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 to announce that we are moving to Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP) next-gen compute-optimized (C2) virtual machines. They will be the backbone of our infrastructure going forward, and the default for new WordPress sites that you spin up in available regions.
Paving the Way for Unrivaled WordPress Performance
The new compute-optimized VMs (C2) offer the highest performance per core that GCP offers on Compute Engine and they are optimized for compute-intensive workloads. These machine types are equipped with Intel Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) and up to 3.8 GHz sustained all-core turbo. They’ll be able to handle even the most demanding WordPress sites!
We’ve developed our WordPress hosting platform to be completely scalable, from our Single 35k plans all the way up to our WP 60 and more. This means we aren’t just moving a select few to this new hardware or limiting their use to our higher-tier plans. We’re making the new GCP machines available for everyone at Kinsta. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a casual blogger or Fortune 500 company, you’re going to reap the benefits this change has to offer.
How exactly will this impact you? Over the past month, we’ve been testing these new machines internally and have been blown away by their performance. It varies based on the type of site, but we are seeing performance improvements from 30% all the way up to 200%!
We ran a multitude of benchmarking tests comparing our current N1 machines to the new C2 machines and found the following:
- The new GCP C2 machines are on average 2.1x faster when it comes to cache being bypassed.
- The new GCP C2 machines are on average 2.08x faster when it comes to our Nginx page cache.
Make sure to also check out the real-world performance results we are already seeing with sites hosted at Kinsta.
Looking at the data, here are a few things you can expect:
- Simply moving your sites to the new architecture is going to result in faster load times, without any work or testing required on your part.
- Due to the way the C2 machines work, heavier sites will see greater performance increases than those of already optimized sites. But as we saw above, even optimized sites are noticing a difference.
- This change doesn’t only impact the frontend of your sites. You’ll see faster load times on the backend, when working in your WordPress admin dashboard.
Migration Timeline
As Google Cloud Platform rolls out C2 instances in additional regions, our team will continue moving to the new infrastructure. Make sure to check out all of the details on our migration timeline.
It’s important to our team that we keep delivering on our promise of providing high-performance WordPress hosting. We fully understand that for many of you, this is one of the primary reasons you choose us over the competition. That’s why we’re excited to roll out the compute-optimized C2 machines to everyone.
If you’re a Kinsta client and have more questions, you can open a ticket with our support team, and we’d be more than happy to help.