OVH Alternative – The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta

Introduction

OVH is a flexible web hosting platform. It offers shared hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), and dedicated hosting plans..

Kinsta, on the other hand, is a managed WordPress hosting solution. That means we focus 100% on WordPress, and our clients don’t have to worry about maintenance tasks such as updating the CMS, creating backups, optimizing for performance, and more.

This makes Kinsta a great option if you want to focus on growing your website instead of managing your own server. With OVH, you get a solution that’s more DIY and not optimized for WordPress users.

In this page, we’ll show you the key differences between Kinsta vs DIY hosting providers such as OVH.

Kinsta is Built for Performance and Scalability

Most hosting plans fall into predetermined categories, such as shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers. Those are precisely the types of plans that OVH offers to its customers.

Kinsta takes a different approach when it comes to hosting. While we call ourselves a managed WordPress hosting solution, that doesn’t paint the full picture when it comes to our offerings.

With Kinsta, you get custom-built infrastructure powered by the Google Cloud Platform. When you combine that with our in-house optimizations and WordPress expertise, you get a unique type of hosting solution.

While other web hosts like OVH offer cheaper hosting plans, they can do that because they leave server optimization and management up to their users. At the shared hosting level, you may pay less to power your website, but the trade-off is that you’ll need to spend much more time ensuring that it runs smoothly, and fix issues on your own when they occur.

With Kinsta, you not only pay for server resources, but also for our hosting and WordPress expertise. The benefits become evident once you consider some of the tasks you’ll need to take care of on unmanaged hosting solutions:

• Migrating your website
• Setting up a CDN or a premium DNS for your website
• Gaining access to performance analytics
• Monitoring website uptime
• Troubleshooting technical or security issues with your website
• Setting up server-level caching
• Securing your server and website
• Mitigating DDoS attacks

At some point, opting for managed vs unmanaged hosting becomes a matter of how much your time is worth. For personal projects that may not require as much maintenance or optimization, shared unmanaged plans can be a good low-cost solution.

However, for business websites or projects that you plan to grow, Kinsta’s managed hosting solutions can offer a stress-free alternative. Although they can be more costly, your time will remain free to focus on your business strategy and growing your website to its full potential.

Starting at $35 per month, Kinsta plans help you take care of all the maintenance tasks we’ve talked about so far. What’s more, Kinsta offers unmatched scalability. That means the platform can take you from a new website to one that gets thousands of visits per day, and still provides optimal performance.

With Kinsta, you can launch a new WordPress website from your MyKinsta dashboard in a matter of minutes. With OVH, you’ll need to set up WordPress manually and configure it before you can get to work.

Depending on the type of site you’re running, simply switching to Kinsta usually results in an immediate and dramatic increase in performance!

To sum it all up, Kinsta managed WordPress hosting means you don’t need to take the role of a sysadmin to ensure that your website runs at its best at all times. Our experienced technicians take care of everything for you, so you can focus on what’s really important.

Expert Support for WordPress

Although WordPress is a user-friendly CMS, every website runs into occasional performance issues or technical errors. In some cases, your website’s security might even be compromised.

If you find yourself in any of those situations, you can either troubleshoot them on your own or reach out to your web host’s support system. With some web hosts, however, you don’t have the luxury of around-the-clock support or access to technicians who know their way around WordPress.

One of the primary advantages of managed WordPress hosting is that our support team knows WordPress inside and out. We offer the same level of premium support for all our customers and plans.

With Kinsta, you get access to WordPress and Linux experts, as well as troubleshooting resources in over 10 languages. On average, we take under two minutes to respond to live chat requests, which you can make at any time from your MyKinsta dashboard.

For the past two years, more than 97 percent of our customers closed a chat support session happy or satisfied with the support they received:

Although OVH also offers around-the-clock support, it’s only available as an extra, starting at 250€ per month ($306). Regular support is also available via multiple channels, including mail, phone, and chat, but only during working hours.

Kinsta is Developer-Friendly

Although shared hosting plans tend to be cheaper than their managed counterparts, they’re often lacking when it comes to advanced functionality. That means you’ll have access to fewer developer-friendly options.

OVH’s shared hosting plans are not the exception. If you’re looking for advanced features, you’ll need to opt for OVH’s VPS and dedicated servers.

Kinsta was created with both developers and regular users in mind. MyKinsta includes a broad range of developer-friendly tools, but it’s also intuitive enough that you can use it without a web development or sysadmin background.

