Bluehost Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta
If you’re looking for a Bluehost alternative, look no further than Kinsta. Powered by the Google Cloud Platform, our unique, powerful solution for managed WordPress hosting is optimized for speed and performance. It’s unlike anything else you’ll find.
Introduction
Kinsta is an expert in managed WP hosting for 10+ years and is well-known for top website performance, world-class support, and the powerful MyKinsta dashboard that makes website management a breeze. More than 120,000+ clients all across the world, including some of the biggest companies in the world, rely on Kinsta.
There are some huge fundamental differences between how Bluehost and Kinsta’s infrastructures are built and operated. Every day, we hear from clients and growing businesses interested in a Bluehost alternative.
I am certain there is no better hosting than Kinsta. I have used GoDaddy, Bluehost, and HostGator, and a few others for a total of 17 years with over 200 websites. Kinsta is in a class in itself far above and beyond ALL others I’ve used, and cannot be compared to any I mentioned or have compared online in thorough search. The hosting platform is exceptionally superior to all in every respect
How Kinsta Compares to Bluehost 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.
Feature Comparison Overview
At this point, let’s take a moment to review some of the key differences between Kinsta and Bluehost:
| Kinsta | Bluehost | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Plans start at $35/month | Plans start at $2.95, but there’s no monthly billing |
| *First Month Free | Yes | X |
| Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days on all plans | 30 days on all plans |
| Plan Tiers | 21 (not including custom) | 6 |
| Premium 24×7 Support | All plans | All plans |
| Core Infrastructure (GCP) | Same across all plans | Varies by plan |
| SSH Access | All plans | All plans |
| Global Data Centers | 37 locations | 6 locations |
| Different location for each of your sites | ✓ | X |
| Firewall Powered by Cloudflare | ✓ | Not specified |
| Free DDoS Protection | ✓ | X |
| Continent Locations | 5 | Not disclosed |
| Network | Low-latency and redundant premium Google Platform network on all plans | Limited carriers |
| Bandwidth Limits | No limits (within AUP) | Unmetered |
| Container Technology | 100% resource isolation on all plans | Shared, VPS, Dedicated |
| Free Migrations | All plans | 1 free migration or $149.99 for up to 5 websites |
| WooCommerce optimized infrastructure | ✓ | X |
| Continuous MySQL database optimization | ✓ | X |
| Staging Environment | All plans | Not specified |
| PHP Versions | PHP 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 | PHP 7.4, 8.0, 8.1 |
| Switch PHP Engine | One-click change in dashboard | One-click change in dashboard |
| Free CDN | 260+ (All regions) | All plans (Let’s Encrypt) |
| Early Hints Modern Web Standard | ✓ | Not specified |
| Built-in Edge Caching | ✓ | Not specified |
| Free Premium DNS | Amazon R53 | X |
| Free SSL Certificates | All plans | All plans |
| Free Hack Fixes | All plans | X |
| Uptime Monitoring | All plans | No uptime guarantee |
| Multisite Support | WP 2 plans and higher | Prime and Pro plans |
| Additional Backups + Frequency Add-on | ✓ | X |
| Free APM Tool | Kinsta APM | Not specified |
| Detailed Performance Analytics | ✓ | X |
| IP Geolocation | ✓ | X |
| Reverse Proxy Support | ✓ | ✓ |
| Redis Add-on | ✓ | X |
| New Relic (license required) | ✓ | X |
| Site Transfer feature | ✓ | X |
| Multilingual Dashboard | English, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, French, Swedish, Danish, Japanese | English |
Enjoy a 39% Faster Website Simply by Moving From Bluehost to Kinsta
We measured 3,200+ migrations over the course of a three-month span. On average, client sites that came from Bluehost to Kinsta experienced 39% 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 Bluehost 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 vs Bluehost
Let’s take a look at some of the major differences between Kinsta and Bluehost:
- Kinsta is a leading managed WordPress hosting provider that offers all-in-one solutions for managing your website and supports 37 data centers across Google’s global network, while Bluehost has 6 locations.
