Files and Database Storage

When you host a site, application, or database with Kinsta, you can choose the data center where it is hosted. Your files, including backups, are stored in that data center. We do not create copies and store those copies elsewhere.

However, certain pieces of data related to your site’s visitors, files, and database will necessarily leave that data center in a few scenarios. In this article, we’ll explain those scenarios.

Website access logs

One system that processes some of your website data is Kinsta’s WordPress Hosting analytics system. This system is used for security purposes, such as to watch for malicious login attempts, as well as to keep track of things like visits, bandwidth, and website performance.

In order for this to be done, data from the access logs, including website visitor IP addresses, is transmitted securely to our analytics servers, where it is included in our analytics data set for 30 days and then deleted.

MyKinsta tools

Certain tools in MyKinsta process information related to your site or application, including data pulled from your access and error logs, your visitor’s IP addresses, and information extracted from the database (for example, when our search-and-replace tool is used).

Depending on the tool in question, this data may be stored temporarily on the Google Cloud Platform virtual machines in the United States, which power MyKinsta.

In some rare cases, this data may be processed by a third party. Such is the case if you enable Kinsta’s CDN in MyKinsta. When you do that, you’re enabling a premium CDN powered by Cloudflare, which will then log the requests from your website’s visitors as those visitors pull your website’s static asset files over their CDN network.

Communication tools

There are a variety of communication systems that are used in relation to your site or application, such as our chat and email systems and the SMTP service that sends emails from your website (more here about SMTP ports).

If you share data that contains visitors’ information in a chat with our Support team, that data is then stored on our chat provider’s servers. The same is true for any other communication system integrated into our platform or used by our team to provide services.

Kinsta’s CDN and edge caching

For every site where Kinsta’s CDN is enabled, as website visitors access your site, copies of your website’s static assets (JavaScript files, CSS files, media files, etc.) will be stored on Cloudflare’s network. Additionally, if Edge Caching is enabled on your site(s), the rendered HTML files for all cached pages accessed by visitors to your site(s) will also be stored on Cloudflare’s network.

We strongly recommend that you use our CDN and enable Edge Caching on every site where they are compatible. Doing so will ensure your sites provide the fastest performance and greatest uptime possible. However, if you do not wish to allow Cloudflare to store copies of a site’s static assets or cached HTML files, you can disable the CDN or turn off Edge Caching for each site in MyKinsta (WordPress Sites > sitename > Edge Caching).

Summary

When you pick a data center to host your site at Kinsta, your files, and database, as well as any backups we create, are stored at that location. However, in order to provide services, we do have to transfer some limited amounts and types of data to other places, as described in this article.

If you have any further questions about this topic, please refer to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.