WPX Hosting Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta

If you’re looking for an alternative to WPX Hosting, you’ve come to the right place. Powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform, Kinsta offers a unique and powerful solution for managed WordPress hosting. With affordable plans and best-in-class technology, our speed-optimized platform is perfect for sites of all sizes and scales. Let’s take a look at the benefits of choosing Kinsta as your hosting provider!

Introduction

Although WPX Hosting shares some similarities with Kinsta, as a WordPress-specific managed hosting provider, it isn’t backed by the same innovative technologies and solutions that allow us to deliver unparalleled speed, performance, security and site management tools to customers. 

WPX Hosting is geared primarily toward bloggers and small publishers. Therefore, it’s not a suitable option for enterprises or dynamic websites, such as WooCommerce stores and membership sites. At Kinsta, we hear every day from frustrated clients looking for a WPX Hosting alternative, who want to hear what makes Kinsta unique.

That’s what we’ll cover here. We’ll explain what makes Kinsta so different from other providers such as WPX Hosting, and explore the many benefits of using us as your managed WordPress host.

How Kinsta Compares to WPX Hosting in a Nutshell

Before we dive into the specifics of Kinsta vs WPX Hosting, we first want to provide a brief breakdown of the key differences.

Kinsta is the first host to be powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Leveraging Google’s premium-tier network is one of the many ways we’re able to maximize the speed, security, and performance of each site hosted with us.
We’re also the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2, the world’s leading software review and comparison site:

Enjoy a 20% Faster Website Simply by Moving From WPX Hosting 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 WPX Hosting 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!

Some additional differences between Kinsta vs WPX Hosting include:

  • Kinsta is a leading WordPress hosting provider, as well as the recommended managed WordPress host by Google Cloud. We offer all-in-one solutions for managing your website with simple, affordable plans. With over 10 options, we make it easy to find one that meets your specific needs, from Starter to Enterprise. WPX Hosting only has three plans, all geared towards small publishers. It’s not equipped to handle dynamic and enterprise-level sites.
  • Kinsta uses Google Cloud’s premium global tier network and Google’s latest generation of virtual machines (C3D), which are the most expensive and fastest machines. Both are available for all customers, starting at only $35 per month. This kind of powerful and reliable cloud computing isn’t accessible with WPX Hosting’s infrastructure.
  • Kinsta has a massive global presence that consists of 37 data centers (and counting) worldwide. WPX Hosting only has three data center locations.
  • Kinsta’s platform, tools, and features are all built with developers in mind, and give you unrestricted access to your site’s files (regardless of your plan). Unlike WPX Hosting, Kinsta gives you access to WP-CLI, SSH, and Git, as well as support for Nginx reverse proxy.
  • Kinsta plans allow for New Relic integration (license required), as well as support for Redis and SSD add-ons. WPX Hosting doesn’t offer support for New Relic or Redis. 
  • Kinsta plans include everything you need to maximize site performance and security, including a premium DNS, daily 480 times uptime monitoring, IP Geolocation, and a secure Cloudflare firewall with free DDoS protection. While WPX Hosting offers standard security features such as malware scanning and DDoS protection, it doesn’t offer much beyond that for safeguarding your site and server.
  • Kinsta includes a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) on all plans. WPX Hosting’s WPX CloudCDN has only 25 end-point locations, as compared to Kinsta’s 34.
  • Kinsta is SOC2 compliant, which provides independent proof that we have established security procedures and adhered to those procedures over time. WPX Hosting is not SOC2 compliant. See Kinsta’s Trust Report for additional information.
  • Kinsta offers six different types of backups with every plan, including automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system generated, downloadable, and automatic external backups sent to your Amazon S3 or Google Cloud storage. You’ll also get automatic weekly database optimizations. WPX Hosting offers just two types of backups. 
  • Kinsta provides free, one-click staging environments that don’t count towards your total disk space. WPX Hosting staging environments take up a ‘slot’ in the total sites included with your plan. 
  • Kinsta offers free, human-performed migrations. Our superior support team gives you access to over 120 WordPress experts at your fingertips. Unlike WPX, we also offer multilingual 24/7 support.
  • All Kinsta plans come with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, as compared to WPX’s 99.5% guarantee. 
  • Kinsta’s custom MyKinsta dashboard comes with a plethora of tools and one-click features, including a PHP switcher, debugging tool, ionCube loader, and more.
  • Kinsta’s platform is optimized for WooCommerce. WPX doesn’t offer WooCommerce-specific hosting, nor does it provide the advanced caching mechanisms needed to maximize the speed and performance of online stores.

Kinsta is Built for Performance and Scalability

When you need to keep your site fast and secure, Kinsta’s got you covered. We’re not like typical managed WordPress hosts such as WPX Hosting. Our unique, innovative, custom-built platform is optimized to deliver incredible speed, performance, and scalability, no matter whether you have a personal blog or an enterprise site. 

This is because we only use the latest and fastest technologies for our tech stack. In addition to Google Cloud Platform’s word-class architecture, we also use isolated container technology. Our orchestrated LXC software containers and LXD managed hosts are used for each site hosted with us, and include all the software resources required to run it, including Linux, Nginx, PHP, and MySQL. 

