WPServeur alternative: benefits of choosing Kinsta
If you're looking for a WPServeur alternative, look no further than Kinsta. We're powered exclusively by Google Cloud Platform and offer a unique approach to managed WordPress hosting that we promise you've never seen before.
- Introduction
- Performance
- WooCommerce
- Developer-friendly
- Features
- Free migrations
- Expert support
- Global presence
- CDN
- Affiliate program
- MyKinsta
WPServeur was one of the first managed WordPress hosting companies in France. They can be attributed to helping pave the way for WordPress in the French market, and are very active in the community. With that being said, there are some significant differences between how WPServeur and Kinsta's premium infrastructure is built and operates, especially when it comes to developer-friendly features.
We regularly encounter WPServeur clients coming to us because they need a host that offers 24/7 support year round. WPServeur only provides limited support on the weekends and within certain windows during the week. For a premium host, this isn’t acceptable. Your website should always be mission-critical, not when it's already gone down. Their lack of critical tools such as SSH and WP-CLI also put massive restrictions on developer’s workflows, productivity, and automation.
People ask us how we're different from WPServeur, and that's the question we'll answer here. Below, we'll dive into how Kinsta is not your typical WordPress host and the benefits we offer.
Kinsta is built for performance and scalability
From day one Kinsta was built for performance and scaling so that your WordPress sites would stay online during traffic surges. Our hosting platform doesn't fall into any of the traditional hosting categories. Our entire infrastructure is built on the Google Cloud Platform and is very different from traditional shared, VPS, or dedicated infrastructure.
Kinsta utilizes LXD managed hosts and orchestrated LXC software containers for each site. What this means is that every WordPress site is housed in its own isolated container, which has all of the software resources required to run it (Linux, Nginx, PHP, MySQL). For example, if PHP crashes on one site, it won't impact any other sites. The resources are 100% private and are not shared between anyone else or even your own sites. We don’t offer shared hosting.
Our scalable infrastructure is ready to handle your sudden surges in traffic and load. With our isolated software container technology, hardware resources are allocated to each site container automatically by our virtual machines on an as-needed basis. The result is a hosting configuration that is secure and private by design while simultaneously allowing server resources to scale up or down as needed based on the demands of the site.
At WPServeur, they don't use container technology. They claim to use a hybrid system (between shared and VPS), but if PHP crashing takes down the whole server, then in reality it's shared hosting. The only way to scale is to upgrade your plan. So if your site gets a sudden peak of traffic, it could buckle under the load. The big risk is that this could then impact others on the same server.
Kinsta is the fastest server configuration we've ever had. It's not even close. Speed is so critical to ecommerce. If you give a shopper even one reason to pause their checkout process, you have lost them. Slow site speeds used to cost us countless customers. Since switching to Kinata, our revenue is up without touching anything else on the site.
If you need something with better performance at WPServeur, they do offer dedicated servers. These start at a little over 950€/month. At Kinsta, once you reach our Enterprise tier, at $600/month, we have some flexibility to work with you and create a customized plan if needed. This can include a dedicated VM, which are available.
Every site is different, and some are simply horribly optimized for large spikes in traffic. That's why we also offer a high-performance dedicated server solution that’s specifically designed to address massive traffic events that you know are going to happen.
Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
Kinsta’s platform is also optimized for ecommerce sites which can be very demanding and generate a lot of cache-bypassing dynamic page loads. We help clients using WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads on a daily basis increase the speed of their online stores. A few examples include:
- Fast server-level page caching in place with rules to ensure proper WooCommerce and EDD functionality.
- By default, certain pages that should never be cached, such as cart, my-account, and checkout, are excluded from caching.
- Users automatically bypass the cache when the “woocommerce_items_in_cart cookie” or “edd_items_in_cart” are detected to ensure a smooth and in-sync checkout process.
Kinsta is the fastest WordPress host you’ll find on the web. Review Signal publishes an annual review, where they do rigorous performance testing of the top hosts in the industry. While some failed tests, we can proudly say that Kinsta stood its ground across the board, and proved to be one of the best-performing companies, five years in a row!
This test detects whether a website is caching the front page and determines how well the caching system is performing.
Kinsta had essentially perfect LoadStorm and Blitz tests. They also had no flaws in any other tests. I’m at a loss for words to praise their performance.
Kinsta is developer-friendly
Many of us at Kinsta are developers ourselves, that’s why from day one we’ve built our tools and dashboard with WordPress developers in mind. We provide the following features and accessibility to make your workflow more efficient, not all of which are available at WPServeur:
- SSH access, Git, and WP-CLI on all plans from Starter to Enterprise.
- We allow you to use custom setups like Bedrock and Trellis, as well as starter themes such as Sage. This is not possible at WPServeur due to the lack of SSH access.
