Rackspace Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta
If you’re looking for a Rackspace alternative for managed WordPress hosting, Kinsta should be at the top of your list. Our services are powered by the Google Cloud Platform, which means you get access to a premium-tier network.
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 Rackspace alternative to host your application or database, 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
Rackspace provides several types of plans, including bare metal servers and private cloud solutions. It also offers the option to work with several cloud hosting providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud.
Kinsta, on the other hand, is powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform. By signing up for Kinsta, you get access to virtual machines in over 37 data centers across the world.
Kinsta’s architecture was designed from the ground up to work with WordPress. We take Google Cloud’s servers and optimize them for WordPress users. That means you get unmatched performance that rivals most other web hosts in the market, without having to fine-tune every aspect of your server or WordPress itself.
Although both Kinsta and Rackspace are cloud hosting solutions, the former offers a much more optimized service. With Kinsta, there are no hidden costs or complex setup processes. You sign up, and then you can launch a WordPress website in a matter of minutes.
How Kinsta Compares to Rackspace Hosting in a Nutshell
Before we dive into the specifics of Kinsta vs Rackspace, let’s break down the key differences between both services.
Kinsta is the first 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 platform.
We are also proud to be a top-rated managed WordPress host on G2, the world’s leading software review and comparison site. Kinsta takes the lead when it comes to ease of use and administration, both of which are critical aspects when running a website:
Enjoy a 20% Faster Website Simply by Moving From Rackspace to Kinsta
We measured 3,200+ migrations over the course of a three-month span. On average, client sites experienced 20% faster load times just by moving to Kinsta.
How is this possible? Our customers enjoy:
- The latest generation of virtual machines from Google’s Compute Engine general-purpose machine family C3D VMs and The fastest Compute-Optimized C2 VMs, available across all plans in supported regions.
- A stack that’s been fine-tuned for WordPress over the past 8 years.
- Google’s Premium Tier Network to deliver website data faster.
- Free CDN powered by Cloudflare’s global network of 260+ locations.
- Built-in Edge Caching that cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
Migrate from Rackspace to Kinsta hassle free with our free expert migration service. With our 30-day money-back guarantee, you can test out the service and improved speeds completely risk-free. You only lose if you don’t give this a try!
With Kinsta, you get a hosting platform that caters to WordPress businesses, enthusiasts, and developers. Our entire service catalog centers around ensuring that your WordPress website can grow to its full potential, without compromising on speed.
Rackspace also offers managed web hosting plans, but its service is not geared toward WordPress users in particular. Some additional key differences between Kinsta and Rackspace include:
- Kinsta offers clearly-priced and defined plans for all levels of WordPress websites. Rackspace plans vary a lot depending on the resources you need, the extras you choose, and whether you opt for managed hosting or not.
- Kinsta houses every WordPress site in its own isolated container, which has all of the software resources required to run it (Linux, Nginx, PHP, and MySQL). The resources are 100% private and are not shared with anyone else or even among your own sites. Rackspace offers both shared and private containers for your projects.
- Kinsta has 37 data centers worldwide, while Rackspace has only 14.
- Kinsta offers six types of backups: free automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system-generated, downloadable, and external backups sent automatically to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. We also offer one-click backup and restore features. Rackspace offers automatic cloud backups as an add-on for its plans.
- Kinsta uses a unique caching system to automatically cache pages at the server level, eliminating the need for any plugins or add-ons. Rackspace includes caching functionality if you opt to use its Cloud Load Balancers add-on for your server.
- Kinsta support, composed of WordPress experts and Linux engineers, is available 24/7 for every customer via live chat. Rackspace support is also available around the clock, with phone, live chat, and email ticketing as options.
- Kinsta offers free, expert-performed migration services with all of our plans. Rackspace offers paid migration services.
- Kinsta is powered by a custom-built dashboard called MyKinsta, which is designed to provide the most user-friendly experience possible for managing websites. Rackspace also uses a custom dashboard, but it’s not designed with WordPress users in mind.
- Kinsta makes it easy to develop websites locally using the DevKinsta application.
- All Kinsta plans include free access to our in-house developed Application Performance Monitoring tool (Kinsta APM).
- We monitor your sites every three minutes for uptime, which equates to 480 daily uptime checks
- With Kinsta, you get access to automatic MySQL database optimizations.
