Google Cloud Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta
If you’re looking for a Google Cloud alternative for WordPress hosting, Kinsta has you covered. Although Kinsta is powered by the Google Cloud platform, we take it even further by offering a unique, powerful solution for managed WordPress hosting.
If you’re looking for a hosting provider to host your application and/or database, make sure to check out Kinsta’s Application Hosting and Database Hosting, your new home for modern web applications and databases.
Get Your Applications and Databases Live Quickly and Seamlessly with Kinsta’s Cloud Platform
If you’re interested in Kinsta’s Managed WordPress Hosting solution, skip over this section for a robust comparison.
If you’re looking for a way to use Google Cloud Platform’s infrastructure but avoid all the complicated setup, you’ll want to check out Kinsta’s Application Hosting and Database Hosting.
With our cloud platform, you can:
- Avoid complicated infrastructure setup, product lines, and control panels
- Deploy right from GitHub in minutes
- Enjoy internal connections between your app and database without row or query count limits
- Host apps with your favorite languages, frameworks, or custom Dockerfiles
- Choose from 25 data centers
- Contact expert support 24/7/365
Don’t take our word for it. Test it yourself for free! Your first $20 worth of server resources are on us.
Introduction
Kinsta is optimized for speed and performance. It’s unlike anything else you’ll find. By integrating the Google Cloud platform into the MyKinsta setup, we are able to transform a generic cloud services provider into a managed WordPress hosting experience unlike any other. Let’s explore why!
Kinsta has been a lifesaver. Their powerful MyKinsta dashboard, their advanced architecture stack providing phenomenal performance boosts, and their true 24/7 great support make them the best hosting provider for WordPress sites.
How Kinsta Compares to Google Cloud Platform in a Nutshell
Before we take a deep dive into the specifics of Kinsta vs Google Cloud, we first want to offer a brief breakdown of the key differences between these two solutions.
Kinsta is also powered by Google Cloud Platform, so you might be wondering why you would host your website here and not directly with them.
The summarized version is that buying directly from Google Cloud is generally more expensive. Choosing to use Kinsta instead of Google Cloud directly gives you 100% peace of mind as you don’t need to manage anything related to the servers.
Already included with every Kinsta plan are backups, security, Cloudflare Enterprise integration, website caching, optimizations, staging, and more.
Kinsta was also the first managed WordPress host to be powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform. Google’s premium-tier network positions us to maximize the speed, security, and performance of each site hosted on our network.
Built-in Edge Caching that cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
We are also proud to be the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2, the world’s leading software review and comparison site:
Key Differences Between Kinsta and Google Cloud
Let’s take a look at some other differences between us and Google Cloud:
- Google Cloud Platform is a generic cloud services provider, while Kinsta is a specialized managed WordPress hosting provider.
- Kinsta’s singular focus enables us to offer a better user experience for hosting WordPress sites.
- The Kinsta setup is WordPress-optimized, which makes creating and managing your site simple and straightforward. With Google Cloud, you need to set up and configure your own virtual machines, which is complicated and resource-consuming.
- Kinsta includes everything you need to maximize website performance and security on each of our plans. With Google Cloud, you’ll be responsible for collecting, purchasing, and combining the tools together yourself.
- Kinsta provides premium 24/7 support on all our plans, whether you’re a startup, small business, or a Fortune 500 company. Google Cloud offers free support only for billing-related issues and requires you to pay extra for technical support (starting at $29 per month + 3% of your monthly prices). In addition, Google Cloud doesn’t provide WordPress-specific support.
- All Kinsta plans come with our custom-built, WordPress-specific MyKinsta dashboard with one-click WordPress installation and staging features.
- Kinsta has its custom-developed application performance monitoring tool (APM) that helps you identify WordPress performance issues. Google Cloud doesn’t offer a solution like this.
- Kinsta offers simple, straightforward hosting plans and packages, which can be easily integrated with add-on solutions. Google Cloud’s plans can be complex and confusing.
- Kinsta takes active and passive measures to safeguard your site and prevent malicious code from entering our network. Google Cloud doesn’t provide any WordPress-specific security features.
- Kinsta offers you 37 publicly available global data center locations, all that are available on the Google Cloud platform.
