Shortlisted Kinsta and Cloudways for hosting your WP website but can’t choose one platform among the two? Below we have compared the managed cloud hosting plans of the two firms.
About the companies
Kinsta was founded in 2013, and Cloudways started offering WP managed hosting services in 2011. It provides Google Cloud managed hosting packages. Cloudways offers managed Linode, DigitalOcean, AWS, Google Cloud, and Vultr servers. It lets users choose the infrastructure providers. The AWS/Google Cloud plans are expensive compared to those of Vultr/Linode/DigitalOcean. Kinsta servers are powered by the Google Cloud Platform.
Plans
Cloudways Google Cloud plans start at 33.78 dollars and can cost up to 1290.30 dollars per month. The GCE Small pack is priced at 33.48 USD. This server has a single vCPU, 1.70GB RAM, and 20GB storage and comes with a bandwidth restriction of 2 GB. Priced at 73.50 USD/month, the GCE n1-std-1 machine offers 3.75GB RAM and 20GB storage memory. The $138.2/month server comes with 7.5GB RAM and 2-vCPU. The 225.93 dollar server features four vCPU and 15GB RAM. Each Google Cloud package of CW offers just 2GB bandwidth and 20GB storage memory. This is the biggest limitation of CW.
Kinsta has launched over ten plans. The cheapest managed WP hosting package is the Starter plan which costs 30 dollars per month. Sites hosted on this server can have traffic of up to 25k visitors/month and can consume up to 10GB of storage memory. The Pro subscription costs 60 USD per month and offers 20GB storage memory and 100GB CDN bandwidth, and it supports two websites. The remaining plans of the company fall into these two categories – Business and Enterprise. Kinsta has introduced 4 Business and 4 Enterprise plans.
The Business 1, 2, 3, and 4 servers cost $100, $200, $300, and $400, respectively, and support 5, 10, 20, and 40 WordPress installations. They provide 30GB, 40GB, 50GB, and 60GB storage memory and support website traffic of 100k to 600k.
Enterprise 1, 2, 3, and 4 packages are priced at $600, $900, $1200, and $1500 per month and offer 100GB, 150GB, 200GB, and 250GB storage memory. These plans support 60, 80, 120, and 150 WordPress sites and ship with 1TB CDN bandwidth.
In Cloudways, no matter what server you choose, you can install as many apps as you want. In Kinsta, each subscription allows you to deploy X number of WP sites. Another difference between the two services is that CW has a no money-back policy. Its counterpart has a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Security
Kinsta employs the Cloudflare Enterprise plan as a security measure. Cloudflare Enterprise plan protects a server from DDoS attacks, and it ships with a web application firewall. It promises 100% uptime and has higher network priority than the other three plans of the CDN service provider i.e. Business, Pro, and Free. Like Kinsta, Cloudways also protects its servers from DDoS attacks and uses a Firewall as a layer of security.
If your site is hosted on Kinsta and is infected by malware or is hacked, the company’s staff will fix this issue at no additional cost. If your site hosted somewhere else is infected or compromised, and you want to move your website to Kinsta, the company’s staff can fix the security issue at a one-time payment of 100 dollars. Cloudways doesn’t offer a free malware removal/site cleaning service.
Performance
The managed WP hosting servers of the two firms are enabled with a custom-built CDN service. While Kinsta hasn’t specified the amount of data that can be received/transferred over a CDN service, it restricts CDN usage from 50GB to 1TB. Should you worry about the restriction? No. The company has launched several plans. Each plan comes with a site traffic limit. If you choose the right package, your CDN usage would always be lower than the limit Kinsta has set.
Cloudways supports HTTP/2 and PHP 7.3. Kinsta supports HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 and the latest edition of PHP i.e. PHP version 8.0. Both companies cache pages of your website at the server level. They also allow you to control the cache.
Site migration
Site migration is one of the services every popular WP hosting company bundles with their plans. The support staff of the two companies will migrate your WP site to their servers for free. You must purchase a subscription from them and place a site migration order.
Backup and staging
The two firms will automatically back up your site every day for free. Kinsta will keep the backup for 14 days. Both managed hosting companies give their users free access to a staging environment.
Self-healing
The self-healing module will check the process of PHP frequently. When the script that is monitoring PHP learns that the PHP service is not running, it will start PHP automatically.
Performance monitoring
Kinsta gives its users access to a tool called APM through which users can check the performance of their WP site, PHP processes, database queries, and more. Cloudways provides a basic monitoring tool that shows the RAM/CPU used on the server.
Closing words: Kinsta has better managed hosting plans than Cloudways. The only advantage of CW is that its subscriptions let users deploy unlimited sites.
