Cloudways and Kinsta are both leading web hosting service providers that stand out for their high-grade security, enterprise infrastructure, and excellent customer support.

We will compare both the platforms on a number of features and aspects to help you select between the two. We’ll also provide you details about the benefits each provider offers so that you can make an informed choice.

Product	Cloudways	Kinsta
Trial	Yes	No
Cloud providers	Multiple	Few
Limited plugin usage	No	Yes
No of data centers	60	24
Manual backups	No	Yes
Free CDN	No	Yes
Chargers	Monthly	Monthly
Starting price	$10/mo	$30/mo
Product page	Explore Cloudways	Explore Kinsta

Where does Cloudways excel over Kinsta?

• Cloudways comes with a 3-days free trial whereas Kinsta doesn’t offer a free trial
• You can host unlimited websites with Cloudways but Kinsta doesn’t offer this feature
• You can select from multiple cloud providers in Cloudways unlike Kinsta
• Benefit from dedicated server resources which is an advantage over Kinsta
• No limitations on plugins usage while Kinsta gives you a list of banned plugins
• 60 data centers compared to Kinsta’s 24 data centers
• Server response and page loading time are better than Kinsta
• Offers pay-as-you-go pricing which is not provided by Kinsta
• Pricing is more affordable compared to Kinsta

Where does Kinsta excel over Cloudways?

• Automatic security patches via daily malware scanning. Cloudways doesn’t offer this feature
• You can take manual backups anytime. Cloudways doesn’t offer this feature
• Free CDN offered which is not provided by Cloudways
• Detailed visitor and resource analysis which is an edge over Cloudways
• 30-days money-back guarantee which is not offered by Cloudways

Cloudways vs Kinsta: Features compared

User interface

I reviewed Cloudways previously. Its control panel differs from the conventional one. Its interface allows you to effortlessly use all the functions in a single place. It doesn’t offer a control panel like Plesk or cPanel.

Instead, its user interface is simple to set up and allows the effortless performance of tasks like scaling your cloud resources. You can also change PHP versions and install apps with just one click.

Kinsta also doesn’t offer a standard control panel but you can easily manage your account on the MyKinsta dashboard. It allows you to effortlessly view analytics, implement staging servers, add new sites, and more.

The dashboard is also mobile-responsive which means you can use your phone to perform activities like checking for plugin updates. You can also take backups, chat with support, and more.

Cloudways is very easy to set up. After registration, you can choose your desired cloud service, the application for running your web pages, and your server size.

Then, Cloudways will manage the rest and ensure your application is functional in a few minutes. Thus, it is an ideal platform for newbies and lay users.

Kinsta is also simple to set up. You can begin with a fast and effortless install or right away use its pro solutions, whichever suits your needs.

Bottomline: It’s a tie as both offer user-friendly dashboards and interfaces. But for the mobile experience, myKinsta interface seems good.

Data centers

Cloudways has a big advantage as it has 60 data centers across the world compared to Kinsta’s 24 centers.

Cloudways’ data centers are in the U.S., France, Germany, Singapore, Ireland, England, Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, Japan, India, and Australia.

Kinsta’s servers are globally distributed in the U.S., Belgium, Taiwan, Australia, Brazil, the U.K., Germany, Singapore, Japan, India, Canada, the Netherlands, Finland, Hong Kong, Switzerland, South Korea, and Indonesia.

Cloudways’ greater number of data centers makes it a better choice as it will enable you to better serve your global audience.

Bottomline: Cloudways offers a much higher number of data centers as they have partnered up with popular cloud server solutions. Whereas, Kinsta deals only with Google Cloud.

Available hosting plans

Cloudways offers only managed cloud hosting packages. It gives you a choice of 5 cloud providers and offers benefits such as an innovative control panel. Support for all PHP apps and unlimited applications are some other key features.

Kinsta provides managed WordPress hosting plans. Its main benefits include top-notch security, free migrations, daily backups, and Google Cloud Platform.

Both of these hosting services don’t offer you free domain names with their hosting plans. You may need to buy your domain names from NameCheap, Name.com, etc.

Bottomline: Cloudways is the winner as it has more choices for plans and cloud service providers. The plans also start out cheaper compared to Kinsta.

