Cloudways vs. Kinsta (2023)

Cloudways and Kinsta offer reliable and flexible cloud hosting services, so it can be challenging to choose between them.

As a web hosting expert and tech veteran, I have extensive experience using both hosting services. 

If you’ve narrowed your options to these two hosting platforms, my comprehensive review can help you decide. 

Here’s my guide to Cloudways vs. Kinsta for 2023. 

How Did We Test Cloudways and Kinsta Hosting?

At Tweak Your Biz, we always adhere to the highest testing standard and only utilize the most reliable software. We rely on data collected during lab testing rather than our personal biases. To arrive at our results, we created two web hosting test sites for Cloudways and Kinsta.

Using these sites, we monitored performance in the following areas:

• Hosting Types & Features
• Performance & Speed
• Ease of Use
• Pricing & Value
• Website Security
• Help & Support
• WordPress Features
• Extras

Our Winner:

Choosing between Kinsta and Cloudways was difficult, but we did it. Ultimately, Cloudways is the winner of this web-hosting standoff. 

You can’t top Cloudways’s versatility. The flexibility of their price plans, hosting infrastructure, and data center locations led them to beat Kinsta narrowly during our testing. 

What is Cloudways Web Hosting?

Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that was founded in 2012. Since its inception, it’s maintained its commitment to offering simple yet quality cloud hosting to thousands of websites.

Their unique hosting services are founded on clustered servers, evenly distributing your site load for impressive speed and uptime. They also offer pay-as-you-go plans for ultimate user flexibility.

Their cloud servers come from diverse providers, including DigitalOcean (the Cloudways parent company), Google Cloud Platform, Vultr, Linode, and Amazon Web Services. Users can choose their cloud infrastructure, which certainly gives Cloudways an edge in this competition.

Furthermore, Cloudways allows users to choose between a wide selection of CMS choices, including:

• WordPress
• Magento
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Laravel

Not to mention the many more services offered on their site. Check out our in-depth Cloudways review here for more information!

Where Cloudways Shines

Cloudways shines when it comes to flexibility.

This hosting provider offers customizations to your hosting plan, including infrastructure and CMS, and a flexible pricing dynamic with their pay-as-you-go plans.

Cloudways also offers exceptional customer support with the option to purchase advanced customer service features. These advanced features include involved troubleshooting, lightning-fast response times, and even access to a private Slack channel with additional payment.

Where Cloudways Falls Short

Cloudways has less advantage than Kinsta due to its lack of managed WordPress features.

If you’re a huge WordPress fan, Cloudways may be missing some essential features for running a WordPress website.

For example, the service doesn’t offer automatic WordPress updates and installations. This lack of WordPress management should be acceptable for running a single site, but managing multiple can get overwhelming.

In this case, Kinsta has the edge for WordPress hosting.

What is Kinsta Hosting?

Kinsta is a cutting-edge web hosting platform famous for fast server configurations and global-scale bandwidth.

Like Cloudways, Kinsta’s hosting types are limited to cloud hosting. All of their virtual and physical servers are from Google Cloud Platform.

The service also offers application and database hosting, but they’re primarily used for their efficient and reliable managed WordPress hosting plans.

Where Kinsta Shines

Kinsta offers an advantage over Cloudways in its managed WordPress hosting features.

Their managed plans come with the following managed features:

• Global CDN and top-tier CPUs
• Automatic optimizations
• Built-in performance monitoring
• Monitored security with Cloudflare, DDoS, and a firewall
• Automatic backups and updates

The prices of their managed WordPress hosting plans aren’t the cheapest, but as we discovered in our Kinsta review, they’re worth it if you have the budget.

Where Kinsta Falls Short

Kinsta falls short if you’re looking for affordable cloud hosting.

Because it uses Google Cloud Platform for its hosting infrastructure, its plans are much more expensive than the average cloud hosting package. Even for managed cloud hosting.

If you’re running a single website or looking for more affordable cloud hosting options, I’d send you towards Cloudways.

Cloudways Vs. Kinsta: The Final Showdown

Cloudways and Kinsta are well-renowned managed hosting platforms providing exceptional services to website owners and developers. However, when comparing the two, it’s essential to consider each platform’s unique features and benefits.

Let’s look closely at Cloudways vs. Kinsta and their comparative features!

Hosting Types & Features

Winner: Cloudways

I chose Cloudways as the winner here because it offers more hosting infrastructure and CMS systems options.

Kinsta and Cloudways are limited in hosting types, especially compared to other providers like Dreamhost, so this was a difficult choice.

Ultimately, though, Cloudways offers more flexibility within cloud hosting, so it’s the clear winner.

Performance & Speed 

Winner: Tie

Cloudways and Kinsta are crafted on some of the world’s fastest, most dependable infrastructures.

Using either provider, you will receive their speed-boosted server stack preconfigured and ready for use immediately.

Both companies leverage Nginx as a web server, MariaDB databases, and up-to-date versions of PHP and multiple caches to enhance your website’s performance.

Between their servers and their huge host of global data center locations, they’re pretty neatly tied when it comes to speed.

However, the services differ where CDN services are concerned.

In either case, you’ll likely have to pay extra for CDN, but it’s less likely with Kinsta as their KeyCDN is initially free for all plans (for a limited amount of traffic).

Uptime

Winner: Cloudways

Both Kinsta and Cloudways can guarantee nearly 100% uptime.

Kinsta’s supported by Google Cloud infrastructure which, as we all know, is about as reliable as hosting infrastructure gets.

Cloudways, on the other hand, offers Google Cloud infrastructure and hosting support from multiple other partners, all of which promise at least 99.99% uptime.

