In the world of web hosting, Kinsta is one of the most recognized and respected brands out there.
With servers from the Google Cloud Platform, the company has a well-deserved reputation for offering fully featured hosting solutions to its audience, especially with its managed hosting solutions.
However, Kinsta isn't the only kid on the block when it comes to excellent hosting services.
In fact, if you look closely, you may notice some things that would make you consider an alternative hosting platform to Kinsta for your managed hosting needs.
And we have the perfect Kinsta alternative for you — Nexcess.
Read on to discover how Nexcess compares to Kinsta's managed hosting plans and why Nexcess may be a better fit for you.
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Why Choose Nexcess as an alternative to Kinsta for managed hosting?
Kinsta offers managed hosting at a range of prices. Their plans include features common with leading competitors like Nexcess, Bluehost, Cloudways, WP Engine, Siteground, and Digital Ocean.
It can be overwhelming to consider all these features. To help you compare Kinsta with Nexcess, we’ve put together this guide to save you time.
At Nexcess, these managed hosting features make us the best alternative to Kinsta.
1. More than WordPress managed hosting
When it comes to managed hosting, Kinsta can only be used for WordPress websites. This restriction means you're out of luck if you use any other content management systems.
WordPress is the most popular web platform, with more than 43% of the web built on it, but there are several other platforms for building sites that also require managed hosting.
In addition to 20 WordPress-related managed hosting plans, Nexcess offers managed hosting for several other popular CMS and PHP platforms. These include Magento, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, and CraftCMS. Nexcess offers managed hosting plans crafted for each of these platforms.
These plans are spread across different tiers and use cases and are designed to offer something for everyone. That means that regardless of your budget, there’s a high probability that Nexcess has the right hosting plan for you.
In contrast, Kinsta offers 13 WordPress-managed hosting plans, and besides being generally more expensive, the plans don’t cover as many use cases.
2. Managed WordPress hosting from Nexcess has unique features
While Nexcess and Kinsta offer managed WordPress hosting, Nexcess distinguishes itself by offering premium plugins and built-in features to enhance the experience. Three of these include Solid Security Pro, Plugin Performance Monitor, and WooCommerce Automated Testing.
Solid Security Pro is the best security plugin for WordPress and is designed to prepare your website for eventual attacks, as well as detect and prevent them. It includes a host of security features such as malware scans, spam protection, and two-factor authentication.
Plugin Performance Monitor watches your site every day, so you don’t just see the problem — you know how to fix it. It keeps track of how the plugins installed on your site affect its performance over time.
WooCommerce Automated Testing detects WooCommerce payment, checkout, and login problems and fixes them fast. A great shopping experience is essential for a successful ecommerce store, and this tool ensures that you don’t lose any money because something’s not working on your site.
Many of Kinsta’s unique add-ons offered at no extra cost, like free migrations, caching, free SSL certificates, uptime monitoring, and content delivery networks (CDN) are also available with Nexcess.
3. Nexcess is more affordable
Currently, the most affordable plan on Kinsta starts at $35/month. For the price, you get a WordPress install, 10GB SSD space, 100GB CDN limit, one free premium migration, 2 PHP workers, and 14 days of backup retention.
Compare this to Nexcess, and you get more value for your money. The Nexcess Spark plan gives you one WordPress site, 2TB bandwidth, 15GB storage, 250GB CDN limit, multiple site migrations, 10 PHP workers, and 30 days of backup retention.
At almost half the price of Kinsta’s most affordable plan, the Nexcess Spark plan offers you a better hosting package. It starts at $21/mo.
You save more money and still end up with a more feature-rich hosting plan. Even if you choose the yearly payment option, which Kinsta offers with two free months, Nexcess still offers more functionality for less.
4. Nexcess makes it easy to get started
The whole purpose of managed hosting is to make things easier for anyone who wants a website. The hosting company handles the setup, management, and security work so that you can focus on the main business of your website.
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That is in contrast to regular dedicated, virtual private server (VPS), or shared hosting plans where you’re responsible for the management while your hosting provider handles the basics.
Nexcess improves upon the standard managed hosting package from Kinsta by including some features for customers unfamiliar with owning a website. These include page builders in the Nexcess installer to help you design your site quickly and free marketing tools to get your business noticed online. Additionally, Nexcess does not charge for Redis which costs $100 per month per site at Kinsta.