Speed

Cloudways uses the following technologies and features to ensure optimum speed:

• SSD drives for quicker page load times
• Built-in advanced caches such as Redis, Varnish and Nginx
• Auto-healing capability to restart
• HTTP/2 for swiftest communication between servers and clients
• Pre-configured PHP-FPM to improve the load time
• A cache plugin named Breeze for WordPress users
• CloudwaysCDN to boost the response time.

Kinsta offers speed-optimizing architecture that contains the MariaDB database, LXD containers, Google Cloud server, PHP 7.3, and Nginx. It uses speed features like StatusCake and LoadImpact for rapid site loading.

The CloudwaysCDN is affordable and simple to implement. It costs $1 per 25 GB and will give a speed boost to your website.

Kinsta offers a CDN in partnership with KeyCDN. It’s easy to enable this CDN but you need to install the Kinsta MU plugin for the task. Kinsta offers 50 GB free CDN with its starter package and after the limit is crossed, it will charge you $0.10 for each extra GB of CDN bandwidth.

Further, Kinsta offers free Amazon premium DNS to help you make sure your website is always available.

Bottomline: Both Cloudways and Kinsta deliver similar page speeds. But Kinsta’s KeyCDN integration and premium DNS should give it an edge.

Security and backups

SSL certificates – Cloudways offers free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates and also allows you to buy them from third-party providers and implement them on your Cloudways server.

Kinsta also presents a Let’s Encrypt integration, which facilitates free SSL certificates and hosting for your WordPress websites. The certificate renewal procedure is fully automated, which saves you time and money.

.htaccess files – Cloudways offers .htaccess files to help you control access and safeguard your website.

If you host your website on Kinsta you won’t get a .htaccess file which is a basic configuration file utilized by the Apache webserver. This is because Kinsta uses the more advanced Nginx web server and not Apache.

Cloudways offers a cloud-based firewall to shield your site from malware and other kinds of cyberattacks.

Kinsta provides free malware removal for your WordPress site to ensure that your website, visitors, and servers are protected.

Cloudways safeguards your server from DDoS attacks and ensures that it is active all the time.

Kinsta offers features like Google Cloud Platform firewall and GeoIP blocking to minimize the chances of DDoS attacks on your website.

Now let’s talk about backups and restores.

1-click restore manager – Cloudways allows you to restore your applications in two steps. Kinsta offers a one-click restore option for WordPress sites from Backup in the MyKinsta dashboard.

When it comes to backups, Cloudways offers both on-demand and automatic backups. You can set the schedule and frequency for the automated backups.

Cloudways also provides free automatic hourly backups as well as time-specific restore points. It levies a fee of $0.50 per GB each month to keep your backups secured at an offsite location to facilitate disaster recovery.

Kinsta offers automatic WordPress backups with 14-days storage as well as system-produced backup types for all of your accounts. Both automatic and manual backups are offered in your MyKinsta dashboard.

If you need additional restore points, you can buy the paid plans for 6-hour and hourly backups

Bottomline: It’s a tie as both offer the essential security features.

Scalability

Cloudways facilitates smooth scaling of your servers using a 1-click hosting function that scales resources like storage, CPU, and RAM without impacting your customization.

Kinsta offers automatic scaling. It doesn’t restrict each container or site to just 1 or 2 GB of RAM or 1 or 2 CPUs. Instead, Kinsta lets its virtual machines assign the needed amount of RAM and CPU to each website to respond to increases in traffic and other on-site activity.

Bottomline: Tie, as both offer excellent scaling features.

Other features

Staging area – Cloudways staging area presents a sandbox in which you can test new themes, plugins, and codebase without affecting your live website. They link your staging sites to your live website and you can utilize Push and Pull functions to transfer data between the two.

Kinsta also offers a staging area for testing, development, or tuning and tweaking that you can do with just one click.

Migration services – Cloudways offers free first migration and enables self-migration via the BlogVault plugin.

Kinsta offers free migrations for one or more sites with all the plans. However, you need to contact support to complete the migration.

Automatic WordPress installs and updates – Cloudways doesn’t offer automatic WordPress installs but enables you to set up your WordPress site in a few easy steps.

