Pantheon Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta

Kinsta vs Pantheon

Let’s take a look at some of the major differences between Kinsta and Pantheon:

• Kinsta supports 37 data centers across Google’s global network.
• Kinsta is a specialized managed WordPress hosting provider that provides feature-rich, affordable plans. We offer plans for websites of all sizes and scales. Pantheon is a WebOps platform that focuses on enterprise and agency solutions, making it overwhelming and expensive for the average WordPress user. 
• The Kinsta stack is WordPress-optimized, which makes creating and managing your site simple and straightforward. Pantheon’s infrastructure is not strictly for WordPress sites, so the platform is not as user-friendly or intuitive. 
• Kinsta uses C2 and C3D 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%.
• All sites on Kinsta are protected by a Cloudflare integration, which includes a secure firewall, free SSL certificates, free DDoS protection, HTTP/3, and more.
• Transparent resources and pricing. Kinsta lets you know exactly what resources your sites have available. The Basic Pantheon plan is advertised as $29/month, but that’s only if you are a Pantheon Preferred member, which is the partnership program for agencies. The actual list price for the Basic plan is $60/month, which comes with very few features. For performance-enhancing options, you’ll need to upgrade to one of the four Performance plans, which have a starting monthly price of $160.
• 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 200 cities in more than 100 countries. We don’t need to know where you are to know there will be a Cloudflare server near you. That means lightning-fast server requests to your website. And it’s available at no extra cost in any Kinsta plan.
• 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. Pantheon uses a tiered system where the support features and response times vary depending on the level of your plan.
• Kinsta performs weekly automatic MySQL optimization on all your sites to optimize database performance. We didn’t find any evidence that Pantheon provides the same service so far.
• All Kinsta plans include free access to our custom application performance monitoring tool (Kinsta APM) for debugging WordPress performance issues. Pantheon does not have a built-in free APM tool. 
• Kinsta offers free migrations from Pantheon handled by an expert engineer. You can rest assured that your site will be migrated safely, securely, and following best practices. Pantheon handles migrations with a DIY plugin, which means you have to do the migrations on your own, so you won’t receive a white-glove migration experience specifically tailored to your site.
• Sites on Kinsta are equipped with a self-healing PHP feature. We monitor all sites on our infrastructure 480 times per day and offer an uptime guarantee. Pantheon’s 99.99% uptime guarantee doesn’t apply to the Basic hosting plan. It also only offers site monitoring for Elite plans.
• MyKinsta dashboard includes a variety of useful site management tools that are not available on Pantheon: database search and replace, free and built-in APM tool, free IP Geolocation manager, ionCube loader, PHP restart, and more are either not available or are only offered on its Performance and Elite plans. 
• All Kinsta plans include a free CDN and premium DNS. Pantheon includes a global CDN, but most of the useful features are only available when you upgrade to the Advanced Global CDN, which you have to reach out to the support team to set up and configure.
• Kinsta offers out-of-the-box ecommerce-optimized caching. Our platform is optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads. Pantheon also offers WooCommerce hosting, but advanced server caching is only available with Performance plans.
• All Kinsta plans come with a one-click staging environment feature. 
• Websites with reverse proxy setups are welcome.
• Websites hosted on Kinsta come with a 100% Malware Security Pledge.
• Kinsta is SOC2 compliant, which provides independent proof that we have established security procedures and adhered to those procedures over time. Pantheon is also 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. Pantheon only offers manual, automatic, and on-demand backups.
• Kinsta has a 30-day money-back guarantee, while Pantheon doesn’t offer any type of refund. According to its Terms of Service, “no credits or refunds of any kind will be given.”
• Pantheon does not have an affiliate program. Kinsta has a very attractive affiliate program where you get a 10% monthly recurring commission on top of an initial payment.
• 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. WordPress multisite is also supported. 
• Kinsta provides an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee on all plans.
• Built-in Edge Caching that cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!

Try it out for yourself with our risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee.

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.

With Pantheon, you also have access to basic web-based firewalls and HTTPS through Let’s Encrypt. However, you don’t get most of the WordPress-specific security measures we offer. On the Basic plan, all you really receive are automatic security updates and patching.

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’ll 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!

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 e-commerce 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 e-commerce plugins rely heavily on CPU performance because they cannot be efficiently cached. This is where our C2 and C3D VMs really shine with their industry-leading CPU performance. At Kinsta, we make C2 and C3D 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_cart or edit_items_in_cart are detected.
• Implementing specific rules to allow EDD and WooCommerce functionality during server-level page caching.

Pantheon offers WooCommerce hosting. However, this requires a Performance or Elite plan, which are both much more expensive than Kinsta plans (even with the same features included).

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.

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.

Pantheon offers a free Global CDN via Fastly with all plans. However, to take advantage of features such as full-page caching, IP block listing, and reverse proxy support, you need to upgrade to the Advanced Global CDN. Not only does this involve more money, but you also need to have the Pantheon Professional Services team enable and configure it.

Best Affiliate Program in the Industry

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.

Pantheon does not currently offer an affiliate program. It only provides a Pantheon Partnership Program, which is geared toward agencies.