We also have more than 30 different software packages and PHP extensions, custom-compiled Linux packages, and Nginx rulesets to maximize WordPress site performance. Built on Google Compute Engine servers, our scalable infrastructure is capable of handling sudden spikes in traffic, and makes it easy for you to upgrade or downgrade with ease. 

Another advantage that makes Kinsta superior to WPX hosting is 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, doesn’t require a separate plugin, and cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!

I started an online media business and it was imperative that my website was both fast and secure. Additionally, whilst the business is small at present I wanted the ability to scale for when it grows. I did my research and after originally going with another host who completely screwed up the transfer from my domain registrar I decided to give Kinsta a chance.

Kinsta facilitated the transfer on my behalf as part of the monthly fee – no need for plugins or a guided tour, it was done manually on my behalf.

My website is insanely fast – just like a professional website should be.

Uncover your WordPress Site’s Performance Bottlenecks.

Our experts will run a free performance audit of your website and share the results within 24 hours.

MyKinsta: A Custom-Built Dashboard for Powerful Site Management

At Kinsta, managing your WordPress site couldn’t get any easier. We custom-built our own user portal, the MyKinsta dashboard, specifically for WordPress site management:

MyKinsta is Kinsta's fully custom dashboard for managing WordPress sites.
The MyKinsta dashboard.

WPX Hosting also has a custom dashboard. However, it’s not as user-friendly or feature-rich as ours. Let’s take a look at some of the powerful features that make our MyKinsta dashboard so beneficial, some of which aren’t included with WPX Hosting plans:

  • 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. 
  • 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 such as bandwidth and visitor data, CDN usage and insights, performance analysis data, and cache HIT and MISS ratio. 
  • Free, one-click CDN setup. 
  • A WordPress debugging tool.
  • A search and replace tool to perform bulk updates with ease.
  • One-click PHP version switching, as well as the option to restart PHP when needed.
  • Automatic MySQL database optimizations.
  • A dashboard tool to purge the site cache.
  • A one-click ionCube enabler
  • Free, one-click Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, and the option to import your own. 
  • Simple password protection for your environment, with the option to add your SSH keys to the dashboard to strengthen security. 
  • A multilingual dashboard that’s available in 10 languages: English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch.

We value our clients’ feedback and are always striving to be better. This is why we regularly seek out opportunities to improve, and consider the requests and feedback we get from clients to enhance our offerings. If something can make your site or hosting experience even better, we want to hear about it!

Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads

When you’re running an ecommerce site, you need a web host capable of handling the dynamic, unique challenges and demands of online stores. That is exactly what Kinsta is built to do. 

We understand that the speed of your ecommerce site is a critical priority. This is why, unlike WPX Hosting, we optimized our platform with advanced memory caching to deliver lighting-fast performance and speed for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads sites.

There are a variety of ways we do this, which include:

  • Excluding pages that shouldn’t be cached by default, such as ‘my account’, checkout, and cart pages.
  • Bypassing the cache automatically for users when “edit_items_in_cart” or “woocommerce_items_in_cart cookie” are detected, to ensure a quick, smooth, and seamless checkout.
  • Using server-level page caching and implementing specific rules to allow EDD and WooCommerce functionality. 

Although WPX Hosting positions itself as a CDN host optimized for speed and performance, it does not offer WooCommerce-specific hosting

Each year, Review Signal performs an annual performance testing review on some of the most popular hosts. For five consecutive years, Kinsta has earned “top tier” performance!

In the 2019 round of benchmark reviews, WPX Hosting’s Elite plan ($99/month) was tested. We’ll be comparing that below with our Kinsta Business plan ($115/month).

Web Performance Benchmarks (Business Plans)

To perform these benchmark tests, Review Signal created identical WordPress dummy websites with the same plugins installed (the exception being any tools required for each provider’s specific caching mechanisms).

The WebPageTest.org test measured the overall loading time (in seconds) in 11 different geographical locations. Let’s take a look at the results:

KinstaWPX Hosting
Dulles0.5220.434
Denver1.0190.839
Los Angeles0.7890.807
London0.9830.379
Frankfurt1.0491.282
Mauritius2.2572.862
Singapore1.6961.638
Mumbai2.0344.081
Tokyo1.2281.347
Sydney1.6322.3
São Paulo1.3341.865

As you can see, Kinsta outperformed WPX Hosting in 7 out of these 11 tests.

UptimeRobot and StatusCake were used to perform uptime tests. Both providers had a perfect uptime:

KinstaWPX Hosting
Uptime Robot100%100%
StatusCake100%100%

During the Load Impact test, which was used to assess the caching system’s performance on each site, Kinsta didn’t experienced any errors:

KinstaWPX Hosting
Requests602,521847,119
Errors02
Data Transferred (GB)33.4946.84
Peak Average Load Time (seconds)608242
Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)571785
Peak Average Requests/Sec1,2201,690

The Load Storm tests were used to simulate real users visiting each site:

KinstaWPX Hosting
Total Requests538,858585,724
Total Errors105637
Peak RPS408.67534.75
Average RPS297.70325.40
Peak Response Time (ms)2,37215,102
Average Response Time (ms)440221

Kinsta showed faster response times and significantly fewer errors when compared to WPX Hosting.