- Kinsta uses C3D and C2 VMs (GCP’s fastest servers) for all plans in supported locations. In our tests, we found that C2 VMs are up to 200% faster than GCP’s lower-tier machines, while C3D machines reduced response times by a further 20% to 50%.
- Containerized Solution. Kinsta offers a unique infrastructure that containerizes site resources so they don’t have to share. This increases and levels your performance on a per-site basis. No more worrying about sites you don’t manage potentially stealing your resources. It also helps minimize your time spent troubleshooting performance issues as you no longer have to account for potential resource stealing.
- Because of Kinsta’s unique containerized hosting, you can also host multiple sites on multiple data centers, all within the same plan! No more having to pay for multiple servers just to host sites in different locations. Help your clients get an instant performance boost by simply hosting their site on a server that’s more appropriately located for their customer base.
- Kinsta CDN takes advantage of our Cloudflare integration and its worldwide network that spans almost 300 cities in more than 100 countries. We don’t need to know where you are to know there is a Cloudflare server near you. That means lightning-fast server requests to your website. It’s available at no extra cost on any Kinsta plan.
- Kinsta is SOC2 compliant, which provides independent proof that we have established security procedures and adhered to those procedures over time. Bluehost is not SOC2 compliant. See Kinsta’s Trust Report for additional information.
- Kinsta offers six types of backups: free automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system-generated, downloadable, and external backups sent automatically to your Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. We also store two weeks of backups at all times, with the possibility to increase data retention.
- Kinsta is well-known for its world-class support, composed of WordPress experts and Linux engineers, available 24/7 for all our customers via live chat, with an average response time of under 2 minutes. We offer multilingual support across all of our plans, and our engineers are experienced and capable of solving any hosting issue on your WP site. Bluehost often has a wait time of 30 minutes or more.
- All Kinsta customers benefit from our Cloudflare Firewall.
- Kinsta offers free migrations from Bluehost handled by an expert engineer. You can rest assured that your site will be migrated safely, securely, and following best practices. At Bluehost, you get one free website migration or up to 5 for $149.99.
- Our custom MyKinsta dashboard includes a variety of useful site management tools that are not available on Bluehost, such as database search and replace, APM tool, free IP Geolocation manager, PHP restart, and more. Bluehost uses the general cPanel control panel that’s lacking a lot of site management tools.
- Kinsta has a unique system that caches pages at the server level. Our built-in Edge Caching cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
- For developers and agencies, Kinsta offers a powerful local development tool called DevKinsta. With DevKinsta, you can clone and develop your projects locally and push updates to Kinsta when ready.
- Kinsta uses only the encrypted SFTP connections and provides SSH access, Bluehost supports less-secure FTP connections.
- All Kinsta plans include free access to our custom application performance monitoring tool (Kinsta APM) for debugging WordPress performance issues. For customers who prefer New Relic, we support that as well, but you must have your own license.
- Kinsta performs weekly automatic MySQL optimization on all of your sites to optimize database performance.
- Sites on Kinsta are equipped with a self-healing PHP feature. We monitor all sites on our infrastructure 480 times per day and offer a 99% uptime guarantee.
- Kinsta provides free DDoS protection for all plans.
- Kinsta provides reverse proxy support.
- Kinsta allows multisite setups on the WP 2 plan and above.
- Kinsta offers premium, 24/7/365 support to all customers, including multilingual support at certain hours.
- Kinsta provides an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee on all plans.
- Kinsta provides a 30-day no questions asked money-back guarantee.
- Kinsta offers a 100% Malware Security Pledge.
Read on to see the details of each Kinsta feature and how they compare to Bluehost. Or try it out right now with our risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee.
Kinsta Is Built for Performance and Scalability
If you’re looking for a performance-oriented and scalable host, Kinsta’s got you covered. Our custom-built hosting platform is optimized to deliver incredible speed, performance, and scalability, whether you’re running a personal blog or an ecommerce store doing millions in revenue.
At Kinsta, you can scale up and down between plans with just a few clicks and transparent resource consumption. Best of all, there is no downtime when switching plans, and your hosting bill is automatically prorated with a transparent and controlled cost!
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.