These options will help you kickstart your site much faster without any additional cost or expertise required, making Nexcess the best choice for beginners.
Moreover, if you get stuck somewhere while setting things up, you can always consult the extensive Nexcess knowledge base and frequently asked questions for more information.
5. Nexcess StoreBuilder is perfect for launching ecommerce sites
Ecommerce is experiencing massive growth with over 26 million ecommerce sites online. In 2021, it accounted for $52 trillion in sales worldwide and was projected to grow by 56% by 2026.
As more people are looking to sell products and services online, Nexcess is uniquely positioned to get them started with its StoreBuilder service.
StoreBuilder allows anyone to create an ecommerce website where they can sell anything easily. No coding skills or design expertise is required.
Nexcess Storebuilder is affordable, starting at $5/month for three months before settling at $19/month. For this low price, you get access to premium features like a webpage designer, storefront templates, shopping cart solutions, online store marketing, and ecommerce product management tools.
Since StoreBuilder uses WooCommerce under the hood, your store will benefit from the well-documented features and plugins available to WooCommerce stores.
Once your store is up and running, you’ll find StoreBuilder continues WooCommerce’s commitment to data autonomy, privacy and portability — with zero vendor lock-in.
Everything you need for a successful online store.
6. Nexcess supports PHP worker autoscaling
PHP workers are processes that run in the background on a hosting server and handle most of the tasks that make your website work.
You can think of them as checkout counters at a grocery store. Depending on the number of customers (website tasks) in the store, you may need more or less active checkout counters for things to work smoothly.
Too few checkout counters during peak shopping will lead to slow checkout times and frustrated customers. The same happens to a site with too few PHP workers available when the site is experiencing heavy loads. It will begin to experience slow load times that degrade the customer experience.
Nexcess website hosting plans generally have more PHP workers assigned per website than Kinsta’s managed hosting packages. In addition, all managed hosting plans on Nexcess have autoscaling support, increasing the assigned PHP workers for a site when usage exceeds your plan.
7. Longer backup retention
Backups are an essential part of any web hosting plan since they ensure that you can recover your website in the event of a security incident or an outage. Having access to older backups means that you have more recovery options.
From its most affordable to its most expensive plan, Nexcess offers automated daily backups as a courtesy for the recommended 3-2-1 backup strategy. Kinsta also offers automated backups, but the retention time is what sets both vendors apart.
Nexcess keeps copies of all automated backups for 30 days before removing them. With Kinsta, backup retention all depends on which plan you are on since they vary between 14 days and 30 days. On its lower-priced plans, backups are kept for 14 days before deleting them. If you want hourly and external backups, you’ll have to pay for it as an add-on.
8. 24/7 support via chat and phone calls
Customer support is an essential part of managed hosting services. When a customer needs help with their website or has technical questions about their hosting services, the support team should be the first point of call for them.
Nexcess and Kinsta offer industry-leading chat support available 24/7/365 to customers. However, in those cases where this isn’t enough, Nexcess goes further by offering expert support solutions via phone calls.
These support phone numbers are spread across different time zones to ensure that a trained professional is always available and ready to help you whenever you call. Kinsta also has a phone number available on its site, but it’s limited to sales calls.
9. No monthly visit limitations
Kinsta sets monthly limits on visits to your sites for all its plans. These limits can vary from 25,000 visits on its lowest tier plan to 2,500,000 on its enterprise plans. That means once you reach your plan's visitor threshold, your site will experience some downtime unless you pay overage fees or upgrade to a more expensive plan.
So if you get a burst of website visits from a great sale or your TikTok goes viral, your website could go down just when you need it most. That isn’t feasible for a small business looking to grow its presence online.
Nexcess, however, sets no visitor limits for any of its plans. On Nexcess, PHP workers protect your site in addition to edge and full-page caching for high-traffic events. PHP workers provided in auto-scaling provide a buffer to PHP worker overages when needed.
Final thoughts: 9 reasons why Nexcess is the best alternative to Kinsta
Competition among web hosting providers is fierce, and while industry-standard features are similar across the board, Nexcess has chosen to distinguish itself with affordable pricing, top-notch phone customer support, extensive hosting plans, and unique hosting features.
These are the tools we have designed to make us the preferred alternative to competitors like Kinsta.
If you need more convincing about why you should trust us for your managed hosting, why not check out our hosting solutions?