Kinsta also doesn’t provide automatic WordPress installation. Instead, it facilitates an effortless and fast install or you can utilize its pro tools if they suit your needs better. In addition, it offers plugins to help you manage WordPress automatic updates.

Website Builder: Both Cloudways and Kinsta do not offer a website builder as they are managed hosting providers. If you are using WordPress, you can make use of any WordPress based WYSIWYG builders like Elementor.

Even if your hosting provider comes with website builders, I won’t recommend you to use them as they may lack regular updates and flexibility that comes with WordPress based builders.

Bottomline: Kinsta offers better and more advanced features in most of the cases.

Database support

Cloudways servers support the latest versions of MariaDB and MySQL databases. You can move between the databases that function well with your application.

Kinsta provides direct access to databases and allows you to manipulate them with tools such as MySQL Workbench, Sequel Pro, HeidiSQL and phpMyAdmin. The platform supports secure SSH tunneling into the databases stored on its Google Cloud Platform servers.

Bottomline: Tie, as both offer extensive database support.

Customer support

Both Cloudways and Kinsta offer 24/7 customer support via live chat and tickets.

When it comes to phone support, there’s a “request for callback” feature with Cloudways, but Kinsta doesn’t offer any phone-based support and their live chat support reps are incredibly knowledgeable with WordPress.

Kinsta outranks Cloudways when it comes to the quality of customer support. Its team is super-responsive and fast, and will quickly provide answers to your queries. They are knowledgeable with WordPress too, as they are themselves WordPress developers.

Bottomline: Kinsta has better customer support in spite of the lack of phone support, and the support crew is actual WordPress developers who regularly contribute to the WordPress core.

Pricing

Cloudways offers a 3-days free trial while Kinsta doesn’t provide any trial.

Cloudways offers managed hosting plans in 5 cloud server categories: DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, and Google Cloud. It provides both monthly and hourly pricing. The monthly packages start from $10/month. Click here to avail a discount on Cloudways.

Cloudways presents pay-as-you-go pricing which means you need to shell out only for the resources consumed by your website. There is no lock-in fee and you can host unlimited applications on any plan. It is one of the cheap cloud hosting available today.

Kinsta offers 10 plans:

1. Starter – $30/month
2. Pro – $60/month
3. Business 1 – $100/month
4. Business 2 – $200/month
5. Business 3 – $300/month
6. Business 4 – $400/month
7. Enterprise 1 – $600/month
8. Enterprise 2 – $900/month
9. Enterprise 3 – $1,200/month
10. Enterprise 4 – $1,500/month

You get 2 months free on annual subscriptions. Kinsta’s starter plan begins at $30/month compared to Cloudways’ $10/month basic plan.

Kinsta’s starter package offers only one WordPress install. The provider does not recommend this plan for membership and e-commerce sites.

But you can get free CDN support, backup, and SSL. Extra backups and additional disk space are available.

Cloudways doesn’t offer any money-back guarantee while Kinsta presents a 30-days money-back guarantee.

Bottomline: Cloudways is much cheaper than Kinsta and offers good features for the price. But is Kinsta’s premium price worth it? You need to decide by looking at some of its premium features like NGINX servers, Google Cloud, Amazon premium DNS, inhouse cache plugin, free KeyCDN, and superior customer support.

FAQs on Cloudways vs Kinsta

Conclusion

Both Cloudways and Kinsta offer high-performance hosting, but I think Cloudways is slightly better in terms of cost, and value for money.

Cloudways is more affordable than Kinsta and allows you to host several domains across the world with a selection of 60 data centers as it integrates with multiple cloud services providers.

On the other hand, Kinsta is a more premium hosting compared to Cloudways. It makes use of Google Cloud servers and Amazon premium DNS service.

Kinsta has a better inhouse caching plugin and integrated KeyCDN for better page speeds in most of the cases. By looking at the features it offers, it’s clear that it is optimized for best WordPress and WooCommerce performance.

Kinsta also clearly offers better WordPress support, as the support representatives are WordPress developers.

I hope you found this post on Cloudways vs Kinsta helpful. Let me know your opinion in the comments section.