Kinsta’s infrastructure allows us to guarantee our clients a peace-of-mind that we haven’t been able to find anywhere else. I cannot overstate how good that feels.
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%!
Kinsta Is Safe and Secure
At Kinsta, we know that the security of your data is of the utmost importance, which is why we’re dedicated to providing the most secure hosting service by taking a variety of active and passive measures to safeguard your site.
All sites on Kinsta are protected by our free Cloudflare integration, which includes an enterprise-level firewall with a custom ruleset and DDoS protection. With our Cloudflare integration, you’ll get the benefits of enhanced security and performance without having to manage your own Cloudflare account.
Some of Kinsta’s key security measures include:
- Monitoring sites every three minutes for uptime, 480 times a day.
- Rigid software-based restrictions to stop malicious code from entering your website.
- Real-time DDoS attack detection and mitigation.
- Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) support and automatic bans for IPs that have more than six failed login attempts in a minute.
- A dedicated Security Team to address malicious attackers, hacks, and exploits.
- Free Cloudflare integration with a secure firewall and built-in DDoS protection.
- Only support for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP).
- Completely isolated containers (LXC), using LXD to orchestrate them so there’s no chance of cross-infection from other clients.
- Free Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard domain support.
- 100% Malware Security Pledge if your site is infected with malware while hosted on Kinsta.
- Automatic security checks for every plugin installed to discover vulnerabilities and/or security issues.
In the rare event that something were to happen to your site, our Malware Security Pledge means you will get hands-on assistance from our engineers free of charge. We’ll restore your site and make sure it’s free of backdoors that hackers can take advantage of.
Kinsta Is Developer-Friendly
We created 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.
Our goal is to deliver a developer-friendly experience and help you improve your workflow efficiency and overall productivity:
- 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 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3.
- 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.
Uncover Your WordPress Site’s Performance Bottlenecks.
Our experts will run a free performance audit of your website and send you a detailed action plan.
MyKinsta: A Custom-Built Dashboard for Powerful Site Management
At Kinsta, we believe in empowering our customers with powerful features to make WordPress site management a breeze. MyKinsta dashboard is built with usability in mind.
With features like search and replace, force HTTPS, URL redirects with IP geolocation support, IP deny, Application Performance Monitoring, Edge Caching, Early Hints, Cron Jobs, PHP workers, and more, you have a wide array of powerful tools for managing your WordPress site. MyKinsta even includes a comprehensive analytics dashboard that provides insights into key site metrics.
Let’s look at some of the features that make our MyKinsta dashboard so powerful:
- Toggle between different PHP versions. Kinsta supports PHP 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3.
- Application Performance Monitoring tool that gives you all the necessary PHP and MySQL data to debug WordPress performance issues.
- High-performance object caching with our Redis add-on.
- Get detailed analytics on bandwidth and visitors, CDN usage, cache HIT & MISS rates, and more.
- Access to one-click staging environments and the option to restore backups to production or staging.
- Quick phpMyAdmin access.
- Automatic MySQL database optimizations.
- One-click ionCube enabler.
- Free Kinsta DNS (powered by Amazon Route53) to manage your DNS records directly in the dashboard.
- One-click CDN setup with Kinsta CDN.
- Purge the site cache directly from the dashboard.
- Redirect management with IP geolocation support.
- IP Deny tool that lets you quickly block IP addresses before they reach your site. Free automatic Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard domain support and the option to import your own.
- A toggle for enabling
WP_DEBUGmode. - Password protection for your environment and the ability to strengthen login security by adding your SSH keys to the dashboard.
- The dashboard is available in 10 languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Swedish, Danish.
There’s no need to simply take our word for it, though. Schedule a live demo today and explore the user-friendly interface and plethora of tools to see firsthand what makes MyKinsta different from the competition.
Their MyKinsta dashboard, reporting, instant backups, and staging environments save them hundreds of hours a year on admin tasks. This way, we can focus more on our clients.
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.
Expert Support for WordPress
At Kinsta, we treat every customer as a mission-critical priority, whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, agency, or global enterprise. Our support team of WordPress experts is available 24 hours a day year-round, including holidays, weekends, and late nights (wherever you are).