- Kinsta is developer-friendly and includes SSH, WP-CLI, and Git on all plans. We also support advanced configurations such as Bedrock, IP Geolocation, reverse proxies, Redis, etc. With Rackspace, you can set up the same tools manually, but that process requires sysadmin experience.
- Kinsta is SOC2 compliant, which provides independent proof that we have established security procedures and adhered to those procedures over time. Rackspace is also SOC2 compliant. See Kinsta’s Trust Report for additional information.
- Each Kinsta website can have its own staging environment, which you can push to production with a single click.
- Kinsta provides an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee on all plans.
- Kinsta offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. Since Rackspace charges you based on hourly server use, it doesn’t offer refunds.
In case you’re not convinced yet, let’s look more closely at what Kinsta has to offer.
Kinsta is Built for Performance and Scalability
Kinsta and Rackspace both offer cloud hosting services, but the underlying infrastructure is very different.
With Kinsta, you get access to the Google Cloud Platform. We take Google’s virtual machines and configure them to deliver unparalleled WordPress performance. Although you could directly sign up for Google Cloud, our team’s WordPress and sysadmin experience will be hard to match.
Rackspace, on the other hand, offers both physical dedicated and cloud hosting solutions. If you opt for cloud hosting, you can pay for managed or unmanaged services.
In either case, the servers you get aren’t optimized for WordPress use out of the box. Moreover, you need to have a clear idea of the amount of server resources that you’ll need for your website.
Using Kinsta, you get access to machines with a lot of CPUs and RAM. Matching those specs on Rackspace could be prohibitively expensive in some cases.
Kinsta enables you to choose from over ten standard hosting plans (custom plans not included). We don’t limit the best features only to the highest-paying clients. Our broad selection of plans is all about providing customers with plenty of options to choose from when it comes to scalability.
When using Rackspace, you don’t ‘sign up’ for a plan. Instead, you choose the specs of the cloud server you want to spin up. Its cheapest server setup, which includes 1 GB of RAM, starts at around $23 per month, including managed infrastructure services.
Rackspace also charges you depending on how much bandwidth you need, which means costs may rise quickly.
Starting at just $35 per month, Kinsta plans include all of these technical elements and more. For each site hosted on our platform, we use LXD-managed hosts and LXC software containers. This means that every site has its own isolated container equipped with all the necessary resources, including MySQL, PHP, Linux, and Nginx.
Kinsta’s scalable infrastructure also enables you to upgrade or downgrade your plan with ease. Plus, we have custom-compiled Linux packages and Nginx rulesets that enable us to maximize the performance of your WordPress sites, as well as more than 30 different software packages and PHP extensions.
With Kinsta, configuration is never a concern. You can quickly and easily launch a new WordPress site from your MyKinsta dashboard, and choose from any of our 37 global data centers.
Kinsta eliminates the need for any caching plugins or add-ons.
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%!
We also understand that uptime is a critical priority, which is why we offer C2 and C3D Google Cloud machines that enable our customers to see major improvements in average response times. In fact, depending on the type of site you’re running, simply switching to Kinsta could result in an immediate speed improvement between 20% and 200%!
If I’m talking with another developer and they want recommendations on WordPress hosting, Kinsta hands down. It’ll save you headaches and all sorts of issues and your clients will be super happy so it’s a no brainer.
The bottom line is that using Kinsta as your managed WordPress hosting provider can save you a lot of time and money, and help you avoid plenty of headaches and frustration.
Expert Support for WordPress
Every website runs into technical issues at some point. Even if you’re a WordPress expert, it’s always great to have a knowledgeable team that has your back and can help you repair your website at a moment’s notice.
With Kinsta, you get access to such a team of WordPress and Linux experts. In addition to multilingual support and resources that are available in 10 languages, we also have an initial ticket response time of under two minutes. If you don’t believe us, just ask some of our clients!
Kinsta support is also quick and convenient, with an average initial ticket response time under two minutes! In fact, in the past two years, more than 97% of Kinsta customers left a chat support session happy or satisfied.
What’s more, you won’t need to repeat the same explanation to agents over and over again. If a different WordPress expert needs to weigh in on your tickets, they’ll be able to catch up nearly instantly.
With Rackspace, you get access to around the clock support via multiple channels. However, Rackspace support is more focused on server management and optimization, instead of applications such as WordPress. If you have WordPress-specific issues, you’ll probably need to troubleshoot them yourself.
