DigitalOcean Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta

How Kinsta Compares to DigitalOcean in a Nutshell

Kinsta’s infrastructure is fully containerized and powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform on Google’s Premium Tier network, enabling us to provide you with a large selection of the fastest data servers, incredible performance, server-level caching, dedicated resources, and enhanced security. Gone are the days of worrying about sharing resources with other sites, including your own! 

All sites on Kinsta are protected by our enterprise-level premium Cloudflare integration, free for all customers. It includes a secure firewall, HTTP/3 support, DDoS protection, free CDN, and other benefits. You also experience transparent resource consumption, costs, and pricing. 

We are also proud to be the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2, the world’s leading software review and comparison site.

Enjoy a 26% Faster Website Simply by Moving From DigitalOcean to Kinsta

We measured 3,200+ migrations over the course of a three-month span. On average, client sites that came from DigitalOcean to Kinsta experienced 26% faster load times.

How is this possible? Our customers enjoy:

• The latest generation of virtual machines from Google’s Compute Engine general-purpose machine family C3D VMs and The fastest Compute-Optimized C2 VMs, available across all plans in supported regions.
• A stack that’s been fine-tuned for WordPress over the past 8 years.
• Google’s Premium Tier Network to deliver website data faster.
• Free CDN powered by Cloudflare’s global network of 260+ locations.
• Built-in Edge Caching that cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
• Containerized sites, meaning no more shared hosting/resources at any plan level.
• Early Hints feature, a modern web standard that can help immediately improve how quickly your pages load by providing additional information on what resources to preload, resulting in faster page rendering speed.

Migrate from DigitalOcean to Kinsta hassle free with our free expert migration service. With our 30-day money-back guarantee, you can test out the service and improved speeds completely risk-free. You only lose if you don’t give this a try!

Kinsta Is Built for Performance and Scalability

Kinsta’s unique, powerful solution doesn’t fit into any of the categories of traditional hosting, such as shared, VPS, or dedicated plans. Our infrastructure is custom-built to deliver unparalleled performance and support. 

The raw cost of most barebone and VPS hosting plans is relatively cheap. For example, at DigitalOcean, you can get a balanced VM with 1 GB for as low as $5 per month. However, you will be responsible for:

• Assigning IP addresses
• Setting up your DNS records
• Installing PHP
• Installing Nginx/Apache
• Setting up proper website caching
• You have to take care of backups
• Secure your server and WordPress sites
• Deal with DDoS attacks on your own
• Constantly check for vulnerabilities
• Set up a CDN
• Implement a firewall solution
• Come up with a staging solution
• Website monitoring
• Set up and renew the SSL certificates
• Troubleshoot on your own
• Keep all software on the server up to date

How much is your time worth? Managing your servers is a very time-consuming process and requires a lot of expertise. A $10 VPS at the end of the month can cost you $500 or $1000! 

Are you really saving money if you go with a cheaper VPS solution?

With GCP’s Premium Tier network, we ensure that the traffic to and from our customers’ sites is routed around the world as quickly as possible. When it comes to page load times and site performance, every millisecond counts!

High-performance virtual machines powered by the Google Cloud Platform form the foundation of our hosting infrastructure. Beyond that, our high-performance hosting stack consists of orchestrated LXC containerized software containers and LXD managed hosts and highly tuned configurations for Nginx, PHP, and MariaDB. Our unique containerized infrastructure allows sites hosted on Kinsta to automatically scale CPU and RAM usage in response to traffic surges.

As part of our Cloudflare integration, Edge Caching saves your Kinsta site/page cache to any of Cloudflare’s global network of 260+ data centers.

Edge Caching is included free with all Kinsta plans, doesn’t require a separate plugin, and cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!

Bottom line: using Kinsta as your managed WordPress hosting provider can save you a lot of time and money (not to mention headaches and frustration).

Kinsta Is Developer-Friendly

We create a WordPress hosting solution tailored for developers without sacrificing ease of use. Everything from our custom dashboard to our products and tools is built to help improve your productivity. 

Some developer-friendly features and tools you’ll have access to as a Kinsta customer include:

• SSH, Git, and WP-CLI access on all plans.
• Custom setups like Bedrock and Trellis, as well as starter themes such as Sage.
• One-click WordPress staging environments that allow you to easily push changes from staging to production as well as conveniently clone your site.
• Run a different version of PHP for each live site and staging site, and switch between PHP engines takes just one click. We currently support 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4.
• Post and page revisions enabled by default. While we recommend limiting or disabling these, we believe this should be your choice.
• Load your site over a reverse proxy.
• Built-in free APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tool for troubleshooting WordPress performance issues.
• DevKinsta, a free local development tool.
• Restore backups to staging as well as production.

With Kinsta as your hosting provider, you have all the tools needed to manage your WordPress site, regardless of your technical knowledge.

DigitalOcean is geared primarily toward programmers and engineers. However, even if you’re capable of acting as your own sysadmin, that doesn’t mean you should. It’s smart to consider whether your time and attention would be better spent elsewhere, like on other critical aspects of your business. 

With DigitalOcean, it’s possible to clone your machine. However, that isn’t exactly free or easy. It would require a premium add-on, which you would need to purchase, install, and configure yourself. 

Kinsta also offers automatic Cloudflare SSLs with wildcard support on every plan, as well as the option to install your own.

This isn’t the case with DigitalOcean. You’d be required to put a system in place for SSL certificate installation, issuing, and automatic renewal. You could use a system such as ServerPilot or Certbot, but again, this isn’t free or easy.

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

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

Digital Ocean’s hosting plans do not come with a free APM tool, which makes it very difficult to quickly troubleshoot performance issues on your WordPress site.

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!

DevKinsta is fully integrated with MyKinsta and Kinsta’s hosting platform, which means you can develop locally and push updates directly to a staging environment on Kinsta! DigitalOcean doesn’t have an integration with a local WordPress development tool, which means there is no way to clone and push WordPress sites for DigitalOcean customers.

If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver, especially when compared with DigitalOcean, where you do everything through the command line.

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 DigitalOcean! Our migrations are performed by an expert migrations engineer.

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.

DigitalOcean doesn’t offer migration services.

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 WP 2 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.

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.

DigitalOcean doesn’t have an affiliate program, only a referral program. If someone uses your referral link and spends $25, you get a DigitalOcean credit worth the same amount.