We don’t rely on a tiered support system, which means we won’t waste your time with escalations and transfers. No matter the plan you are on, you have access to the same team of WordPress experts.
In addition to multilingual support and resources available in over 10 languages, we’re also proud to maintain an initial ticket response time average of under two minutes!
Bluehost does offer 24/7 support via chat or phone. However, you don’t always get it within a couple of minutes:
In reality, response times can be anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. The only language Bluehost offers technical support for is English.
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
Bluehost plans do not come with a free APM tool, which makes it very difficult to quickly troubleshoot performance issues on your WordPress site.
Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
As a managed WordPress hosting company, we understand the importance of a platform capable of supporting high-traffic, resource-intensive ecommerce sites. We also recognize the unique and demanding challenges that come with powering online stores. This is why we optimized our platform for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
WooCommerce and other WordPress ecommerce plugins rely heavily on CPU performance because they cannot be efficiently cached. This is where our C3D and C2 VMs really shine with their industry-leading CPU performance. At Kinsta, we make C3D and C2 VMs available on all plans.
Our expert engineers are very familiar with WooCommerce and have developed a custom workflow that optimizes performance. Some of the ways we enhance the WordPress ecommerce experience include:
- Excluding ‘My Account,’ checkout, cart, and other pages that shouldn’t be cached.
- Ensuring a smooth checkout process by automatically bypassing the cache for users when
woocommerce_items_in_cartoredit_items_in_cartare detected. - Implementing specific rules to allow EDD and WooCommerce functionality during server-level page caching.
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!
Bluehost doesn’t have an integration with a local WordPress development tool, which means there is no way to clone and push WordPress sites for Bluehost customers.
If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver.
Static Sites for Free
Are you an agency creating static WordPress sites for your clients? Or do you create landing pages for high-traffic campaigns? We got you covered!
Static site hosting is 100% free at Kinsta. You can create a static or Jamstack site or use a static site generator. We can run the build process for you and deploy your site directly to the edge.
Benefits of hosting Static sites with Kinsta include:
- Your site is directly pushed to our edge network with 260+ locations globally, powered by the security and speed of Cloudflare
- Use a static site generator, and we handle the build process, which is also included free of charge
- Add custom domains, and we deliver the security (SSL certificates automatically issued and updated)
Sign up, connect your git account, and start deploying your static site from your repo.
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.
Migration of the site over to these guys is a complete simple breeze, they do it all once you send them the site details, although if you are not sure they are on hand to assist you anyway via the online message box in the admin area of your dashboard.
If you’re interested in moving your site to managed WordPress hosting, we offer unlimited free migrations from Bluehost! 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.
Comparatively, as with automatic backups, Bluehost only offers one free site migration before you need to pay $149.99 for up to five site migrations.
Turbocharging Your Content Delivery With Kinsta CDN
In addition to free bandwidth, all Kinsta plans include a free Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is a premium HTTP/3-enabled CDN to deliver your content lightning-fast across the globe.
As part of our Cloudflare integration, our built-in Edge Caching saves your Kinsta site/page cache to any of Cloudflare’s global network of 260+ data centers.
When site visitors load your website in their browser, cached responses will be delivered from the location closest to them. Edge Caching is free with all Kinsta plans and doesn’t require a separate plugin.
Our content delivery architecture was tailor-made for high throughput and low latency. You can enable the CDN directly from your MyKinsta dashboard.
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.
Bluehost also has an affiliate program, where you can earn up to $65 for every qualified signup you refer to them. In addition, they offer a tiered commission, which can range anywhere between $65 to $130 per sale.
However, they don’t pay recurring commissions for the lifetime of a referred customer. This means the Bluehost affiliate program doesn’t allow you to build a passive income stream.
Join Others Making the Switch to Kinsta
At Kinsta, we offer the fastest, latest technology possible. We’re constantly evolving and adapting to leverage the most innovative solutions available. You can see for yourself simply by checking out our Changelog!
We are confident in our solutions and want you to be 100% satisfied with your hosting, which is why we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee and free migrations from Bluehost. It’s time to move away from Bluehost and switch to our managed WordPress hosting platform.