- All Kinsta plans included a free CDN and premium DNS. Google Cloud, on the other hand, charges for CDN traffic on top of regular cloud storage and usage fees.
- Kinsta automatically performs weekly database optimization for all your sites, whereas, with Google Cloud, you’d need to take care of database optimization tasks yourself.
- Unlike Google Cloud, Kinsta offers out-of-the-box ecommerce-optimized caching (our stack is optimized for WooCommerce sites).
- All Kinsta plans come with a standard staging environment feature and also the option to add Premium Staging Environments. At Google Cloud, you need to set up and manage staging environments from scratch yourself
- Kinsta provides easy SSL implementation using free Cloudflare certificates, which aren’t provided with Google Cloud.
- The MyKinsta dashboard allows you to easily test and change the PHP versions of your website or staging environment. At Google Cloud, this is a manual task, and you have to take care of your own.
- All Kinsta customers benefit from Google Cloud’s premium global tier network, which provides faster load times for your website visitors. Thanks to our deal with them, this is the default network for all our customers. If you host directly with them, you have the option to select which tier to use, and if you choose premium, that comes at a higher price plan.
- Kinsta has a one-click edge-caching solution available to further boost website performance. At Google Cloud, this is not available, and you need to set this up on your own.
- Kinsta provides free, human-performed migrations with all of our plans, offloading you from the time-consuming website migration process. Google Cloud doesn’t offer migration services; you have to take care of these on your own.
- Kinsta has a 30-day money-back guarantee, while Google Cloud doesn’t provide full refunds. Instead, they only provide refunds for unused funds.
- Kinsta provides an automatic site healing feature and monitors your website for uptime 480 times a day. Google Cloud doesn’t monitor individual websites hosted on your server.
- We offer six types of backups, including automatic daily backups. At Google Cloud, you need to take care of backups on your own.
- Kinsta offers a Malware Security Pledge for all sites hosted on the platform.
- Kinsta is SOC2 compliant, which provides independent proof that we have established security procedures and adhered to those procedures over time. Google Cloud is also SOC2 compliant. See Kinsta’s Trust Report for additional information.
- Kinsta has a free local WordPress development tool, DevKinsta, which helps you build websites locally, and it’s easily integrated with your Kinsta account. Google Cloud doesn’t offer a development tool like this.
- Kinsta has a very attractive affiliate program with recurring commissions. Google Cloud doesn’t have an affiliate program.
- Kinsta provides an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee on all plans.
Performance and Scalability at Your Fingertips
If you’re looking for a high-performance and scalable host that’s a great fit for agencies of all sizes, Kinsta’s got you covered. Our custom-built hosting platform is optimized to deliver incredible speed, performance, and scalability whether your site is a personal blog or a high-traffic ecommerce store generating millions in revenue. At Kinsta, you can scale up and down between plans with just a few clicks and zero downtime, and your hosting bill is automatically prorated.
Our high-performance software stack consists of orchestrated LXC software containers and LXD-managed hosts, along with tuned configurations for Nginx, PHP, and MariaDB.
Kinsta plans start at just $35 per month and leverage Google Cloud’s fastest servers – compute-optimized C2 and compute engine general-purpose C3D virtual machines.
What’s more, every WordPress site has its own isolated container. This has all of the software resources required to run the website, including Linux, Nginx, PHP, and MySQL.
Our platform offers more than 30 different software packages and PHP extensions, as well as custom-compiled Linux packages and Nginx rulesets, to help maximize the performance of your WordPress site. Our scalable cloud infrastructure enables you to upgrade or downgrade with ease.
Another benefit of using Kinsta as your WordPress hosting provider is our unique caching system, which helps to optimize speed and performance and eliminates the need for any caching plugins.
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 and cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
Switching to Kinsta turned out to be the best decision we’ve ever made when it comes to our website infrastructure. We saw a 60% drop in server response times, faster delivery of our pages, and nearly 100% uptime. The most insane part of it all was that this came at nearly 40% lower cost than the previous host.
Unlimited Free Migrations From All Hosts
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 any 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 ALL hosts! Our free migrations are performed by an expert migrations engineer.
