WordPress VIP Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta

How Kinsta Compares to WordPress VIP in a Nutshell

Before we start talking about the different technology powering Kinsta and WordPress VIP respectively, let’s take a look at the main differences between these services.

WordPress VIP is not an open platform. If you want to sign up for it, you have to fill out an application and wait for someone from its team to reach out to you. 

Although this enables WordPress VIP to provide custom plans to each customer, it also means you have no way of knowing how much hosting might cost you at a glance. This enterprise-focused approach only works if you’re a big company that wants to rely entirely on a third-party hosting service to handle everything involving development and optimization. 

With WordPress VIP, every line of code that you add to your website gets scanned before it goes live, to ensure that it meets their standards and that updates are safe. Unfortunately, this means you sacrifice a lot of freedom for the sake of optimization. Moreover, some popular and frequently-used plugins and themes are not compatible with this platform’s infrastructure, which means you won’t be able to use them.

Kinsta also offers hosting solutions geared towards enterprise-level customers that are both performance-oriented and user-friendly. In fact, we’re the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2, with many of our awards stemming from ease of use:

Enjoy a 20% Faster Website Simply by Moving From WordPress VIP 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 fastest C2 and C3D VMs and Google Cloud servers
• 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 WordPress VIP 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!

At Kinsta, we allow customers to have full control over their WordPress projects. Simultaneously, we work in the background to ensure that you get the best possible performance, website monitoring, and support system. 

If you run into problems, we can jump in at a moment’s notice to help you solve them. We also don’t limit your access to critical components or features, such as your database or error logs.

Some additional differences between Kinsta vs WordPress VIP include:

• Kinsta’s stack works for businesses of all sizes, whether you have a tech background or not. WordPress VIP is primarily geared towards enterprises with in-house development teams.
• Kinsta’s plans highlight everything that’s included in detail. With WordPress VIP, you’re not able to get full details about the potential costs upfront..
• Kinsta has 37 data centers across the globe. WordPress VIP offers 28 data centers worldwide.
• All sites on Kinsta are protected by our free Cloudflare integration. In addition to an enterprise-level firewall that’s tailored for WordPress, Kinsta customers also benefit from free DDoS protection and HTTP/3 support.
• 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. WordPress VIP offers an hourly backup subscription service through VaultPress.
• All of our plans include a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) and free premium Domain Name System (DNS). WordPress VIP offers free CDN integration, but no DNS.
• Kinsta support, composed of WordPress experts and Linux engineers, is available 24/7 for every customer regardless of their plan. WordPress VIP relies on Zendesk to provide ticketing support, but you pay extra for each support ‘seat’ or account that can submit requests.
• Kinsta monitors your website for uptime every three minutes, 480 times a day.
• Kinsta provides free, human-performed migrations with all of our plans. WordPress VIP can also perform migrations for you, but you’ll be asked to prepare files for them and commit your plugins and themes to GitHub before moving you to its platform.
• All Kinsta customers can take advantage of the custom-built, WordPress-specific and intuitive MyKinsta dashboard. WordPress VIP uses its own custom platform called VIP Dashboard.
• On-click staging environment functionality is available with all Kinsta plans. WordPress VIP doesn’t offer staging functionality. Instead, you push every update to a GitHub repository and wait for its team to review the code before it goes live.
• Kinsta offers simple, straightforward hosting plans and packages, which can be easily integrated with add-on solutions. WordPress VIP doesn’t offer public information about pricing, except that plans start at $5,000 per month. However, it deals with each customer on a case-by-case basis.
• Kinsta has a 30-day money-back guarantee, while WordPress VIP does not. 
• Kinsta and MyKinsta seamlessly integrate with local development tools like  DevKinsta.
• Kinsta provides multilingual support.
• Kinsta provides an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee on all plans.
• We offer a very popular affiliate program.

MyKinsta: A Custom-Built Dashboard for Powerful Site Management

WordPress VIP offers a custom dashboard for simple project management. While it gives you access to several configuration settings, you don’t get full entry into your site’s back end.

