This head-to-head comparison of Cloudways vs Kinsta looks at the key features, pros and cons and more, to help you choose between these two cloud hosting companies.
Kinsta and Cloudways both provide managed WordPress hosting services. Both offer amazing support, enterprise infrastructure and security that is optimized for WordPress sites.
Cloudways vs Kinsta speed comparison
Here I’m going to test Cloudways and Kinsta’s performance by looking at how fast they load a cloned version (i.e. exact copy) of this website (FYI currently hosted on SiteGround), but hosted on Cloudways and Kinsta instead.
That is:
- First, I’ll test a cloned copy* of this website’s speed at Kinsta**.
- Then, I’ll test a cloned copy* of this website’s speed at Cloudways***.
* using a migration plugin, exporting the entire site and hosting it on Cloudways/Kinsta
** Google Cloud Platform hosting on Kinsta's Starter plan ($30/mo)
*** DigitalOcean hosting on Cloudways's DO-2GB plan ($22/mo)
If you want you can go straight to the results here.
Why am I doing this?
- So that you can get a feel for how fast a site hosted on Cloudways versus Kinsta loads
- As this might help decide which one to choose if you are considering moving to a fully managed WordPress host
I'll start with Pingdom, a leading website speed and performance tool, to test the homepage load time.
Here’s how my homepage (cloned copy of this website) hosted on Kinsta performs on Pingdom:
On Kinsta it loads in 544 milliseconds. Almost half a second, now that's pretty damn fast!
Now let's find out how the homepage (cloned copy of this website) hosted on Cloudways performs on Pingdom:
On Cloudways it loads in 499 milliseconds. Just under half a second, and that's even faster than Kinsta!
What about blog posts, how fast does one of my blog posts load on Kinsta vs Cloudways?
Let's check Kinsta first:
The blog page loads in 953 milliseconds, just under a second, on Kinsta.
Not it's Cloudways turn:
On Cloudways, it loads in just 524 milliseconds. Wow, that is significantly faster than Kinsta!
Now let's use GTmetrix, another reputable website speed and performance tool. Again, I'll start off with Kinsta:
On Kinsta the homepage loads in 1.5 seconds. Let's check Cloudways:
While on Cloudways the homepage loads in 1.4 seconds. It's not by much but again Cloudways come out as the “winner”.
What about the blog post, how fast does it load on Kinsta vs Cloudways?
Let's start with Kinsta:
On Kinsta this blog post loads in 1.6 seconds. Pretty fast but is loading faster than Cloudways? Let's see:
On Cloudways this blog post loads in 0.7 seconds. That's well under a second and way faster than Kinsta.
Summary
For every webpage checked (my homepage and one of my blog posts) on Pingdom and GTmetrix, Cloudways deliver the fastest load times:
| Cloudways | Kinsta | |
| Homepage speed (Pingdom) | 0.499 seconds | 0.544 seconds |
| Homepage speed (GTmetrix) | 1.4 seconds | 1.5 seconds |
| Blog post speed (Pingdom) | 0.953 seconds | 0.524 seconds |
| Blog post speed (GTmetrix) | 0.7 seconds | 1.6 seconds |
| Visit Cloudways (Free 3-day trial) | Visit Kinsta (30-day money-back guarantee) |
So what to make of all this?
You shouldn't read too much into this, because I'm not really comparing apples with apples. I'm only looking at a handful of pages and I'm using different plans and different cloud providers (but I would have thought that Google's Cloud Platform would be faster than DigitalOcean).
However, in this specific circumstance, it sure looks like Cloudways delivers faster speed performance compared to Kinsta. I am a bit surprised that DigitalOcean (Cloudways) performed better than Google's Cloud Platform (Kinsta) for the pages that were tested.
Cloudways vs Kinsta Head-to-head comparison
| Ninja Column 6 | Ninja Column 35 | |
|---|---|---|
Cloudways | Kinsta | |
| About: | Cloudways is a cloud hosting provider who offer managed cloud servers which are feature rich and are easy to start with and manage and scale as required. | Kinsta is a premium and fully managed WordPress hosting service powered by Google Cloud Platform. You get daily backups, free migrations, staging environments + loads more |
| Founded in: | 2012 | 2013 |
| BBB Rating: | Not Rated | Not Rated |
| Address: | Cloudways Ltd. 52 Springvale, Pope Pius XII Street Mosta MST2653 Malta | 10880 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 1101 Los Angeles, CA 90024 |
| Phone Number: | (855) 818-9717 | No phone |
| Email Address: | [email protected] | [email protected] |
| Types of Support: | Phone, Live Support, Chat, Ticket | Live Support, Chat, Ticket |
| Data Center / Server Location: | Ohio, USA, Montreal, Canada, London, The United Kingdom | 18 global server locations |
| Monthly Price: | From $10.00 per month | From $30.00 per month |
| Unlimited Data Transfer: | No (From 1TB) | No |
| Unlimited Data Storage: | No (From 20GB) | No |
| Unlimited Emails: | No | No |
| Host Multiple Domains: | Yes | Yes (except Starter Plan) |
| Hosting Controlpanel / Interface: | Cloudways Interface | MyKinsta Dashboard |
| Server Uptime Guarantee: | 99.90% | SLA has a 99.9% uptime guarantee |
| Money-Back Guarantee: | 3 Days Free Trial | 30 Days |
| Dedicated Hosting Available: | No (only Cloud available) | Dedicated hosting is available on the higher tier enterprise plans |
| Bonuses & Extras: | Free SSL certificate. Free site migration. 24/7 customer support. | Free Let's Encrypt SSL certificates. 30-day money-back guarantee. Amazon Route 53 premium DNS is included for free. Free daily backups. Choose from 15 server locations. Free KeyCDN integration. Optimized WordPress stack. |
| The Good: | 30-day free trial is available. Host unlimited sites. Automatic site backups. Pay-as-you-go pricing system. WordPress is easy to get started with. | Google Cloud platform and architecture (PHP 7, HTTP/2, NGINX, LXD containers, MariaDB). Server-side caching. Easy CDN integration and staging environments. Automatic backups and storage of 14-days of backups for you. WordPress-specific security, DDoS detection, hardware firewalls, and more. Paid upgrades: Cloudflare Railgun, Elasticsearch, Redis. |
| The Bad: | No cPanel because Cloudways is a Platform-as-a-Service company. | Only provides WordPress Hosting: Kinsta exclusively offers premium WordPress hosting. Expensive Plans: Kinsta isn't the cheapest options out there, but that being said you get what you pay for, that is a superb and quality service. |
| Summary: | Cloudways WordPress hosting (review here) is known for enabling users to host resources as their website grows. Deployment is possible within minutes as it allows users to choose the server resources such as storage, RAM and CPU. Any of the offered infrastructures such as Kyup or Vultr, DigitalOcean, Google and Amazon can be chosen for the Cloud. Users can also build their App utilizing any of the offered 10+ PHP-based frameworks, emcommerce builders and CMS. | With Kinsta (review) you get a WordPress hosting service that is powered by Google Cloud Platform. You get Fort Knox like security, warp-speed fast servers, free site migrations, daily backups. Everything on a fully managed and optimized and secure WordPress stack. |
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You really can't go wrong with either of these web hosts, but before you sign up, this Kinsta vs Cloudways head-to-head comparison is here to help you shortlist the one that works best for you. Take your time in finding the best match.