- We have one-click staging environments which allow you to easily push changes from staging to production as well as a site cloning feature. WPServeur has a cloning feature, but they don't offer backups for it, and there is no way to add multiple domains or restart PHP if needed.
- Kinsta has 6 different types of backups. Included with every plan are automatic daily backups which are stored for 14 days. You can manually download a backup, create a restore point, and automatic system backups are generated when you perform important tasks. For those with constantly changing data, we also offer hourly backup add-ons (every one hour, every 6 hours). WPServeur only has daily and downloadable backups.
- We leave post and page revisions enabled by default. While we recommend limiting or disabling these, we believe this should be your choice. WPServeur limits you to only 3.
- No limits that get in the way of your development workflow. WPServeur, for example, limits the number of files which can be uploaded and viewed in a single directory via FTP to 10,000. This causes headaches for many users as they will be missing files when trying to download manual backups or migrating to another service.
- Loading your site over a reverse proxy is possible, and we have many clients who do so.
- You can add your own New Relic Application Performance Monitoring (APM) API key (license required) in our MyKinsta dashboard. Our support team can also enable this for you temporarily to help troubleshoot performance-related issues on your WordPress site.
Feature comparison overview
Here is a quick overview of some of the key differences between Kinsta and WPServeur.
Kinsta only supports encrypted SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) and SSH connections (no FTP) when accessing your WordPress sites directly. This ensures that no clear text passwords or file data is ever transferred. WPServeur on the other hand allows FTP connections and doesn't even offer SFTP.
Free migrations
All of our plans include one or more free migrations. After signing up you’ll be able to request a hands-off migration, handled by our team, from our MyKinsta dashboard. WPServeur doesn’t offer free migrations but instead consists of a do-it-yourself plugin. The issue with this method is that it doesn’t bring over data or images stored outside of the /wp-content/ directory. Redirects also don’t get moved, which are critical to prevent SEO disasters. For larger and more complex sites this quickly results in data loss or could even fail entirely if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Unless you’re a developer with time to burn, it’s much safer to let our expert migration team take care of everything for you. We don't use plugins. Moving your site to Kinsta usually won’t incur any downtime and we’ll help you inspect your migrated site prior to going live.
Expert Support
We don’t have level 1 or level 2 support reps. Our entire support team is made up of WordPress developers and Linux hosting engineers many of whom have managed their own servers, created themes and plugins, and contributed back to core. This ensures you’ll receive expert advice from someone who actively uses and develops with WordPress. Every Kinsta client gets to chat with the same team members that support our large enterprise and Fortune 500 companies. In fact, we hire less than 1% of applicants who apply. You won’t find better support anywhere else!
Kinsta provides 24/7 support, 365 days a year in English. Our average ticket response time in Q3 2019 was 1 minute and 19 seconds! Support in French is currently provided between 7 am and 3 pm. Coverage of full-time French support will be available soon. WPServeur only offers support from Monday to Saturday, between 9 am and 6PM. And no support on national holidays.
Kinsta also monitors your sites' uptime every minute which means that our slowest response time is 5 minutes to any downtime that may occur. Our staff is alerted instantly and quite often we start resolving the issue before you even contact us. And yes, this includes evenings, weekend, and holidays!
WPServeur does offer phone support, while we don't. We have found that keeping support solely online allows us to better help you troubleshoot your website in a speedy and more efficient manner, as our engineers are able to focus all of their energy on solving your support concerns with the fewest number of distractions and interruptions possible. This, in turn, means that your support requests are ultimately resolved faster. We believe it wouldn’t be possible to provide the same effective assistance over the phone.
Kinsta has a global presence
Kinsta is exclusively powered by the Google Cloud Platform and offers 32 data centers around the globe (6 across Europe), extending across five continents. At Kinsta all data centers are available across all plans (with no extra or hidden charges), starting from as low as $35/mo! You can also choose a different data center of each of your sites. Current locations:
- Changhua County, Taiwan (asia-east1)
- Hong Kong (asia-east2)
- Tokyo, Japan (asia-northeast1)
- Osaka, Japan (asia-northeast2)
- Seoul, South Korea (asia-northeast3)
- Mumbai, India (asia-south1)
- Delhi, India (asia-south2)
- Jurong West, Singapore (asia-southeast1)
- Jakarta, Indonesia (asia-southeast2)
- Sydney, Australia (australia-southeast1)
- Melbourne, Australia (australia-southeast2)
- Warsaw, Poland (europe-central2)
- Hamina, Finland (europe-north1)
- St. Ghislain, Belgium (europe-west1)
- London, United Kingdom (europe-west2)
- Frankfurt, Germany (europe-west3)
- Eemshaven, Netherlands (europe-west4)
- Zurich, Switzerland (europe-west6)
- Montréal, Canada (northamerica-northeast1)
- Toronto, Canada (northamerica-northeast2)
- São Paulo, Brazil (southamerica-east1)
- Santiago, Chile (southamerica-west1)
- Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA (us-central1)
- Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA (us-east1)
- Ashburn, Virginia, USA (us-east4)
- The Dalles, Oregon, USA (us-west1)
- Los Angeles, California, USA (us-west2)
- Salt Lake City, Utah, USA (us-west3)
- Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (us-west4)
- Milan, Italy (europe-west8)
- Paris, France (europe-west9)
- Madrid, Spain (europe-southwest1)
WPServeur offers only one data center in France.