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, with WordPress developers and enthusiasts in mind:

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. WordPress VIP doesn’t offer staging functionality, as every update goes through your GitHub repository.
• Quick phpMyAdmin access.
• Premium Amazon Route 53 DNS, to manage your DNS records directly in the dashboard. To set up a DNS with WordPress VIP, you must contact support.
• A built-in Cloudflare integration with optimized settings to secure and boost the performance of your site without the need for a separate Cloudflare subscription.
• 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.
• Access to Kinsta APM.
• A search and replace tool to make performing bulk updates easy.
• One-click PHP version switching, and the option to restart PHP when needed. This feature isn’t available with WordPress VIP.
• A dashboard tool to purge the site’s cache. Flushing the cache with WordPress VIP requires a VIP-CLI setup.
• Simple redirect management.
• The ability to quickly block IP addresses via the IP Deny tool.
• New Relic integration (license required)
• Unlike WordPress.com, Kinsta offers automatic Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard domain support, and the option to import your own. 
• A WordPress debugging tool.
• Full integration with DevKinsta, Kinsta’s local development tool
• Simple password protection for your environment, and the option to strengthen login security by adding your SSH keys to the dashboard. 
• 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. We’re always looking for opportunities to improve, and we regularly incorporate the requests and feedback we receive to enhance our offerings. If you have a suggestion for how to make our solutions better, we want to hear about it!

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.

WordPress VIP plans come with free access to New Relic APM, but their hosting plans start at $2,000/month.

Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads

We appreciate that ecommerce is vital for many businesses, and that these websites come with particularly challenging and complicated demands. This is why the Kinsta platform is optimized for ecommerce stores.

We take care of caching for you at the server level, to deliver fast page loading times. Plus, our solution is configured to work out of the box for WordPress, WooCommerce, and Easy Digital Download sites. 

To optimize the speed and performance of your online store, we offer automatic purging of cache and archive pages. We also:

• Exclude ‘My Account’, checkout, cart, and other pages that shouldn’t be cached
• Ensure a smooth checkout process by automatically bypassing the cache for users when “woocommerce_items_in_cart” or “edit_items_in_cart” are detected
• Put specific rules in place to allow EDD and WooCommerce functionality during server-level page caching

With WordPress VIP, you also get access to enterprise ecommerce solutions through its WooCommerce Paid Services add-on.

Safe and Secure

At Kinsta, we take both active and passive measures to safeguard your site, including:

• Monitoring your sites every three minutes for uptime, equaling 480 times a day
• Implementing strict software-based restrictions
• Free Cloudflare integration with a secure firewall and 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)

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, meaning up to 480 times a day.

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.

On the off-chance that something were to happen to your site, we offer a free 100% hack-fix guarantee.  We’ll also get in touch with you immediately to discuss next steps.

With WordPress VIP, security is largely out of your hands, as its team reviews all of your site’s code as well as the plugins and themes that you use. However, the service does include basic security features, primarily through Jetpack.

Expert Support for WordPress

Kinsta gives you full access to your website’s backend using the MyKinsta dashboard. However, if you need help troubleshooting any issue, we offer 24/7 premium support for each of our plans. Our WordPress experts are always ready to provide quick, concise answers to your questions and concerns. 

In addition to multilingual support and resources that are available in over 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!

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:

We use the Intercom customer messaging platform to ensure that our support is quick and convenient. All communications are logged, so you won’t ever need to repeat yourself to multiple support agents. 

WordPress VIP offers 24/7 support as well through the Zendesk platform. However, you have to pay for each account that you want to be able to submit support requests. Also, if you run into errors with your website, you have to wait for support to address them, rather than having the option to troubleshoot them yourself.

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

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.

WordPress VIP offers a custom CDN solution on all plans, but the website offers limited information beyond that.

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 utilize the most innovative solutions available. When you check out our many Changelog entries, you can see that no other hosting provider releases the amount of new features, tools, and integrations at the same rate and frequency that we do. 

We are proud of our solutions, and we want you to be completely satisfied with your hosting. This is why, unlike WordPress VIP, we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you’re ready to make the move to Kinsta, you can try our plans risk-free for 30 days!