hosting Service.
As you can see, my Page Scores improved, and loading time was reduced.
For a blogger it seems, just good. Of course, my next step is to keep optimizing and improve the website speed so that it keep getting faster.
Having Elementor and WPML as plugins doesn’t help that much with speed.
Elementor did some Updates that affected back my website speed.
But still the DNS loading times are fast.
And I also need to do image optimization.
Another advantage of Cloudways with Vultr High Frequency is the price. It only costs $13 per month and it doesn’t have the visitors limit as in Kinsta.
Of course Kinsta has brought to me the fastest WordPress blog so far, but you can also use Google Cloud Platform through Cloudways, and you may also skip that limit of the number of visitors.
And I don’t recommend Kinsta due to the visitors limits and that they take into consideration the bots visits in that visitors limit.
I recommend Cloudways with Vultr in High Frequency if you are looking for a website with speed at lower price.
If we follow our theme of WordPress hosting websites, there is no other stop we can’t make at this time than Kinsta and that is that this is another provider that is giving a lot of talk, although it is not as old as it is believed.
If you don’t know what Kinsta is the first thing you need to know is that this is nothing more than a premium managed service from WordPress as a host company and its technology stack is running on nothing less than the world’s largest and fastest cloud network: Google Cloud.
This provider was first launched recently in 2013 and its creator was Mark Gavalda, who is currently the company’s CEO.
His most popular collaborations are with companies such as TripAdvisor, Intuit, ASOS, FreshBooks and a couple of other names.
There is a lot of controversy regarding this provider, many people recognize how good it has to offer, but it is impossible to highlight that, in terms of competition, it has factors that usually leave it a little behind in the battle. And you’re about to find out what we’re talking about specifically.
It works with the Google cloud platform and has undergone a move to GCP VM with computer optimization (C2). This, among other things, makes the data delivered at lightning speed as to when visitors are browsing the website.
We all know that no one likes to be on a slow loading site. This provider is always in charge of guaranteeing its customers maximum speed levels. Many who have tested the site claim that it usually loads in as little as 1.24 seconds, which puts it ahead of its competitors.
This company takes security issues very seriously and implements a couple of policies, together with certain tools, that help ensure that the site's data is always protected. This is the case with live monitoring every minute, for example.
The MyKinsta dashboard may be one of the easiest to use. It is a panel that can be considered not only intuitive, but also has everything necessary for site management, accounting information and many other aspects that we will leave to your exploration.
Perhaps the point that plays most against this provider is that it currently has no domain name registrations, as many of the competitors do. This means that this is a process that must be fulfilled with a third party company.
Kinsta does not offer email hosting, which limits users to creating emails using the domain, which we know is something that adds professionalism to a brand. We still don't know the reason why they haven't incorporated it, but we hope they do soon.
It restricts the use of some add-ons because they are likely to conflict with the services they provide. Some of these are the home wall with sessions and words, performance add-ons such as Better WordPress Minify, among others.
To give you an idea of the cost of Kinsta we can look at the first three hosting plans that Kinsta offers openly to all those users who are interested in becoming part of its network of customers:
Knowing whether or not Kinsta’s hosting is a good option for you is a matter of meditating, evaluating what the service, in its different plans, can offer you and whether it meets your needs and the most important limitation: the budget.
What we can tell you is that it is a service with some very strong points, as is the case of loading speed and that this is based on Google Cloud Platform servers.
But, beyond that, is it really what you need?
Something that undoubtedly plays against you is that in their plans is limited the number of visits you can receive per month, so you have to be clear about the traffic of your site.
Be careful, this doesn’t mean that when you reach the maximum they will take down your site so that no one else can see it, the limit only serves so that, if you exceed it, they will charge you an extra amount of money for each visit you generate from it.
This can be a big drawback if you’re on a tight budget. But that’s not all, unfortunately you don’t have full control over the visits, so visits made by some bots will be added to your bill.
We all know that when it comes to advertising all hosting websites will be the best and that when we see some with prices perhaps a bit below average we fear the fact that their service is not the best.
However, Cloudways is one of those providers that have let themselves be defined by offering affordable cloud hosting, but other features that accompany their name is that they are a powerful server and also very simple to set up.
Their developers know that today they must be on hand with WordPress sites and that’s why they’re working harder and harder to offer a complete service in this area.
Although it may not make it into the top 3 due to some drawbacks that are found in it.
