Cloudways Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta

Introduction

Cloudways targets experienced developers who don’t mind acting as system administrators. However, when it comes to managed WordPress hosting, it doesn’t offer the support, premium features, or prices that Kinsta does.

Cloudways is mainly a server reseller, not specialized in managed WordPress hosting.

On the other hand, Kinsta is an expert in managed WP hosting for 10 years and is well-known for top website performance, world-class support, and the powerful MyKinsta dashboard that makes website management a breeze. More than 120,000+ clients all across the world, including some of the biggest companies in the world, rely on Kinsta.

We know that everyday WordPress and website users are looking for an alternative hosting solution to Cloudways that combines better infrastructure and performance, along with faster and better support. Kinsta provides all these and much more!

Feature Comparison Overview

At this point, we want to take a moment to look at some of the biggest differences between Kinsta and Cloudways:

Kinsta vs Cloudways

Let’s take a look at some of the major differences between Kinsta and Cloudways:

• Kinsta is a leading managed WordPress hosting provider that offers all-in-one solutions for managing your website and supports 37 data centers across Google’s global network. Cloudways is a cloud hosting and server reseller platform that is not specific to WordPress.
• Kinsta uses C3D and C2 VMs (GCP’s fastest servers) for all plans in supported locations. In our tests, we found that C2 VMs are up to 200% faster than GCP’s lower-tier machines, while C3D machines reduced response times by a further 20% to 50%. 
• Sites on Kinsta are equipped with a self-healing PHP feature. We monitor all sites on our infrastructure 480 times per day and offer an uptime guarantee. Cloudways only includes monitoring services as a paid add-on.
• Sites on Kinsta are covered by our Malware Security Pledge. At Cloudways, you have to pay for a premium upgrade to get Malware coverage.
• Kinsta is well-known for its world-class support, composed of WordPress experts and Linux engineers, available 24/7 for all our customers via live chat, with an average response time of under 2 minutes. We offer multilingual support across all of our plans, and our engineers are experienced and capable of solving any hosting issue on your WP site. Cloudways premium support is only available as a paid add-on, starting at $100 per month. 
• Kinsta offers free migrations from Cloudways handled by an expert engineer. You can rest assured that your site will be migrated safely, securely, and following best practices. Cloudways doesn’t offer expert assistance migration services, only a dedicated “do it yourself” plugin, which means you have to do the migrations on your own, so you won’t receive a white-glove migration experience specifically tailored to your site.
• Containerized Solution. Kinsta offers a unique infrastructure that containerizes site resources so they don’t have to share. This increases and levels your performance on a per-site basis. No more worrying about sites you don’t manage potentially stealing your resources. It also helps minimize your time spent troubleshooting performance issues as you no longer have to account for potential resource stealing.
• Because of Kinsta’s unique containerized hosting, you can also host multiple sites on multiple data centers, all within the same plan! No more having to pay for multiple servers just to host sites in different locations. Help your clients get an instant performance boost by simply hosting their site on a server that’s more appropriately located for their customer base.
• While Cloudways offers some caching through a dedicated caching plugin, Kinsta has a unique system that caches pages at the server level. Our built-in Edge Caching cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
• Transparent resources and pricing. Kinsta lets you know exactly what resources your sites have available. Gone are the days of blind upgrade requests and upsell attempts. Cloudways’ pay-as-you-go pricing plans can be complex and confusing, with potentially hidden fees and lots of premium add-ons that add up to the final costs.
• Cloudways’ bandwidth allowance on Google Cloud setups is 2GB, which is only enough for a few hundred visits a month. All data transfers above this limit will be charged as overage.
• Kinsta CDN takes advantage of our Cloudflare integration and its worldwide network that spans almost 200 cities in more than 100 countries. We don’t need to know where you are to know there will be a Cloudflare server near you. That means lightning-fast server requests to your website. It’s available at no extra cost on any Kinsta plan. Cloudways offers its CloudwaysCDN as a paid add-on. 
• Kinsta plans include everything you need to maximize site performance and security, including premium DNS, uptime monitoring, and firewalls. With Cloudways, many of the security and support features you’d expect from a managed WordPress host are only available for additional fees. 
• All Kinsta plans include free access to our custom application performance monitoring tool (Kinsta APM) for debugging WordPress performance issues. Cloudways’ APM only lists slow pages without detailed stack traces.
• Kinsta performs weekly automatic MySQL optimization on all your sites to optimize database performance. We didn’t find any evidence that Cloudways provides the same service so far.
• Kinsta always supports the most recent version of PHP and supports different versions for staging environments. Switching between PHP versions takes just a few clicks in the MyKinsta dashboard.
• MyKinsta dashboard includes a variety of useful site management tools that are not available on Cloudways: database search and replace, free and built-in APM tool, free IP Geolocation manager, ionCube loader, PHP restart, and much more.
• Kinsta is SOC2 compliant, which provides independent proof that we have established security procedures and adhered to those procedures over time. Cloudways is not SOC2 compliant. See Kinsta’s Trust Report for additional information.
• Kinsta offers six types of backups: free automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system-generated, downloadable, and external backups sent automatically to your Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. We also store two weeks of backups at all times, with the possibility to increase data retention.
• For developers and agencies, Kinsta offers a powerful local development tool called DevKinsta. With DevKinsta, you can clone and develop your projects locally and push updates to Kinsta when ready. WordPress multisite is also supported. Cloudways is compatible with Local, but their Local Connect feature, which is required to move sites between Local and Cloudways (or other remote hostings), doesn’t have built-in multi-site support at this time. This means importing and/or deploying multi-sites in and from Local will require a more manual and time-consuming process.
• Kinsta has a 30-day money-back guarantee, while Cloudways only offers a three-day free trial.
• Kinsta provides an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee on all plans.
• Kinsta offers a 100% Malware Security Pledge.