If you have problematic high traffic sites like us, you’ll love their migration service — they took care of everything and even identified some problem plugins that had been installed by former members of our team. I would have spent hours on the migration due to the size without their help.
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.
At Kinsta, We Take Security Seriously
The security of your data is of the utmost importance, which is why we’re dedicated to providing a secure hosting service by taking a variety of active and passive measures to safeguard your site.
All sites at Kinsta are protected by our free Cloudflare integration, which includes an enterprise-level firewall with custom rulesets 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 on the side.
Our other 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.
- Automated backups for all plans, so you never lose your site or data. We also store two weeks of backups at all times, with the possibility of increasing data retention.
- 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.
- A Malware Security Pledge that has you covered 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 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.
Uncover your web app’s performance bottlenecks.
Our experts will run a free performance audit of your website or app 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. Our MyKinsta dashboard is built with usability in mind.
With features like search and replace, force HTTPS, URL redirects with IP geolocation support, IP deny, free Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool, 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 take a look at some of the features that make our MyKinsta dashboard so powerful:
- Toggle between different PHP versions with the click of a button. Kinsta supports PHP 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4.
- Kinsta APM, a free APM (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.
- Free Cloudflare integration with optimized settings to secure and boost the performance of your site without the need for a separate Cloudflare subscription.
- Get detailed analytics on bandwidth, 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 weekly MySQL database optimizations.
- One-click ionCube enabler.
- Free Kinsta DNS (powered by Amazon Route53) to manage your DNS records directly in your dashboard.
- One-click CDN setup with Kinsta CDN (powered by Cloudflare with over 260+ global PoPs).
- A dashboard tool to purge the site cache easily.
- Simple URLs redirect management with IP geolocation support.
- Powerful IP Deny tool that lets you quickly and easily 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 dashboard toggle for enabling WP_DEBUG mode.
- Password-protection feature for your environment and the ability to strengthen login security by adding your SSH keys to the dashboard.
- A multilingual dashboard that’s available in 10 languages: English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch.
At Kinsta, we value our clients’ feedback and are always looking for ways to improve. That’s why we regularly incorporate the requests and feedback we get in order to better our products. If there’s a way to enhance your experience, we want to know about it!
Expert Support for WordPress
At Kinsta, we treat every customer and site as a mission-critical priority, whether you’re a solopreneur, 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).
With Kinsta, you don’t need to worry about being left hanging if you’re faced with an urgent issue, regardless of your plan. At Kinsta, we don’t rely on a tiered support system, which means we won’t waste your time with escalations and transfers. Whether you’re on our Starter plan or Enterprise 4 plan, you’ll have access to the same team of WordPress experts.
Managing more than 100 websites carries the potential for overwhelming tech support issues. But the switch to Kinsta has decreased our support tickets by roughly 50%. Our sites just work–they’re live, they’re fast, they’re protected, and they’re (expertly) supported. And that frees us to take care of our clients, which keeps them happy (98%+ retention rate) and our families fed! Kinsta frees me from spending time on things that are outside our wheelhouse. Kinsta’s ability to do what they do frees us to what we do in a way that far exceeds what we’ve experienced from other managed hosting companies.
In addition to multilingual support and resources available in 10 languages, our support team is proud to maintain an initial ticket response time of under 2 minutes and a customer satisfaction rating of over 97%!
Agency Partner Program
Kinsta has an Agency Partner Program that’s specifically designed for WordPress agencies looking for a powerful and secure hosting platform with minimal overhead. By hosting your client sites on Kinsta, you’ll be able to take advantage of our high-performance servers along with purpose-built tools for site management in the MyKinsta dashboard.
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 infrastructure side of things.
Our Agency Partner Program also comes with a number of perks:
- Free hosting for your agency site on a Kinsta Pro plan (a $70/month value).
- Unlimited free migrations for your client sites.
- Unlimited free malware removals
- White-label our cache-clearing plugin with your agency’s logo and branding.
As a member of our Agency Partner Program, your agency and all your client sites will receive the same level of support, features, and tooling offered on our normal plan tiers!
This means your agency site and your clients’ sites will be hosted on Google Cloud Platform’s fastest servers with dedicated resources on a per-site basis, and they’ll also be backed by our 24/7 support engineers.
