Why Choose GridPane Over Kinsta?

Both Kinsta and ourselves here at GridPane are 100% focused on WordPress hosting services, but we each have fundamentally different business and pricing models. We occasionally get asked by prospective clients how we compare with each other and so we’ll seek to explain the key differences here, as fairly and accurately as possible.

If you’re looking to understand the differences between GridPane and Kinsta to decide who is the better choice for your business, you’re in the right place.

TLDR Summary

Business

Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting provider that charge a premium for their hosting services. Prices start at $30/month for 1 regular site, and they have a structured pricing tier system for upgrading your plan as you need it. They have an excellent reputation in the space and are one of the more popular WordPress hosts. We think very highly of Kinsta.

GridPane gives you the power to create your own managed WordPress hosting service. Instead of renting strictly limited resources directly from a host, you can provision and manage your own enterprise-capable WordPress servers through our SaaS platform. We primarily serve WordPress agencies and developers.

We’re both 100% client funded with no outside investors/shareholders to answer to.

Service

Kinsta rents a small slice of one of their Google Cloud Compute servers, which they themselves rent and install their own LEMP stack on. All plans come with strict restrictions on bandwidth, visits, and PHP workers. Their platform comes with a nice UI with many one-click options for managing your websites.

GridPane allows you to provision servers from providers such as DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, UpCloud, and essentially any quality VPS provider that you wish through our Custom VPS option (including Google Cloud Compute, Hetzner, and OVH). You choose and control your infrastructure, and you can use our software and control panel to manage your websites and servers.

Pricing Model

Kinsta, like most managed hosts, base their pricing on arbitrary metrics and can result in overage charges if you go over these set limitations. By restricting “visits”, disk space, and server customization options such as PHP workers, many people are forced to upgrade to higher-tier plans. This is one of the main reasons many agencies are switching from Kinsta to GridPane.

GridPane’s pricing model is straightforward. We have 3 set plans that are designed to help you at different levels of your hosting venture’s journey. As you add more sites and servers to your account, the more you’ll benefit from the higher-tier plans. There are no preset server or site limitations on any plans, and there are no restrictions or arbitrary limits on pageviews or bandwidth. Your servers can handle what they can handle, and pricing is predictable.

Pricing Comparison

Kinsta’s pricing starts at $30/month for 1 regular site (multisite is available from their $60/month plan onwards), and then they have numerous plans available that allow you to add more and more sites. They also offer a couple of things with their plans that we at GridPane don’t include. One of those is free malware clean up should any of your sites become hacked. The other is a CDN. Both of these are great features.

GridPane includes many features that Kinsta don’t include, such as OpenLiteSpeed (beta), server customization options, hourly backups (additional $100/month per site on Kinsta), Redis object caching (additional $100/month per site on Kinsta) offsite backup options, Elasticsearch (additional $100/month per site on Kinsta), DNS integrations, multiple Web Application Firewalls, and server-level security configurations. We also have a one-click WP Ultimo integration. Our Pro plan is $30, Developer is $100 and we have agency and enterprise options available.

Also, with the money you’ll save using GridPane you’ll easily be able to afford BunnyCDN which is both excellent and incredible value for money if you need a CDN. Cloudflare is of course free, but not as performant. With the backup options available to you, recovering from Malware should be quick and painless. The easiest & fastest way to recover from getting hacked is to restore from a clean backup, and this is likely what Kinsta will do for you.

The above pricing comparison is comparing GridPane + $24 VPS plans that include additional full server backups at your chosen IaaS provider.

Support

We both have 24/7 live support, and as we’re both dedicated to WordPress, we can each offer a much higher level of WordPress specific support than companies who are generalized and serve many different markets.

The main difference is that we have no incentive to ask you to increase the size of your server resources as that isn’t how we make our money. GridPane is completely independent from your infrastructure (IaaS) provider.

We allow you to customize your servers to meet your website’s requirements and we can advise you on how to fine-tune your servers vs upgrading them. You’ll also get your servers at “cost” (we don’t add any additional markup on them), and the average $10-$20 VPS can easily handle a TON of traffic.