Once again, due to their flexible options, Cloudways takes the cake here.

For the record, though, neither site went down during our testing. We used Cloudways’ DigitalOcean infrastructure.

Speed 

Winner: Tie

It’s easy to achieve a blazing-fast website using either Kinsta or Cloudways.

Furthermore, speed comparison tests can be questionable, as speed depends on a massive variety of factors, including:

• Site themes, plugins, and other page elements
• CDN
• Choice of data center location
• Server/cache status

However, we can judge Kinsta and Cloudways based on their speed-boosting features. They each boast speed-optimized server stacks, speed-optimizing caches, ample resources for RAM and CPU, constant updates, and Nginx.

As such, this segment of our comparison is a tie!

Stress Testing 

Winner: Tie

Neither Kinsta nor Cloudways went down during our stress tests. Both providers are known for their stellar uptime, and our tests didn’t indicate any difference.

Ease of Use 

Winner: Kinsta

Kinsta offers a quick and easy sign-up, immediate SSL activation, and an intuitive control panel.

Cloudways, on the other hand, offers a custom cPanel, but it’s more complicated for beginners. Their initial configuration was more complex than Kinsta’s too.

Both services offer daily backups and site monitoring that make it easy to understand what’s happening with the health of your website.

Pricing & Value 

Winner: Cloudways

Cloudways and Kinsta have slightly different pricing models. However, each service offers fully transparent pricing, so you know exactly what you’ll get in each plan.

With Cloudways, you’ll pay monthly only for the resources you used the previous month. Kinsta’s price packages are fixed per month.

I chose Cloudways as the winner because they offer more pricing options with greater value.

Kinsta’s affordable price plans, for example, are much more limited than Cloudways’s. With it, you only get one WordPress installation with 25k visits. However, Cloudways’s Google Cloud Platform starter plan offers unlimited site visits and installations.

It’s worth noting that Kinsta doesn’t limit bandwidth on any plan. Even with this consideration, though, Cloudways still offers more value with its tremendous flexibility, variety, and pay-as-you-go structure.

Website Security 

Winner: Cloudways

Cloudways and Kinsta rely on multiple Google Cloud Platform features for your website’s safety. They also each offer automatic daily site backups, so restoring a healthy version of your site in a crisis is manageable.

However, Cloudways tops this category because of its comprehensive security.

Beyond its collaboration with GCP, Cloudways’s other cloud providers offer unique and extensive security features available on any plan for no extra cost.

On top of each cloud provider’s security features, Cloudways has its dedicated firewalls for an added layer of protection.

Help & Support 

Winner: Kinsta

Kinsta’s customer support team comprises developers and engineers with expert knowledge to help you maintain the health of your website.

Their team is highly proactive, to the extent of reaching out if they detect issues with your site, and most ticket requests get fixed within the day.

Cloudways’s customer support is just a little behind Kinsta’s with its various support formats, including Slack, phone/video calls, and web chat.

WordPress Hosting Features

Winner: Kinsta

Kinsta and Cloudways offer similar advanced features, from equivalent security protection to a choice of data center. However, Kinsta has a slight advantage in providing more flexibility, various price plans, and more features.

Kinsta also offers unlimited sites and site staging on any plan.

Website Migration

Winner: Tie

Cloudways and Kinsta offer free WordPress site migrations.

Email Hosting 

Winner: Tie

Neither Cloudways nor Kinsta offers email hosting services.

Website Builders 

Winner: Cloudways

Cloudways’s website builder is more efficient and easier to use than Kinsta’s. It offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and allows you to design a beautiful website without any coding necessary.

Alternatives to Cloudways

If you’re unsure if Cloudways is the right web hosting service for your business, many other hosting services are available on the market.

Let’s take a closer look at each alternative!

A2 Hosting

A2 hosting is another hosting provider known for its fast speeds. However, unlike Cloudways, A2 Hosting is home to many hosting types, including shared, VPS, and dedicated.

However, Cloudways offers more advanced security than A2 and better site-management features and performance.

Hostinger

For simpler hosting needs, Hostinger is the way to go. This service offers cloud and web hosting at more affordable prices than Cloudways.

However, if you’re running a large-scale site or are vulnerable to hacking, Cloudways offers advanced features that may be more relevant to your needs.

Alternatives to Kinsta

If you don’t think Cloudways is the web host for you, there are numerous alternatives to Cloudways that offer robust and feature-rich cloud hosting solutions for web applications and websites.

Let’s explore these alternatives!

HostGator

HostGator is more affordable than Kinsta, but don’t let their prices fool you. Long term, they require pricey renewal fees and subpar quality for their hosting services.

Kinsta beat HostGator across the board in uptime user experience, customer support, and overall performance.

Godaddy

Kinsta is easier to set up than GoDaddy, with more consistent and stable long-term performance.

Kinsta is also well known for transparency and a genuine dedication to hosting, while GoDaddy seems more set on upselling.

Conclusion

This review was difficult since Kinsta and Cloudways are top-notch web hosting platforms. In reality, that’s all the more reason to compare them.

Generally speaking, Cloudways is the better web host, but Kinsta does offer some advantages if you’re specifically in the market for a managed WordPress host.

Between Cloudways’s hosting versatility and fantastic pricing, we’d rank it higher than Kinsta. Cloudways is an excellent solution for any sized project.

If you’ve read this review and tried out Cloudways, leave a comment telling us what you think. Or, if you’re interested in exploring other web hosting solutions, check out our overview of the best web hosting services of 2023.

Kinsta Vs. Cloudways FAQ