Read on to see the details of each Kinsta feature and how they compare to Cloudways. Or try it out right now with our risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee.

Kinsta Is Safe and Secure

At Kinsta; we know that the security of your data is of the utmost importance, which is why we’re dedicated to providing the most secure hosting service by taking a variety of active and passive measures to safeguard your site.

All sites on Kinsta are protected by our free Cloudflare integration, which includes an enterprise-level firewall with a custom ruleset and DDoS protection. With our Cloudflare integration, you’ll get the benefits of enhanced security and performance without having to manage your own Cloudflare account.

Some of Kinsta’s key security measures include:

• Monitoring sites every three minutes for uptime, 480 times a day.
• Rigid software-based restrictions to stop malicious code from entering your website.
• Real-time DDoS attack detection and mitigation.
• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) support and automatic bans for IPs that have more than six failed login attempts in a minute.
• A dedicated Security Team to address malicious attackers, hacks, and exploits.
• Free Cloudflare integration with a secure firewall and built-in DDoS protection.
• Only support for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP).
• Completely isolated containers (LXC), using LXD to orchestrate them so there’s no chance of cross-infection from other clients.
• Free Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard domain support.
• 100% Malware Security Pledge if your site is infected with malware while hosted on Kinsta.
• Automatic security checks for every plugin installed to discover vulnerabilities and/or security issues.

In the rare event that something were to happen to your site, our Malware Security Pledge means you will get hands-on assistance from our engineers free of charge. We’ll restore your site and make sure it’s free of backdoors that hackers can take advantage of.

Kinsta API

Say goodbye to the limitations of the past and enjoy a revolutionary era where machines can seamlessly interact with our services. Kinsta API (Application Programming Interface) allows you to perform tasks on your Kinsta site without logging in to the MyKinsta dashboard.

What’s possible with Kinsta API?

• Reporting: seamlessly integrate Kinsta Services into your internal tracking systems and retrieve Kinsta analytics data effortlessly.
• Scheduled Tasks: create applications to schedule tasks, ensuring minimal disruption to your visitors. 
• WordPress Site Creation: create a new WordPress site installation automatically and take control of your site’s functionality. You can also create WordPress Multisite installations.

