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Many companies are offering dedicated WordPress hosting nowadays, but you can hardly tell which one is the best from their marketing plans.
Regardless of your WordPress experience, you can enter a minefield when choosing a hosted host. Even so, two oft-mentioned brands still outperform their competitors. Therefore, this article will compare Kinsta and WP Engine in detail.
Both companies have a lot to offer and a large number of loyal customers. Choosing between them means delving into the metrics and making a decision based on your own needs.
Brief introduction
Kinsta is the leading WordPress dedicated hosting provider in the industry, in fact, they only handle WordPress websites, so you get a team of tech-savvy experts who.
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They have been in business for many years and have grown with WordPress and offer tailored hosting solutions for this most popular platform. kinsta has a very strong client base, supporting websites for famous companies such as Ubisoft, Asos and General Electric.
As for WP Engine, they are also an active member of the WordPress community and, like Kinsta, offer only dedicated WordPress hosting at
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Again, this means that their team are true WordPress experts, so you can get the perfect solution no matter how your site is structured. They have many high-profile clients, such as Microsoft, AMD and SoundCloud.
On the surface, the two solutions are very similar. To determine which one best suits your needs, you may need more granular data, and next we compare the metrics of both.
- Function
There is no doubt that for most people, the features and functionality offered by a web host are the most critical buying factors.
KinstaWP Engine
Kinsta's state-of-the-art Nginx servers run on PHP7 (i.e. the latest and greatest combination) to ensure speed and stability. What's more, their infrastructure is powered by Google Cloud, with a large number of data centers around the world, giving your visitors access to the web at the fastest possible speed, no matter where they are.
20 data centers
North America
Council Bluffs
Moncks Corner
Ashburn
The Dalles
Montréal
Los Angeles
Council Bluffs
Iowa
Montescona
South Carolina
Ashburn
Virginia
Dalles
Oregon
Montreal
Quebec
Los Angeles
California
Europe
St. Ghislain
London
Frankfurt
Netherlands
Hamina
Zürich
St. Gislain
Belgium
London
United Kingdom
Frankfurt
Germany
Netherlands
Hamina
Finland
Zurich
Switzerland
Asia
Jurong West
Tokyo
Osaka
Mumbai
Hong Kong
Changhua
Jurong West
Singapore
Tokyo
Japan
Osaka
Japan
Mumbai
India
Hong Kong
China
Changhua County, Taiwan
China
Oceania
Sydney
Sydney
Australia
South America
São Paulo
São Paulo
Brazil
For a detailed description of each data center, please click here to view.
Your website (and visitors) will be extremely secure, with Kinsta providing hardware firewalls and DDoS detection that can effectively prevent malicious attacks. In addition, they check the uptime of your website every five minutes and respond quickly to any problems.
Kinsta's control panel (called MyKinsta) is very easy to use and looks good: the
There is no denying that the clean and generous look is easy to get in the mood, and the top-notch functional design helps to navigate easily. Finally, you get a lot of add-ons such as Cloudflare Railgun and Elasticsearch. whatever your needs are, they are almost always met.
WP Engine is just as stable and feature-rich as Kinsta, but handles things differently. In addition to being very similar to Kinsta's Google Cloud coverage, they also have a built-in CDN (Content Delivery Network) so your site can be served the fastest on a global scale.
18 data centers
WP Engine's data centers are powered by Google Cloud and AWS, with 18 in total, spread across 13 regions.
Cloud
North America
Iowa
South Carolina
Oregon
Montréal
Iowa
United States
South Carolina
United States
Oregon
United States
Montreal
Canada
Europe
Belgium
London
Frankfurt
Belgium
London
United Kingdom
Frankfurt
Germany
Asia Pacific
Taiwan
Tokyo
Sydney
Taiwan
China
Tokyo
Japan
Sydney
Australia
AWS
North America
Virginia
Ohio
Oregon
Montréal
Virginia
United States
Ohio
United States
Oregon
United States
Montreal
Canada
Europe
Ireland
London
Frankfurt
Ireland
London
United Kingdom
Frankfurt
Germany
Asia Pacific
Sydney
Sydney
Australia
For a detailed description of each data center, please click here to view.
WP Engine provides enterprise-grade security, and the in-house team can handle various cyber threats and malicious attacks. In addition, they provide a variety of useful performance and diagnostic tools such as page performance, content performance, pre-publication evaluation, and more.
The administration backend is as smart as Kinsta: the
You also get more, such as the virtually unlimited media storage offered by Amazon S3, multisite support, and a host of other features unique to premium users.
- Price
Unlike shared hosting, where first-class dedicated WordPress hosting can carry a high premium, Kinsta has a variety of different pricing levels, most of which are available for individuals and businesses:.
As shown in the picture, a WordPress site starts at $30/month and there is not much difference in features between plans, making it easier for potential customers to accept. With a 30-day money-back guarantee, you have a long time to test before you buy.
In contrast, WP Engine takes the classic route with 3 fixed prices and a 4th customization option.
WP Engine hosts one site for $35/month, which is $5 more expensive than Kinsta, but you can add more sites to this plan (for an additional $20/month). With this approach, WP Engine is actually cheaper than Kinsta. Just by paying attention to the parameters of each plan, you might think that WP Engine offers less features than Kinsta, which is not the case, it's just a matter of marketing and presentation.
In short, whichever hosting provider you choose, you will need a large budget. However, for no more than 3 sites, WP Engine is the cheaper option.
- Support
If you're happy with your WordPress hosting service, it's likely that you'll want excellent technical support. Fortunately, both companies are known for their high quality customer service.
Kinsta offers Tickets and Live Chat and can be accessed 24/7, 365 days a year. To get customer support, simply click on the message icon in the bottom right corner of the MyKinsta dashboard and start a live chat at
WP Engine has a proactive support team that provides 24/7 live chat and Ticket support for all plans. For more advanced plans, you can also get 24/7 phone support. As with Kinsta, when seeking customer support, simply go to the dashboard and click on the appropriate option in the upper right corner at
When it comes to customer support, both Kinsta and WP Engine do not disappoint, providing professional customer service anytime, anywhere.
- Performance
A comparison of these two companies would not be complete without a performance test, and we saved this for last for a number of reasons. The main point is that every website is different and while testing performance is useful, it is not the only factor in choosing a host.
Basically, we get most of our test data through the popular website testing tools Pingdom and Load Impact.
Over the past year, Kinsta's average page load time is 307 milliseconds and WP Engine is slightly slower, but at 368 milliseconds, the difference between the two is very small and both are the fastest WordPress dedicated hosts. In addition, they both have an uptime of over 99.99%, which is at the top of the industry.
Summary
Dedicated WordPress hosting is an important purchase decision for any website owner, but the wrong choice can have a negative impact. Fortunately, there are many reliable options out there, but Kinsta and WP Engine are by far the best companies out there.
Whichever company you choose, you get the same value. In terms of performance, they are very close, with Kinsta performing slightly better in our tests. All in all, Kinsta is for those who need pure power and WP Engine is for those who are interested in real-time web analytics.
It is worth mentioning that after the acquisition of StudioPress, WP Engine now offers StudioPress for free to all customers, a value equivalent to $499.