Kinsta Vs. GreenGeeks (2023)

Choosing the right web host is almost as overwhelming as switching between services. That’s why it’s a wise decision to compare as many hosting services as possible before committing.

I’ve worked in the tech world for over a decade. As such, I’ve gained experience and expertise with the industry’s top-leading web hosts.

Whether starting fresh or creating a website for the first time, the host you choose is an important decision. However, it doesn’t have to be stressful!

Here’s an in-depth analysis of Kinsta vs. GreenGeeks web hosting services to help you decide which one is best for you.

How Did We Test Kinsta and GreenGeeks Hosting?

At Tweak Your Biz, we’re committed to the highest testing standard and only using trusted software. We prioritize data drawn from lab tests more than our personal points of view in our research. 

To conduct these tests, we created two staging sites for Kinsta and one for GreenGeeks and measured their results in these areas: 

• Hosting Types & Features
• Performance & Speed
• Ease of Use
• Pricing & Value
• Website Security
• Customer Help & Support
• Site Migrations
• Website Builder

Let’s take a closer look at each!

Our Winner

Kinsta or GreenGeeks?

Choosing a winner between these two is hard because they serve different purposes. 

CHOOSE KINSTA IF YOU:

• Are a developer
• Need insanely reliable uptime for a large-scale site
• Need extra customizability on your site
• Prefer a managed site
• Have a large budget to dedicate to hosting

CHOOSE GREENGEEKS IF YOU:

• Want to invest in eco-conscious hosting
• Prefer shared hosting
• Need an affordable price plan
• Run a smaller site

What is Kinsta Web Hosting?

Kinsta web hosting is a cutting-edge hosting platform aiming to “offer industry-leading tools and services for the modern developer.”

They offer advanced services due to their super-fast servers, global-scale bandwidth, expert customer support, and intuitive, personalized dashboard.

Their cloud-based hosting offers impressive speeds and near-perfect uptime. Their cloud servers are from Google Cloud Platform, the world’s fastest hosting infrastructure.

Kinsta combines reliable GCP resources with an experienced team of tech developers. As such, their hosting services are an attractive and powerful option.

Kinsta offers managed WordPress cloud hosting solutions for:

• Single-site hosting
• Agency hosting
• WooCommerce
• Enterprise hosting

With their impressive features, it’s no surprise that Kinsta price plans are more expensive than many other managed hosts. With Kinsta, you’re paying not only for managed hosting but also for top-tier infrastructure. Check out our Kinsta review for more information!

Where Kinsta Shines

Kinsta is one of the big winners in the hosting world regarding top speeds and uptime. They nearly can’t be beaten.

Their plans come with generous CPU and RAM resources, constant updates to PHP and MySQL, server caching, and robust network connections. You also have the option to choose between 24 global data centers.

During our tests, our Kinsta site didn’t go down once. Their uptime is so secure that you won’t worry about site-visit limitations. Furthermore, Kinsta offers uptime checks every two minutes. If your site goes down, they’ll reach out to you.

Where Kinsta Falls Short

Kinsta doesn’t offer domain names. For some, this could create complications, but we at TYB respect their reasoning.

The Kinsta team focuses on web hosting rather than domain hosting to provide the best customer support and services possible. It’s likely less possible to do this if your energies are spread between multiple services.

Another shortcoming that many perceive with Kinsta is that it doesn’t offer cPanel functionality. However, in its place, they provide a sleek MyKinsta dashboard that offers all of the features of a cPanel, tailored to their services.

Finally, Kinsta can be challenging in the way of pricing. Their plans are simply too expensive for some clients to afford, even if they are willing to spend a bit more for Kinsta’s rock-solid speeds and uptime.

What is GreenGeeks Hosting?

GreenGeeks web hosting is a 14-year-old environmentally-conscious web hosting company. GreenGeeks is a leading face and trailblazer for this combination of eco-friendliness and web hosting.