Our team also includes a lot of developers and engineers, which means we understand what your needs are and the kind of tools that other web hosts often lack. Some of the developer-friendly features you’ll have access to at Kinsta include:

• One-click staging environments for all plans.
• Git, WP-CLI, and SSH access included, regardless of your plan. 
• Five different types of backups available: automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system generated, and downloadable. OVH gives you access to one, two, or three-day-old backups, as well as a one-week-old option.
• A Redis add-on for quicker database performance.
• The option to load your site over reverse proxy. 
• Unrestricted access to your site’s critical files. 
• The ability to use custom setups such as Bedrock and Trellis.
• An option to run a different version of PHP for each live and staging site, and the ability to switch your PHP version with one click. Although OVH doesn’t include staging functionality, the custom OVH panel does enable you to switch PHP versions with one click.
• Default enabled post and page revisions for WordPress.
• The ability to restore backups to staging as well as production. Plus, we don’t include backups as part of your total web storage usage.

Staging environments are critical for testing plugins, themes, and core updates to ensure that they’re compatible with your website and won’t cause anything to break. They’re also an important feature for debugging code and developing projects before pushing them live.

That’s why we offer one-click staging for every WordPress site hosted at Kinsta. You can create a new staging environment directly from your MyKinsta dashboard. You can push changes live with a single click, as well as restore backups to a production or staging site.

It doesn’t get any easier than that. Plus, as with backups, your staging sites aren’t included in your total disk space usage (only your live sites are).

Although OVH doesn’t offer staging functionality, you can still create copies of your website to use for testing or development purposes. However, you’ll have to do so manually, which means pushing those copies to production isn’t a seamless process.

Kinsta offers free Cloudflare SSL certificates on every plan, as well as the option to install your own.

OVH offers free Let’s Encrypt certificates with all its shared hosting plans, which you can activate from your custom hosting panel.

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 APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tools can help. An APM 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 for expensive 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.

OVH plans are unmanaged and do not come with a free APM tool, which makes it very difficult to quickly troubleshoot performance issues on your WordPress site.

Safe and Secure

When using OVH, securing your server and website largely falls on you. That’s fine if you have a sysadmin background, but otherwise, setting up firewalls, scanning your site for malware, and updating software can eat up a lot of valuable time. One feature that OVH does offer out of the box, however, is DDoS protection.

All sites on Kinsta are automatically protected by Cloudflare’s firewall, which includes free DDoS protection. With our Cloudflare integration, you’ll get the benefits of enhanced security and performance without having to configure your own Cloudflare account.

Kinsta also offers DDoS protection, among several other security features that keep your server and website protected against malicious attacks. This includes:

• Monitoring your sites every three minutes for uptime
• Implementing strict software-based restrictions
• Free Cloudflare integration, which includes a secure firewall with built-in DDoS protection.
• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) support
• Automated backups for all plans
• Isolated LXC containers
• Self-healing PHP
• Only support for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP). OVH, on the other hand, supports both FTP and SFTP.

Kinsta provides premium uptime monitoring for all of your WordPress sites via our in-house developed monitoring system. The status of the sites hosted on our platform are checked every three minutes. On the off-chance that something were to happen to your site, we offer a free 100% hack-fix guarantee.

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.

Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads

Ecommerce is vital for many businesses, and WordPress offers some of the best tools and plugins for online stores. However, if you want to offer the best possible ecommerce experience, you need to use a web host that is optimized for it. 

Kinsta is optimized for online stores, and our solution is configured to work out of the box with plugins such as WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.

To optimize the speed and performance of your online store, we offer automatic purging of cache and archive pages, as well as:

• 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_cart” or “edit_items_in_cart” are detected
• Putting specific rules in place to allow EDD and WooCommerce functionality during server-level page caching

With OVH, you’re not limited in any way when it comes to setting up an online store using WordPress. However, OVH doesn’t offer any ecommerce optimizations or solutions for the CMS.

Feature Comparison Overview

Now that we’ve made it this far, let’s take a look at some of the biggest differences between Kinsta vs OVH:

Join Others Making the Switch to Kinsta

At Kinsta, our mission is to offer the fastest, latest technology possible. We’re always evolving and adapting to use the most innovative solutions available. When you check out our many feature updates, you can see that no other hosting provider releases the number of new features, tools, and integrations at the same rate and frequency. 

We are proud of our solutions, and want you to be completely satisfied with your hosting. If you’re ready to make the move away from OVH and switch to a new managed hosting provider, try out Kinsta risk-free for 30 days!