Advanced features and details

Every plan at Kinsta features resource isolation, auto-scaling, and is optimized for high-performance. Our robust platform was built from the ground up with WordPress developers in mind, so you’ll be happy to find everything you need under the hood.

Why developers love Kinsta

Optimized WordPress stack

Optimized WordPress stack

We use nothing but the latest and greatest tech stack optimized for WordPress. From Ubuntu, PHP 7.4, Nginx, HTTP/2, and MariaDB, your sites will be able to handle high traffic spikes with ease.

Full control from click to code

Full control from click to code

Take control of your code with our one-click staging environments, cloning, and the ability to push staging to live. WP-CLI, SSH, and Git are supported out of the box.

We talk your language

We talk your language

We are developers ourselves, so we know how you think. It’s very important to us that our tools help speed up and automate your workflow.

How we optimize for WordPress

We aren’t your typical WordPress host. We have hundreds of server-level optimizations and rules in place to ensure that WordPress not only loads fast, but is also delivered in the most optimal way to your visitors. There’s a reason we’ve been awarded top tier status three years in a row by ReviewSignal.

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PHP workers

PHP workers are used to execute the code on your WordPress site. Additional PHP workers per site allow for multiple requests to execute simultaneously. You can easily increase this number by upgrading to a higher plan.

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Performance and uptime monitoring with New Relic

Every site at Kinsta includes 720 daily uptime checks with our New Relic performance monitoring tool. We also use this internally to keep tabs on all the WordPress sites on our network and react speedily to any issues before they cause problems. It helps us instantly pinpoint issues with third-party plugins, theme template files, database queries, external calls, and coding errors that may be causing performance problems. As a developer, you can easily add your own New Relic key in the MyKinsta dashboard.

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Ecommerce functionality

Ecommerce sites are very demanding as they generate a lot of data, as well as un-cachable requests. Because of this we have optimizations in place to make sure you find the perfect balance between performance and functionality. A few examples of these include not caching shopping cart pages and automatically bypassing the cache when the “woocommerce_items_in_cart” cookie or “edd_items_in_cart” cookie are detected to ensure a smooth and in-sync checkout process.

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Server-level caching

We utilize full page caching at the server-level to deliver your content almost instantaneously to your visitors. Combined with this is our Kinsta cache plugin which was developed in-house and is installed by default on all hosted sites. This allows you or your clients to easily clear your page cache, as well as automate the clearing based on certain activities, such as when you publish a new post. This gives you a much more granular control over your caching.

Frequently asked: about the Kinsta infrastructure

Our hosting platform doesn't fall into any of the traditional hosting categories. Our entire infrastructure is built on the Google Cloud Platform and is very different from traditional shared, VPS, or dedicated infrastructure.

What are the details of the Kinsta hosting environment?

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Hardware stack

Kinsta utilizes virtual machines in one of Google Cloud Platform’s multiple data centers. Each machine has up to 96 CPUs and hundreds of gigabytes of RAM. In available regions we utilize their compute-optimized (C2) virtual machines. These offer the highest performance per core that GCP offers on Compute Engine and are optimized for compute-intensive workloads. 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.

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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.

What are the specific tools and policies for security?

Advanced security

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, detect 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.

Hardware firewalls are in place and have very tight 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 it’s 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 Let's Encrypt 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.

What are the technologies that ensure high speed?

High speed

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 20 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 partnered up with KeyCDN, a real-time HTTP/2 and IPv6 powered content delivery network, with 34 POPs around the globe to speed up delivery of your assets (images, JS, CSS). Free bandwidth is included with every plan.

Combine the above with our optimized WordPress stack of PHP 7.4, Nginx, HTTP/2, and MariaDB; and you’ve got yourself a lightning fast solution that is ready to tackle any load.

What does auto-scaling mean?

Auto-scaling

Auto-scaling essentially means that our infrastructure is ready to handle your sudden surges in traffic and load. With our isolated software container technology, hardware resources are allocated to each site container automatically by our virtual machines on an as-needed basis. 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 based on the demands of the site.

Some more notable developer features

PHP 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4
One-click cloning
WP-CLI, Composer and Git
Free SSL, SSH and SFTP
Staging environments
Automatic backups

We never stop improving

MyKinsta is constantly in development. We’re always shipping new features based on requests made by our users.

1
Dec

PHP 7.4 (Official Release) Is Now Available in MyKinsta

We are constantly dedicated to bringing you the latest stable versions of PHP as soon as we have thoroughly tested it throughout our environment. PHP 7.4.0 was released …

18
Nov

PHP 7.4-RC4 is Now Available for Testing

The final version of PHP 7.4 is closely approaching, and nothing excites us more than new software! Why? Because with almost every new release of PHP …

12
Nov

New WP_DEBUG Tool, Search and Replace 2.0, and MyKinsta Improvements

The holidays are quickly approaching, but our teams are still busy at work. We have a lot of new features and updates coming out before the …

13
Oct

Rolling out Google Cloud’s Compute-Optimized (C2) VMs to Everyone

Kinsta is always trying to push the boundaries when it comes to performance, and today we’re taking it to a whole other level. We are excited …

8
Oct

Disk Space Add-on Is Now Available in MyKinsta

We are excited to announce that one of our most highly requested features over the past year is now available; a disk space add-on. Some of …

1
Oct

Automatic MySQL Database Optimizations, Self-Healing PHP, GCP Firewall

If you’re already a Kinsta client, you’ve probably become accustomed to our monthly (sometimes weekly) feature updates. It’s very important for us to share what we’re …

24
Sep

More Disk Space (SSD Storage) on All Plans

We’ve done it again! Back in 2018, we added more disk space to our Starter, Pro, and Business 1 plans. While many were happy about this, …

28
Aug

Password Protection (htpasswd) Tool Now Available in MyKinsta

We are always looking for ways to speed up your WordPress site management workflows. A lot of you work with clients or develop sites in our …

20
Aug

TLS 1.3, Public IPv4 Tool, Better Status Notifications, and MyKinsta Updates

Our favorite time of the month; another feature update roundup! 🤗 While it might be August, our developer and sysadmin teams have been working around the …

1
Jul

MyKinsta – Quick Add Gmail MX Records, UI and Security Updates

Even though it’s the middle of a scorching hot summer, 🔥 this doesn’t mean we pump the brakes. Our development team has been busy sifting through …

4
Jun

More Free Migrations, PHP Workers, Improved Caching, Emails

It’s that time again, we’ve got another round of feature updates to share with you regarding exciting changes to Kinsta’s hosting plans and our MyKinsta dashboard! …

7
May

Minor Updates to MyKinsta: Faster Cloning, Improved Sites List, and More

The development team at Kinsta is constantly pushing out new features, squashing bugs, and making improvements to our MyKinsta dashboard. In fact, a majority of the …

19
Apr

20th Data Center in Osaka, Japan Is Now Available

Great news for WordPress users in Japan! Further increasing Kinsta’s reach in the Asia Pacific region, we are excited to announce that the data center in …

12
Mar

Switzerland Data Center Is Now Available in Zürich (19th Location)

Great news for the Swiss market! Further increasing Kinsta’s reach in western Europe, we are excited to announce that the data center in Zürich Switzerland (europe-west6) is …

18
Dec

Force HTTPS Tool Now Available on MyKinsta

Using an SSL certificate and making sure all website visitors use the HTTPS protocol is a great way to increase your security and SEO rank. Since …

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