GreenGeeks mainly gears its hosting services towards individual site owners and small businesses looking for shared or WordPress hosting. They also offer VPS hosting for large companies.

The GreenGeeks hosting team comprises tech experts with experience building popular companies like iPage and HostPapa. The company applies this expertise to its web hosting, stellar customer support, and online educational resources.

But how does GreenGeeks execute their “green” mission?

Rather than something simple like carbon offsetting, GreenGeeks commits to a “positive energy footprint.” They pledged to replace 3x of your website’s energy with wind power credits.

This pledge amounts to over 615,000 kWh/year across 600,000 websites. Combine these numbers with their guarantee of a tree planted for every site hosted, and you’re looking at some environmental goodness. This resulted in the United State Environmental Protection Agency naming GreenGeeks a Green Power Partner.

Furthermore, GreenGeeks data centers exist mainly in cold-temperature locations, so they can efficiently store their servers while ensuring they don’t overheat. Read our in-depth GreenGeeks review here!

Where GreenGeeks Shines

GreenGeeks excels in ease of use, affordability, and unlimited space and traffic on their web hosting plans.

They offer a straightforward interface. A GreenGeeks account is easy to set up and can lead to a website up and running in no time. The company also provides managed hosting functionality with automatic updates and SSL activation.

Where GreenGeeks Falls Short

GreenGeeks’s uptime is slightly lower-than-average. Our GreenGeeks site didn’t go down during testing, but it wasn’t receiving very much web traffic. GreenGeeks’s uptime presents an issue for large-scale, busy websites, but a small site likely won’t experience downtime on their plans.

Kinsta Vs. GreenGeeks: The Final Showdown

Let’s look at how Kinsta and GreenGeeks compared to each other during our testing!

Hosting Types & Features

Winner: GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks offers significantly more types of web hosting than Kinsta.

Kinsta

Kinsta exclusively offers managed cloud web hosting. There are also application and database hosting options, but no smaller-scale site hosting options are available.

GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks offers:

• Shared hosting
• Reseller hosting
• WordPress hosting
• VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting
• WooCommerce hosting

Performance & Speed 

Winner: Kinsta

Due to its extensive distribution of data centers, Kinsta wins this category by a small margin. 

Kinsta

Kinsta’s speed and performance history is hard to beat, with their ample RAM and CPU resources (on any plan), constant updates, option for MariaDB, frequent server caching, and a vast selection of global data centers.

Their data center locations include the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Singapore. However, they also have data centers in Brazil, Germany, India, Australia, Taiwan, and Switzerland. And that’s not even all of them.

Kinsta uses SSD storage with all plans and a free KeyCDN. There are no slow global locations for Kinsta services.

GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks has fewer global data centers than Kinsta. Their centers are in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands. However, our tests didn’t indicate any slowness in their services.

Like Kinsta, GreenGeeks offers SSD and a free CDN. Their CDN is CloudFlare, which shows no significant differences from KeyCDN.

Uptime

Winner: Kinsta

Based on our research, Kinsta offers more consistent uptime than GreenGeeks.

Kinsta

During our tests and based on online research, Kinsta is consistent with its promise of 99.99% uptime. The company gets extra points for automatic server scaling and uptime checks and how they proactively reach out if your site experiences issues.

GreenGeeks

We didn’t experience downtime during our tests, but GreenGeeks has been reported to experience fairly frequent downtime for high-traffic sites.

Ease of Use 

Winner: Tie

Kinsta

Kinsta is pretty easy to use for those with some experience in tech. Their sign-up and site activation are simple and straightforward, not to mention efficient.

Their control panel is also very intuitive, as it’s Kinsta-specific.

Activating a domain name from a different site can be difficult, though. Overall, Kinsta is super easy for tech novices and learnable for beginners.

GreenGeeks

Like Kinsta, GreenGeeks’ domain transfers can be complex. They also offer a super-simple interface and a quick, straightforward setup.

