Advanced features and details

Hardware stack

Kinsta utilizes virtual machines in one of Google Cloud Platform’s globally-distributed network of data centers. In available regions we utilize compute-optimized (C2) virtual machines — Google Cloud Platform’s fastest servers. Each machine has up to 60 CPUs and hundreds of gigabytes of RAM. C2 virtual machines offer the highest performance per core and are optimized for compute-intensive workloads. Compared to previous-generation N1 and N2 machines, C2 VMs offer up to a 200% performance boost for WordPress sites. Hardware resources (RAM/CPU) are allocated to each site container automatically by our virtual machines on an as-needed basis.

Everything is interconnected over the highly reliable Google Cloud Platform’s “premium tier” network. This is designed to minimize distance and hops, resulting in faster more secure global transport of your data. Some hosting providers might opt for Google’s “standard tier” network service to cut costs, but we believe in only utilizing the best here at Kinsta.

Software stack

Kinsta utilizes LXD managed hosts and orchestrated LXC software containers for each site. What this means is that every WordPress site is housed in its own isolated container, which has all of the software resources required to run it (Linux, Nginx, PHP, MySQL). The resources are 100% private and are not shared between anyone else or even your own sites.

MySQL databases are hosted at localhost, not a remote server. This ensures that there is no latency between machines, which results in faster queries and quicker page load times.

We have a unique solution that allows us to live migrate the LXC containers between the LXD managed host machines when needed, without your site incurring any downtime. This also allows us to take advantage of ZFS based snapshots of the whole containers, which can be taken instantly, without any server overhead.

Kinsta takes security very seriously, implementing active and passive measures to stop attacks and malicious intent in its tracks. We monitor your sites every minute for uptime, mitigate DDoS attacks as they happen, and proactively stop malicious code from entering our network.

We automatically create 2 weeks' worth of backups, meaning a hacked or defaced site can be instantly rolled back from within the MyKinsta dashboard. Automatic backups are taken on a daily basis, but you can increase the frequency in which these are taken by purchasing one of our addons. You could backup every 6 hours or even every hour. For high-traffic or dynamic sites, this can bring peace of mind knowing you roll back your site at a moment's notice without data loss.

All sites hosted on Kinsta are protected by Cloudflare’s enterprise-level firewall, plus additional software-based restrictions. The bottom line is: your site is monitored and secured 24/7. But here are just a few additional ways we protect your site:

• You can enable two-factor authentication to protect your login.
• We automatically ban IPs that have more than 6 failed login attempts in a minute.
• Kinsta stands behind its hack-free guarantee. If a site is compromised while on our network, we’ll fix it for free.
• We only support encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP).
• Free Cloudflare SSL certificates are one-click away in the MyKinsta dashboard.
• We enforce strong passwords on all new WordPress installs.
• WordPress minor security patches (not core) are automatically applied as soon as they are available to ensure your site is fully up to date.

Kinsta uses Google Cloud Platform’s multi-regional deployment mode. This means that you aren’t restricted to a single data center for your account, and can choose a different data center for each of your WordPress sites.

Google offers 28 locations throughout the USA, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America. They are strategically placed to offer the lowest latency anywhere in the world. This also results in blazing fast SFTP download and upload speeds.

Amazon Route 53 premium DNS is included for free for all Kinsta customers. Their global Anycast network, along with latency and geolocation routing help ensure your website is always online, stable, and has fast DNS lookup times.

We’ve also selected Cloudflare's global CDN with 200+ PoPs and HTTP/3 support to speed up delivery of your static assets (images, JS, CSS, etc.). Free bandwidth is included with every plan.

Combine the above with our optimized WordPress stack of PHP 8.0, Nginx, HTTP/2, and MariaDB; and you’ve got yourself a lightning fast solution that is ready to tackle any load.

Scalable hosting essentially means that our infrastructure is ready to handle surges in traffic and load. With our isolated software container technology, hardware resources are allocated to each site container automatically by our virtual machines. The result is a hosting configuration that is secure and private by design while simultaneously allowing server resources to scale up or down as needed.