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
Rackspace gives you access to a custom dashboard that enables you to manage multiple servers simultaneously, as well as activate new services. However, that dashboard is focused primarily on server management instead of Quality of Life (QoL) functionality.
At Kinsta, our mission is to make managing your WordPress site as simple and straightforward as possible. This is why we custom-built our own user portal, MyKinsta, specifically for WordPress site management:
Let’s take a look at some of the powerful features that make our MyKinsta dashboard so useful:
- One-click staging environments and an option to restore backups to production or staging.
- Quick phpMyAdmin access.
- Premium Amazon Route 53 DNS, to manage your DNS records directly in the dashboard.
- An Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool that logs information about your website’s performance, including PHP processes, database queries, and more.
- Detailed analytics and insights, including bandwidth and visitor data, performance analysis data, CDN usage and insights, and cache HIT and MISS ratio.
- One-click CDN setup.
- A search and replace tool to make performing bulk updates easy.
- One-click PHP version switching, and the option to restart PHP when needed.
- An easy-to-use tool to purge the site cache.
- Simple redirect management.
- The ability to quickly and easily block IP addresses via the IP Deny tool.
- New Relic integration (license required)
- Free one-click Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates and the option to import your own.
- A WordPress debugging tool.
- Simple password protection for your environment, and the option 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 opportunities to improve. We regularly incorporate the requests and feedback we receive to enhance our offerings. In other words, we’re always innovating and exploring new ways to make your website and hosting experience better!
Kinsta is Developer-Friendly
Rackspace’s dedicated and cloud hosting solutions give you full control over your server’s configuration. That means you’re in charge of setting up the software you need, as well as configuring it. For example, if you’re a WordPress developer and you regularly use WP-CLI or version control software, you’d need to set up both manually when using Rackspace.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if you have system administration experience. However, all that effort spent on server management means you’ll probably have less time to focus on building and growing your WordPress website.
Kinsta, on the other hand, simplifies the server configuration and website setup process as much as possible. If you want to, you can leave all the advanced configurations to our team of WordPress experts, and focus entirely on your website.
If you’re a developer instead, you’ll be glad to know that Kinsta provides you with an extensive collection of tools and features to help streamline your workflow efficiency. Some of the developer-friendly features you’ll have access to at Kinsta, which you won’t necessarily get with Rackspace, include:
- WP-CLI, SSH, and Git access included, regardless of your plan.
- Six different types of backups available: automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system-generated, downloadable, and backups sent automatically to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. We also offer one-click backup and restore features.
- 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.
- Default enabled post and page revisions.
- The ability to restore backups to staging as well as production.
- An APM tool that lets you debug your website, thanks to in-depth logs you can access from the MyKinsta dashboard.
Using Kinsta, setting up staging environments is as easy as clicking a few buttons. Once you’re done testing, you can push staging websites to production with that same level of ease. Even better, with Kinsta your staging sites aren’t included in your total disk space usage (only your live sites are).
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.
Rackspace plans do not come with a free APM tool, which makes it very difficult to quickly troubleshoot performance issues on your WordPress site. Since Rackspace offers unmanaged hosting, it’s possible to install a third-party monitoring tool.
Develop Locally with DevKinsta
For developers and agencies, Kinsta offers a simple to use (but 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 with just a few clicks.
DevKinsta is fully integrated with MyKinsta and Kinsta’s hosting platform, which means you can develop locally and push updates directly to a staging environment on Kinsta! Rackspace doesn’t have an integration with a local WordPress development tool, which means there is no way to clone and push WordPress sites for Rackspace customers. If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver.
Safe and Secure
When using Rackspace, you get access to several standard security features. However, a lot of its more advanced features are only available as add-ons.
Kinsta takes both active and passive measures to secure every site hosted with us, regardless of your plan. This includes:
- Monitoring your sites every three minutes for uptime, which equates to 480 daily uptime checks
- Implementing strict software-based restrictions
- Detecting DDoS attacks as they happen, and stopping malicious code from entering our network.
- Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) support
- A Google Cloud Platform firewall
- Automated backups for all plans
- Isolated LXC containers
- Self-healing PHP
- Only support for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP)
At Kinsta, we understand that any downtime can have a dramatic impact on the user experience for your websites. That’s why we provide premium uptime monitoring for every website on our platform. We check all the sites on Kinsta every three minutes, and if we detect any downtime or technical issues, our WordPress experts will jump in right away.
Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
WordPress is far more than just a blogging platform. Many of the world’s biggest online stores run on WordPress and ecommerce plugins such as WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads. This is why Kinsta is optimized for online stores.
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 Rackspace, you don’t get access to ecommerce-specific plans or functionality out of the box. Setting up and configuring an ecommerce website to deliver top performance is all in your hands.
Kinsta Has a Global Presence
Kinsta has a global presence, with 37 data centers (and counting) spanning five continents. Our massive footprint makes it easy for you to pick a different data center for each of your websites. Plus, there are no extra fees or hidden charges!
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
Rackspace offers 14 data center locations around the world only, including options in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and South America.
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.
Free WordPress Migrations
Kinsta makes migrations as quick and painless as possible. In fact, we handle the entire migration process for you, and we make sure that your WordPress website is working perfectly from the start.
All you need to do to request a migration is fill out a form, and you’ll hear back from one of our WordPress experts shortly after. Together, you’ll schedule when you want the migration to occur, and then you can track its status from the MyKinsta dashboard.
We truly cannot say enough about the level of customer service that Kinsta provides – it’s always a great experience, with very personable and helpful support.
With Rackspace, you can opt to pay for migration services, but they don’t come as a part of any cloud servers that you decide to launch through its platform.
Turbocharging Your 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.
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.
Our content delivery architecture was tailor-made for high throughput and low latency. You can enable Kinsta CDN directly from your MyKinsta dashboard.
Rackspace also provides you with access to a global CDN network. However, Rackspace’s CDN solution comes as an extra to its hosting services, and you have to pay for bandwidth expenditures.
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 Rackspace:
| Kinsta | Rackspace | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Plans start at $35/month | Plans vary depending on the server resources that you need. |
| *First Month Free | Yes | No |
| Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days on all plans | None |
| Premium 24×7 Support | All plans | Yes |
| Core Infrastructure | Same across all plans (GCP) | Dedicated servers and public cloud solutions. |
| SSH Access | All plans | All plans |
| Global Data Centers | 37 locations | 14 |
| Bandwidth Limits | No limits (within AUP) | Yes |
| Container Technology | 100% resource isolation on all plans | Yes |
| Free Migrations | All plans | No |
| Staging Environment | All plans | Not specified |
| PHP Versions | PHP 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 | Manual installation |
| Switch PHP Engine | One-click change in dashboard | Manual |
| Free CDN | 200+ PoPs (All regions) | No (7 regions for an additional fee) |
| Built-in Edge Caching | 260+ | Not specified |
| Premium DNS | Amazon R53 | Yes |
| Free SSL Certificates | All plans | Manual installation |
| Uptime Monitoring | All plans | Yes |
| Multisite Support | WP 2 plans and higher | Yes |
| Free APM Tool | Kinsta APM | X |
| IP Geolocation | ✓ | Not specified |
| Local Development Tool | ✓ | X |
| Reverse Proxy Support | ✓ | Not specified |
| Redis Add-on | ✓ | Not specified |
| New Relic (license required) | ✓ | Not specified |
| Multilingual Dashboard | English, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, French, Swedish, Danish, Japan | Not specified |
Best Affiliate Program in the Industry
A lot of Kinsta clients are so satisfied with our services that they go on to recommend the platform to their friends and customers. That word of mouth has helped Kinsta become one of the fastest-growing web hosting providers in the field.
Since we want to reward our users for referring new customers, we’re proud to offer one of the highest-paying affiliate programs in the industry. Whether you run an agency, work as a freelancer, or just use Kinsta to host your own websites, our affiliate program can help you earn truly passive income.
As a Kinsta affiliate partner, you can earn as much as $500 (depending on the plan) for every signup referred to us. Additionally, you’ll receive a 10% monthly recurring commission for the lifetime of the customers referred.
Rackspace also runs its own affiliate program, but payouts are much lower than what Kinsta offers. If you refer a client that pays over $150 within a 12-month period, payouts start at $50.
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 Changelog entries, you’ll see that no other hosting provider releases new options, tools, and integrations at the same rate and frequency.
Although Rackspace offers a broad range of services and customizable servers, it’s not the most WordPress-friendly solution on the market. If you want to unlock your WordPress website’s full potential, switch to Kinsta and try our plans risk-free for 30 days!