Pricing & Value 

Winner: GreenGeeks

We chose GreenGeeks for this category winner because their plans are, obviously, less expensive. However, they also offer stellar value and deserve to be the top dog in this category.

Kinsta

Kinsta’s managed WordPress hosting plans are relatively pricey due to their advanced infrastructure and managed features.

GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks offers more affordable WordPress hosting without the added features of Kinsta.

Website Security 

Winner: Kinsta

Kinsta has more security offerings than GreenGeeks.

Kinsta

Kinsta implements 24/7 server monitoring and DDoS protection. On top of that, they offer solid firewalls and protection against hacking, spam, malware, and viruses.

Their GeoIP two-factor authentication bans IPs with 6+ failed login attempts in one minute.

To protect your account from others on your cloud server, Kinsta uses LXC containers. 

GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks, like Kinsta, offers DDoS, 24/7 server monitoring, and hack/virus protection. GreenGeeks also has container technology, but they use Hosting Account Isolation.

Help & Support 

Winner: Kinsta

Kinsta prioritizes customer support, going so far as to limit its features to ensure they have the capacity for top-tier service. 

Kinsta

Kinsta has a reputation for listening to customer feedback. Their developers often look to customer requests to implement new features.

Furthermore, their team is made of developers and techies with high-level expertise. Their educational resources are always accurate and easy to understand.

Kinsta offers 24/7/365 chat, and the average ticket wait time is 1 minute and 30 seconds. In our experience, the response times are immediate. 

Their chat functions save previous interactions in case of ongoing issues. 

GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks also offers 24/7/365 customer support, but their wait times can be longer than Kinsta’s. They provide phone support, but this can have especially extended wait times, and we wouldn’t recommend it if you’re looking for efficiency.

Site Migrations

Winner: Tie

Both Kinsta and GreenGeeks offer free website migrations.

Website Builders 

Winner: Kinsta

Kinsta’s site builder is unique and cutting-edge. It also offers more functionalities than GreenGeeks’s options. 

Kinsta

Kinsta offers an easy-to-use, simple website builder to help set up your site. It’s called DevKinsta and is an offline and local WordPress builder. They also offer one-click staging environments.

GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks offers collaborations with Weebly, SitePad, and WordPress for their site-building.

Alternatives to Kinsta

For those who don’t think Kinsta is the right web host for their business, here are some alternatives to choose from!

A2 Hosting

A2 hosting is an excellent Kinsta alternative if you’re looking for a cost-effective web host with similar speeds and uptime.

Like Kinsta, A2 offers WordPress hosting. However, they boast shared, VPS, dedicated, and reseller hosting options.

Hostinger

Hostinger and Kinsta are tailored to different needs.

Hostinger is renowned for its broad range of web solutions, from first-time bloggers to corporate sites. In contrast, Kinsta offers managed cloud hosting services with a hefty price tag.

If you’re after unparalleled customizability and want your website to handle high levels of traffic, then Kinsta provides the ideal solution.

If budget is one of your foremost concerns, Hostinger has the edge as an affordable option that still provides excellent quality service.

Alternatives to GreenGeeks

Godaddy

GoDaddy isn’t the most reliable hosting site. They’re keen on upsells and don’t offer the best uptime and speeds. Furthermore, they charge steep renewal fees after the first year.

Bluehost

Bluehost is a top name in web hosting, but we’d still recommend GreenGeeks over its services.

Bluehost doesn’t offer the same environmental protection as GreenGeeks or provide superior speeds, uptime, or security.

Now You Decide

I hope this review gave you a better understanding of your priorities regarding web hosting.

Whether you choose between Kinsta and GreenGeeks, or choose a different host altogether, researching your options is a wise way to choose a host.

For more research, consider looking over my overall guide to the best web hosts of 2023.

Good luck with the next steps of your search. Until next time!

Frequently Asked Questions