Is it possible that this provider works as a fast host, that it remains secure, and that you can have a high level of reliability in it without having to skyrocket its costs, you will have to decide for yourself.
But we will give you the tools to draw your own conclusions.
So that we can begin to evaluate how good, or not, Cloudways service is, we can start looking at the advantages and disadvantages of Cloudways.
We have chosen the most important ones so that you know where they are really strong and where they fall behind in the competition with their peers.
This provider offers hosting for owners of cloud-based websites, such as Digital Ocean, Vultr, AWS, Google Cloud Platform. This means that they are very easy to migrate and that content can be stored on more than one server, among other aspects that play in their favor.
Cloudways' servers are always "on fire" because of how fast they send website content to visitors. At least this is the way to say that they have a great load speed no matter how much traffic the site may be getting.
It has a proactive approach to site security, so it generates great confidence when you need to host sensitive data to this provider. Some of its features are integrated with routine patches and firmware updates, operating system level firewalls, among others.
Support is a high priority for this provider, if you need to contact their customer service system you should know that they have live chat options, or you can send tickets through their ticketing system so that your questions and concerns can be addressed.
Currently, this hosting provider does not offer its customers the registration of domain names, regardless of whether it is integrated into their plans, or you have to pay more for it. In order to carry out these processes, third parties must be used, if they allow it.
In this provider you will not find cPanel and Plesk panels. If there is a console that allows their customers to manage the applications that are hosted on the server in the cloud, but this is a point that can present problems for users who do not get used to this notorious difference.
Cloudways hosting plans do not have integrated mail service. Instead they expect their customers to pay for each account they want to add, something that especially affects those large companies that need to add a lot of emails to their sites.
Without a doubt, Cloudways hosting has many strengths, such as the level of security it offers to customers and the loading speed that users will have when visiting the websites hosted by it.
With Vultr High Frequency they have perhaps one of the most attractive offers that not only gives you a low cost for the service, but one of the highest loading speeds.
So, for those projects that don’t have much of a budget or even if you have, and you are in search of a quality hosting provider, Cloudways can certainly be a great option.
In terms of price comparison between Kinsta and Cloudways, there are different cloud services that you could choose inside Cloudways.
In the following chart you can see the lowest plans selected of the different services among the different cloud hosting platforms.
Digital Ocean has one of the lowest offers by price at Cloudways.
There are some other cloud services such as Vultr High Frequency.
Vultr High Frequency price is $13 at its starting point.
Then, Kinsta could be the third one in this chart, with its $30 basic plan.
But it is also highlighted, that Kinsta will charge extra if you exceed the number of visitors.
Of course this is to you to jump to a better plan, and as mentioned under the number of visits, there is also the Bots visits taken into account.
Hence, the reason of not recommending Kinsta.
Instead, Cloudways could also be used with Google Cloud Platform.
GCP at Cloudways has a price of $33.18.
As previously mentioned, visitors are taken into account in the pricing model of Kinsta.
If you want to have a higher limit on visitors, then you should aim for a better plan.
Kinsta Basic plan has a limit of 25,000 visitors per month. (Including Bots)
Cloudways doesn’t state a visitors limit explicitly, but they mention the Bandwith of their Cloud Hosting Platforms.
*For example, if you get 5,000 visitors a month, with the average visitor opening roughly 3 web pages, and each web page is approximately 2 MB in size, this means your bandwidth usage is:
5,000 x 3 x 2 = 25,000 MB, or 25 GB per month. Then 1 TB / 25 GB per month * 5,000 visitors would be 200,000 Visitors.
If we use the same analogy, then GCP, with its 2 GB Bandwith, it should be receiving nearly 3200 visitors per month.
Now, when it comes to storage, the different Cloud Hosting Services are quite similar.
Kinsta basic plan starts with 10 GB of disk space storage.
Digital Ocean has 25 GB of disk space.
Vultr High Frequency offers 32 GB of disk space storage.
And Google Cloud Platform offers 20 GB of disk space storage.
As we have bentioned before, the big no for Kinsta is because of the extra fee that they charge for exceeding the limit, but also that their Visits also take into account the Bots Visits.
Cloudways is for sure the winner, by offering the different cloud services, and also including Google Cloud Platform.
Of course there might be more variables to be measured, and to keep defining inside, which of the different cloud services of Cloudways is better.
For now, Carlos’ Blog is happy to be using Vultr High Frequency, and achieving better Website Speed, although Elementor has been a lowering point, but that is topic for another article.
