August 10, 2017
Feature Updates
Keep track of all the great features we're building into our system.
One thing we love here at Kinsta is data. That’s why we have completely revamped MyKinsta Analytics. You can now quickly gain insights into what is really happening on your WordPress site. The new reports include everything from resource usage, performance monitoring, and even security. These are separated into separate sections in the MyKinsta dashboard:
- Resource Usage: Visitors, bandwidth usage, top requests by bytes, top requests by visits
- Performance Monitoring: Average PHP & MySQL response time, PHP throughput, AJAX usage, upstream time
- Visitor Analysis: Unique requests, requests & bots, mobile vs desktop
- Response Analysis: Response code breakdown, response stats, 300, 400 & 500 error code breakdowns
- Cache Analysis: Cache component stack, top cache bypasses, component chart (HIT, BYPASS MISS, EXPIRE)
- Geo Analysis: Top countries, top cities, top regions
- Security Metrics: Top client IPs
This data can now be used to self-troubleshoot performance and security issues on your site, along with getting a better understanding of how Kinsta is actually delivering content to your visitors. And there’s more! Check out our in-depth knowledge base article on how to use the MyKinsta Analytics to further analyze your site.
August 03, 2017
All 11 Google Cloud Platform Locations Now Available
We’ve been busy behind the scenes and are excited to announce that all 11 Google Cloud Platform data center locations are now available! This infrastructure change allows you to even more strategically position your WordPress sites closer to your visitors and customers. This helps to decrease latency, TTFB, and ensure faster page load times. Below is a list of our current and new locations:
- Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA (current)
- St. Ghislain, Belgium (current)
- Changhua County, Taiwan (current)
- Sydney, Australia (new)
- The Dalles, Oregon, USA (new)
- Ashburn, Virginia, USA (new)
- Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA (new)
- London, UK (new)
- Frankfurt, Germany (new)
- Jurong West, Singapore (new)
- Tokyo, Japan (new)
These locations are now available from within the MyKinsta dashboard when you go to add a new site.
See our knowledge base article on Google Cloud Platform locations for more information and questions about moving an existing site.
May 08, 2017
Redirect Rules Are Now Available On My Kinsta
We just rolled out the ability to add redirect rules from right within your MyKinsta dashboard! This has been a highly requested feature and you can now manage them without having to contact our support team. Redirect rules allow you to seamlessly direct traffic from one location to another. It is particularly useful for preventing 404 errors, ensuring proper SEO when you make changes, and routing visitors to the correct locations on your site.
You can easily add 301 and 302 redirects, as well as bulk import redirect rules from a CSV.
Check out our full tutorial on how to add redirect rules in MyKinsta.
March 28, 2017
Cloning Your WordPress Sites
We are excited to announce that you can now clone your WordPress sites with just a few simple clicks. Create a copy of both your live sites and staging environments. This was a highly requested feature and one that we hope will help improve and speed up your workflows, allowing you to more easily separate your sites. This new feature is now available from within the MyKinsta dashboard.
Check out our full tutorial on how to clone your WordPress site, as well as a few notes regarding post cloning.
February 13, 2017
PHP 7.1 Now Available On My Kinsta
We are constantly dedicated to bringing you the latest stable versions of PHP as soon as we have thoroughly tested it throughout our environment. Today we are excited to announce that PHP 7.1 is now available for all Kinsta users. You can easily change PHP versions from within the My Kinsta dashboard, under Tools, with a single click.
Remember that you can switch PHP engines back and forth, so if you encounter compatibility issues with PHP 7.1, you can easily resort back to PHP 7.0. Read more about changes with this new version in our blog post on what’s new in PHP 7.1.
January 25, 2017
Error Logs Now Visible On My Kinsta
We’re continuously working to bring you more and more information on the My Kinsta dashboard. Today we’re releasing error logs, which can help you debug your website issues easily, without having to resort to SSH.
To view a site’s error log go to sites, click on the site in question and go to the error logs tab. You can select different log files to view with the selector and set how many items you want to load with the slider. Happy bug hunting!
January 06, 2017
Restore Backups To Staging
Today we’ve rolled out a new feature that should help in the development of small and large websites alike. It is now possible to restore a live site’s backup to your staging site. This could make your life easier in a number of ways, such as:
- A smoother and more flexible development experience
- See how your site worked previously without having to touch your live site.
- Retrieve information from a previous backup without modifying your live site
This feature is available for our Google Cloud customers and can be found in the backups section of each site. Read more about how to restore a backup to staging.
December 14, 2016
Custom New Relic Tracking
Today we’re rolling out a new feature for our Google Cloud customers which will allow you to deep-dive into your website stats by adding your own New Relic license key.
New Relic is a monitoring tool that gives you detailed performance breakdowns on a granular level. We use it internally to keep tabs on all websites on our network and react speedily to any issues before they cause problems.
The system comes with two caveats. New Relic only works with PHP, it won’t provide data in an HHVM environment. New Relic will only allow one license key at a time which means that we’ll lose the ability to monitor your site.
Due to this we only recommend adding your custom license key if you have the capacity to monitor your website for potential issues that could cause downtime, or if you want to look at some details temporarily and then remove your key to give back monitoring capabilities to us.
For more information, take a look at our knowledge base article on Custom New Relic Tracking.
November 30, 2016
Free SSL Support Now Available Via Let’s Encrypt
We’re stoked to announce a great feature today that will not only increase security for sites hosted with us, but will save our clients money! We’ve added full support for Let’s Encrypt which is a free, automated, and open Certificate Authority.
Let’s Encrypt is completely free and completely safe. It is backed by corporations and ventures such as Automattic, Mozilla, Cisco, Google Chrome, Facebook, Sucuri – just to name a few.
Grab a free certificate today and add it easily in your My Kinsta backend. If you’d like to know more, take a look at our post about the Let’s Encrypt Launch.
September 15, 2016
Two Factor Authentication (2FA) Now Available
Security is one of our main priorities here at Kinsta and today we’re taking a big leap forward helping you to keep your account safe. We’ve made two factor authentication – 2FA – available to all accounts, it only take a minute to set up.
Two factor authentication uses an additional method of verification – usually a code sent to you via your smartphone. We’ve partnered up with Authy to give you secure one-time codes to use to access your Kinsta account.
To learn more about how 2FA works, why it’s important and how to enable it for your account, take a look at our 2FA blog post.
August 26, 2016
Account Activity Log Now Available
We’ve released a great new security and monitoring feature: the Activity Log. The Activity Log allows you to see all the actions that were taken on your account and who these actions were taken by. Log in to your My Kinsta dashboard to see the new Activity Log menu item.
This feature brings another round of security to our systems by allowing you to easily track all actions. You’ll also be able to see everything we do within your account.
August 01, 2016
HHVM Environment Switching Available
A few weeks back we introduced the ability to switch your environment between PHP 5.6 and PHP 7. We’re happy to announce today that the ability to use HHVM has also been added to our Google Cloud plans.
HHVM is great because it provides 2-5x better performance than the official PHP FastCGI interpreter. To make sure you can test your website before making the switch (which you should) you can also select HHVM for your test environments.
Before you use HHVM on your live site please note the following:
- Some themes and plugins may not be compatible with HHVM so make sure to perform a full website test using a test environment
- New Relic does not support HHVM yet so we won’t be able to see backend processes if something is slowing your site.