Deciding between Cloudways vs. Kinsta?
Cloudways hosts this blog. They were actually faster than Kinsta as shown in multiple speed tests and have an excellent reputation in the WordPress Hosting Facebook Group. Their support used to be just okay, but they made major improvements to not only their support, but also added Vultr High Frequency servers which have similar speeds as DigitalOcean. They’re cheaper (starting at $10/month for DigitalOcean) with Varnish, memcached, and Redis caching. Most Cloudways complaints are about their Breeze plugin, no email hosting, and okay support.
Kinsta is still very fast, but typically not as fast as Cloudways. They use Google Cloud C2 with KeyCDN and server side caching. Kinstya’s support is arguably better than Cloudways but they’re more expensive starting at $30/month. Kinsta is also very innovative. You will notice many high traffic bloggers like Matthew Woodward use Kinsta (one of the reasons is because they’re great for handling many simultaneous visitors). For this, Kinsta is likely your best bet.
1. Speed – Cloudways vs. Kinsta Performance Tests
I tested Kinsta’s Starter Plan versus a $10/month DigitalOcean plan on Cloudways while using the same Astra Starter Site and plugins. Then I measured key metrics like TTFB and load times across various speed tools. Both Cloudways and Kinsta are fast, but Cloudways is slightly faster.
Cloudways Reports
Kinsta Reports
This article was written by Tom Dupuis and originally published on Tom Dupuis.