Cloudways vs Kinsta WordPress Hosting Comparison

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:

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

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.