Everything at Kinsta is interconnected over the highly reliable Google Cloud Platform premium tier network. This is designed to minimize distance and hops, resulting in faster and more secure global transport of your data. Beware, some hosting providers might opt for Google’s “standard tier” network service without telling you to cut costs, but we believe in only utilizing the best here at Kinsta.
Quite impressed what @googlecloud and @kinsta can pull of for #WordPress hosting! #DevOps #Cloud #WPDev #webdevelopment pic.twitter.com/Cr7UMaHdpH
— Neuralab (@Neuralab) July 22, 2017
@TheSportReview's new @Googlecloud based @kinsta environment handled the post-match @ManUtd v @ChelseaFC traffic spike in style 👌⚽ pic.twitter.com/kJewykSqaV
— Martin Caparrotta (@MartinCap) April 16, 2017
Choosing a location near you and your visitors will result in faster SFTP download and upload speeds, making file transfers quick and painless. You're back-end WordPress dashboard will also feel more snappy and responsive, especially when uploading files to the media library.
Turbocharging your content delivery
Kinsta cares about the performance of your site, not just from our data center, but at every point around the globe. That’s why we partnered up with KeyCDN, an HTTP/2 and IPv6-enabled content delivery network (CDN), and include free bandwidth across all of our plans.
KeyCDN’s content delivery architecture was built from the ground up with a focus on high-performance and designed for high throughput and low latency. When enabled, your content will be delivered and cached from their 200 POPs around the globe, this includes all regions: America, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia!
WPServeur also uses KeyCDN as their CDN partner. However, at Kinsta you can enable the CDN with a single click (no plugins required). At WPServeur, you have to open a support ticket to enable the CDN.
Best affiliate program in the industry
Kinsta has become one of the fastest growing managed WordPress hosts thanks in part to the many happy customers helping to spread the word. Whether you're an agency, freelancer, or blogger, Kinsta is proud to offer true profit sharing with one of the highest paying affiliate programs in the hosting industry.
You earn $50 to $500 after every signup based on the type of plan you refer. On top of that, you get a 10% monthly recurring commission for the lifetime of the customer you referred, enabling you to build passive income.
We never settle for anything less than perfection at Kinsta. That's why we built our WordPress hosting affiliate dashboard from the ground up, meaning you don't have to mess with another confusing and cluttered third-party platform. This allows our developers to easily build in new features as needed to help you earn even more.
WPServeur also has an affiliate program. They offer 20% of a customer's first monthly payment and a recurring 10% for the lifetime of the customer. This is managed through a popular WordPress affiliate plugin they use on their website.
MyKinsta - A dashboard that’s better than the competition
We weren't satisfied with any of the existing control panel solutions on the market, so we built our own from the ground up specifically for WordPress website management.
In addition to everyday features which can be found in both our dashboard and at WPServeur, here are a few features unique to MyKinsta:
- Easily switch between multiple PHP engines (we offer PHP 5.6, 7, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3).
- Manage all of your DNS records (premium DNS with Amazon Route 53 is included) from one dashboard.
- Use our search and replace tool to make bulk updates on your site - for example, change HTTP URLs to HTTPS or update old shortcodes.
- Easily block a spammer, hacker, or bot's IP address with our IP Deny tool.
- Add your SSH keys. This provides a more secure way of logging into your server and eliminates the need for a password.
- Detailed analytics including bandwidth and visitor data, CDN usage and insights, cache HIT and MISS ratio, and performance analysis data.
- MyKinsta is available in 10 languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Swedish, and Danish!
Many MyKinsta features have come directly from our client’s feedback. We actively listen to all requests, and if something can help make everyone’s lives easier and more productive, you can count on us looking into it.
Want to learn more about MyKinsta? Check out our full-featured free demo here!
Join others making the switch to Kinsta
Kinsta will never stop innovating and providing clients with the latest and greatest technology. If you don’t believe us, check out our feature updates. We push out new integrations, tools, and features at a rate faster than anyone in the industry!
We stand behind our service and want you to be happy with your hosting. We are proud to offer a 30-day money-back guarantee and no long-term contracts. Try out Kinsta risk-free for 30 days!