Thanks to multi-user support in the MyKinsta dashboard, you’ll be able to provide dashboard access to agency developers or even directly to your clients.
Kinsta Has a Global Presence
Kinsta has a truly global presence, which consists of 37 data center locations spanning five continents. Kinsta customers have access to every data center location without any extra or hidden fees.
Our data center locations include:
- Test, PH
- Johannesburg, Africa
- Changhua County, Taiwan
- Hong Kong
- Tokyo, Japan
- Osaka, Japan
- Seoul, South Korea
- Mumbai, India
- Delhi, India
- Jurong West, Singapore
- Jakarta, Indonesia
- Sydney, Australia
- Melbourne, Australia
- Warsaw, Poland
- Hamina, Finland
- Madrid, Spain
- St. Ghislain, Belgium
- London, United Kingdom
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Eemshaven, Netherlands
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Milan, Italy
- Paris, France
- Dammam, Saudi Arabia
- Tel Aviv, Israel
- Montréal, Canada
- Toronto, Canada
- São Paulo, Brazil
- Santiago, Chile
- Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA
- Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA
- Ashburn, Virginia, USA
- Columbus, Ohio, USA
- Dallas, Texas, USA
- The Dalles, Oregon, USA
- Los Angeles, California, USA
- Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
- Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
Free Performance Monitoring Tool
WordPress is a dynamic CMS, which means it’s constantly executing PHP code in the background. Depending on your theme and plugin configuration, it’s possible for your site to get bogged down with bloated and inefficient code.
That’s where Application Performance Monitoring tools (APM) can help. An APM tool monitors requests to your site and tracks various metrics like external API requests, database queries, PHP execution time, and more. This information allows you to quickly debug and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks.
All Kinsta plans come with a free custom-built APM tool that can be easily accessed right in the MyKinsta dashboard. Kinsta APM provides you with key WordPress performance insights without the need to pay for third-party subscriptions to other APM services.
With Kinsta APM, you can debug the following and more:
- Slow WordPress plugins and themes.
- Long calls to external APIs and domains.
- Unoptimized MySQL database queries.
Unlike Kinsta, Google Cloud plans do not come with a free custom-built APM tool, nor do they support the popular New Relic APM tool.
Use DevKinsta to Develop Locally
For developers and agencies, Kinsta offers a simple to use yet powerful) local development tool called 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 natively integrated with MyKinsta and Kinsta’s hosting platform, which means Kinsta customers can develop locally and take advantage of push/pull functionality for all their sites hosted on Kinsta!
If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features (including multisite support) and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver. Google Cloud does not provide customers with a natively integrated local development tool.
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.
Blazing Fast Content Delivery with Kinsta CDN
All Kinsta plans include a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) via our Cloudflare integration. This is a premium HTTP/3-enabled CDN to deliver your content lightning-fast across the globe.
Our content delivery architecture was tailor-made for high throughput and low latency. You can enable Kinsta CDN directly from your MyKinsta dashboard, and your content will be delivered and cached from data centers in over 37 cities around the globe. This spans all major regions, including North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and Africa.
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 included free with all Kinsta plans and doesn’t require a separate plugin.
Affiliate Program With Recurring Commissions
Kinsta is constantly exceeding our clients’ expectations. Our satisfied customers are eager to spread the word about our products and services, which has helped position us as one of the fastest-growing managed WordPress hosts in the industry.
This is one of the reasons why we’re proud to offer true profit-sharing through our custom affiliate program, which is one of the highest-paying programs in the hosting industry.
As a partner, you’ll have the ability to earn between $50 to $500 in referral commissions, depending on the plan. You can even earn a 10% monthly recurring commission for the entire lifetime of each customer you refer to us. This is a powerful opportunity to earn a passive income!
To make the Kinsta affiliate experience even more enjoyable, we developed our own easy-to-use affiliate dashboard from scratch. Therefore, you won’t have to deal with complicated or confusing third-party platforms.
Unlike Kinsta, Google Cloud does not pay a 10% monthly commission for the lifetime of the referred customer.
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 all hosts. If you’re ready to make the move away from your current host and switch to our managed WordPress hosting platform, try Kinsta risk-free for 30 days!