Enjoy more automation than ever before on the Kinsta platform by taking advantage of Kinsta API.

Free Performance Monitoring Tool

All Kinsta plans come with a free custom-built APM tool that can be easily accessed in the MyKinsta dashboard. Kinsta APM provides you with key WordPress performance insights and metrics without the need to pay for third-party subscriptions to other APM services.

With the information you get from Kinsta APM, you can debug and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks, These include:

• Slow WordPress plugins and themes.
• Long calls to external APIs and domains.
• Unoptimized MySQL database queries.
• PHP execution time

Cloudways plans come with a built-in APM tool, but it doesn’t provide granular insights like Kinsta APM. For example, Cloudways’ APM tool lists the slowest pages on your site but doesn’t provide you with a complete stack trace.

With Kinsta APM, you can use full stack traces to debug WordPress performance issues down to a specific line of code.

Develop Locally With DevKinsta

With DevKinsta, you can launch WordPress sites with a full hosting stack and SSL support on your local computer (macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu) with just a few clicks.

DevKinsta is fully integrated with MyKinsta and Kinsta’s hosting platform, so you can join the 60,000+ community members using DevKinsta to develop locally and push updates directly to a staging environment on Kinsta!

Cloudways is compatible with the Local WordPress development tool. However, the integration with Local doesn’t support WordPress multisite configurations, which are very popular with agencies and developers.

If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features (including multisite support) and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver.

Free Migrations From Real People

Whether you want to move one site or 100, Kinsta provides hassle-free migrations that are handled by our skilled WordPress experts. You won’t have to deal with complex technology or risk losing critical data.

If you’re interested in moving your site to managed WordPress hosting, we offer unlimited free migrations from Cloudways! To top it off, unlike Cloudways, where free migrations are performed via a WordPress plugin, our migrations are performed by an expert migrations engineer.

If you have problematic high traffic sites like us, you’ll love their migration service — they took care of everything and even identified some problem plugins that had been installed by former members of our team. I would have spent hours on the migration due to the size without their help.

To get started, simply complete our site migration request form, and our experts will reach out to schedule a time. Then you can track the migration’s status directly from your MyKinsta dashboard.

Agency Partner Program

Kinsta has an Agency Partner Program specifically designed for agencies looking for a powerful and secure hosting platform with minimal overhead. After joining our Agency Partner Program, your agency will be able to focus on developing client projects and expanding your business while we handle the hosting side of things.

Our Agency Partner Program also comes with a number of perks:

• Free hosting for your agency site on a Kinsta Pro plan (a $70/month value).
• Unlimited free migrations for your client sites.
• White-label our cache-clearing plugin with your agency’s logo and branding.
• One month of free hosting, so you don’t have to worry about paying for two hosting plans while migrating your client sites to Kinsta.

As a member of our Agency Partner Program, all your client sites will receive the same level of support, features, and tooling offered on our normal plan tiers!

Affiliate Program With Recurring Commissions

Kinsta is constantly exceeding our client’s expectations. Our satisfied customers are eager to spread the word about our products and services, which has helped us become one of the fastest-growing hosts in the industry. 

For every referral of Managed WordPress Hosting, you earn both:

• An initial one-time bonus, between $50 and $500, is calculated based on the plan of the customer.
• A 10% monthly recurring commission is paid every month for the lifetime of the customer. The 10% is calculated out of the plan’s monthly fee (discounts applied). Add-ons are not included.

For every referral of Application Hosting and/or Database Hosting, you earn a 5% recurring commission every month for the lifetime of the customer. The 5% is calculated out of the customer’s monthly invoice (discounts applied).

This is a powerful opportunity to earn a passive income! 

To make the Kinsta affiliate experience even more enjoyable, we custom-built our own easy-to-use affiliate dashboard. Therefore, you won’t have to deal with complicated or confusing third-party platforms.

Cloudways offers up to $125 per new sale. Since Cloudwayse doesn’t pay recurring commissions for the lifetime of a referred customer, its affiliate program doesn’t allow you to build a passive income stream.