Kinsta’s support is great, but it’s also limited by the restrictions of the platform. So, if you need more PHP workers, more “views”, or anything that doesn’t fit the mold, your only option is to upgrade your plan. That is the only course of action their support will be able to offer. GridPane doesn’t suffer from those restrictions.

Stack and Performance

Kinsta runs on a well-optimized Nginx stack built specifically for WordPress, and their performance is far superior to that of your average shared hosting account. They run on Google Cloud Computes excellent infrastructure and include a CDN. They also have a strictly regimented service that can quickly require you to scale up your plan if you’re hosting WooCommerce, learning management systems, or multisites etc. Getting the performance you need on these types of sites may cost $$$$.

GridPane is the only platform to offer multiple stack options. Our developer accounts give you have the ability to customize your server stack with either Nginx or OpenLiteSpeed (beta), and MariaDB or Percona for MySQL 8. Our out-of-the-box defaults are ideal for most WordPress websites, but you can further customize them to meet your specific requirements as needed. Need to tweak your PHP workers for a WooCommerce or LMS website? No problem at all. On Kinsta there are no such options and you will likely have no choice other than to increase your resources by purchasing a higher plan.

As far as performance goes, let’s just say that we will happily put any of our server stack options up against ANY managed hosting company any day of the week, but both ourselves and Kinsta have been awarded “Top Tier” honors in the [highest] enterprise category by Review Signal.

TL;DR

These are the key differences between our services:
GridPane can help WordPress agencies and professionals build their own hosting service and save anywhere from hundreds to multiple thousands per month as they scale their business.
GridPane is better suited to WordPress agencies/professionals.
GridPane gives you the power to create your own enterprise capable servers. Kinsta rent a small slice of a server that comes with strict visitor, bandwidth, and PHP worker limitations.
GridPane includes multiple Web Application Firewall (WAF) options.
GridPane includes hourly local backups. Kinsta includes daily backups, but charges an additional $100/month per website for hourly backups.
GridPane includes Redis object caching. Kinsta charges an additional $100/month per website for this feature.
GridPane includes an Elasticsearch integration. Kinsta charges an additional $100/month per website for this feature.
GridPane gives you the ability to create remote backups at Amazon S3, Dropbox, Backblaze B2, and Wasabi (currently in beta).
Kinsta include malware clean ups. GridPane includes a significant number of security integrations and extensive backup options.
GridPane includes OpenLiteSpeed (beta), Nginx, Percona, MariaDB, and PHP server customization options. Kinsta offer great performance, but they have a regimented, one-size-fits-all approach. Problems caused by this approach can only be solved by upgrading to a higher plan.

Below is a pricing comparison with Kinsta’s 20 site plan. Note though that GridPane does not have any preset site/server limits, and so an extra $20 VPS can easily handle 20 extra regular WordPress sites.


Number of Websites	20+	20
SSD Storage	80GB	50GB
Monthly Bandwidth	4000GB	500GB
Monthly Visitors	No limitations – Millions per month	400,000 per month (overage charges if exceeded)
Local Backups	Hourly	Daily local backups (hourly available at $100/month per site)
Server Caching	FastCGI or Redis Page Caching AND Redis Object Caching	Page (Redis Object Caching available at $100/month per site)
Multisite	Freely available in 1 click, with 1 click WP Ultimo integration	Available
Support	Live chat 24/7	Live chat 24/7
Web Application Firewall	6G WAF and ModSecurity WAF options included	None
Plan	GridPane Developer Plan = $100/month 2vCPU 4GB VPS = $24/month (including full server backups).	Kinsta Business 3 Plan
TOTAL	= $124/month	= $300/month

Which Service Is Right For You?

If you only have one or two websites with relatively low traffic (and you expect it to stay at less than 25,000 total visits per month), Kinsta may be the better option for your business.

If you’re a WordPress agency or developer and you’re looking to grow your monthly revenue from your hosting offering, GridPane is purpose-built to serve your needs. Not only will you save a considerable amount of money each month, but you’ll also have a lot more flexibility and capability for hosting different types of websites, and the backing of our support team and knowledge base.

Are you looking to build a high-end hosting service and add a steady, predictable stream of recurring monthly revenue to your WordPress business? We’d love to assist you on that journey. We also have a 2-week free trial that we may be able to extend to 4-6 weeks!

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