Screenshots showing developer friendly MyKinsta features

Kinsta is Developer-Friendly

At Kinsta, many of us are developers. This is why from day one we built our platform and tools with WordPress developers in mind

As your managed WordPress host, we provide you with an array of developer-friendly tools and features to streamline your workflow efficiency. Some of the features you’ll have access to at Kinsta, which you wouldn’t necessarily get with WPX Hosting, include:

  • The option to load your site over reverse proxy. 
  • Unrestricted access to your site’s critical files. 
  • One-click staging environments for all plans.
  • Git, WP-CLI, and SSH access included, regardless of your plan. 
  • Six different types of backups available: automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system generated, downloadable, and automatic external backups sent to your Amazon S3 or Google Cloud storage. Unlike WPX Hosting, backups don’t count as part of your total disk space usage.
  • The ability to restore backups to staging as well as production, with a one-click backup restoration feature directly in the MyKinsta dashboard. 
  • A Redis add-on for quicker database performance.
  • The option to use custom setups like 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.
  • Default enabled post and page revisions.

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.

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

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.

Screenshot of the DevKinsta interface
Develop locally and push to Kinsta with DevKinsta.

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! WPX Hosting doesn’t have an integration with a local WordPress development tool, which means there is no way to clone and push WordPress sites for their customers. If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver.

Kinsta Has a Global Presence

Another advantage of using Kinsta vs WPX Hosting as your managed WordPress provider is our massive global footprint. We have 37 data centers (and counting) around the globe, which span five continents.

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

Our many locations make it easy for you to pick a different server option for each of your WordPress sites. Plus, there are no hidden fees or extra charges!

This is a much different experience than you could expect with WPX Hosting. That provider only offers three data center locations, which are in Chicago, London, and Sydney.

Feature Comparison Overview

At this point, we want to take a moment to look at some of the biggest differences between Kinsta and WPX Hosting:

KinstaWPX Hosting
PricingPlans start at $35/monthPlans start at $24.99/month
Money-Back Guarantee30 days on all plans30 days on all plans
Plan Tiers10 (not including custom)3
Premium 24×7 SupportAll plansAll plans
Core InfrastructureSame across all plans (GCP)Same across all plans
SSH AccessAll plansX
Global Data Centers37 locations3
WooCommerce-optimized platformX
Membership-optimized platformX
Bandwidth LimitsNo limits (within AUP)100 GB
Container Technology100% resource allocation on all plansNot specified
Free Expert MigrationsAll plansAll plans
PHP VersionsPHP 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3PHP 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3
Cloudflare FirewallX
Free CDN34 (All regions)25
Built-in Edge CachingNot specified
Free Premium DNSAmazon R53X
Free DDoS ProtectionX
Free SSL CertificatesAll plansAll plans
Free APM ToolKinsta APMNot specified
Uptime MonitoringAll plansX
Multisite SupportPro plans and higher
IP GeolocationX
Reverse Proxy SupportX
Redis Add-onX
New Relic (license required)X
Multilingual DashboardEnglish, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, French, Swedish, Danish, JapanNot specified

Kinsta is Safe and Secure

While WPX Hosting offers malware scanning and removal with its plans, its security features are limited. At Kinsta, we make server and site security a mission-critical priority, regardless of your plan.

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.

We take both active and passive measures to safeguard you against malicious intent. This includes:

  • Monitoring your sites every three minutes for uptime, 480 times every day
  • Isolated LXC containers
  • Strict software-based restrictions
  • Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) 
  • Cloudflare firewall with free DDoS protection
  • Automated backups 
  • Self-healing PHP
  • Support only for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP, unlike WPX Hosting)

We include premium uptime monitoring for all of your WordPress sites via our in-house developed monitoring system. Kinsta plans also include a 100% hack-fix guarantee. This means that in the rare event something happens to your site, we’ll fix it free of charge.

Kinsta has allowed us to offer a bulletproof service to our top tier clients and keep them happy. Especially those who have traffic spikes with sudden server demand.

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.

Get static site hosting for free

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

Whether you want to move one website or a hundred sites, Kinsta will provide a hassle-free migration process. Our skilled WordPress experts handle the entire migration process for you, eliminating the need for you to deal with complex technology or risk losing critical data.

If you’re interested in moving your site to managed WordPress hosting, we offer unlimited free migrations from WPX Hosting! 

To get started, simply complete our site migration request form, and a member from our team will reach out to schedule a time. You can also track the migration’s status directly from your 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.

Turbocharging Your Content Delivery with Kinsta CDN

Kinsta includes a free CDN with every plan, which you can easily enable for your sites from the MyKinsta dashboard. Unlike WPX Hosting, all of our plans also include free bandwidth.

KinstaCDN is a free HTTP/3-enabled Content Delivery Network (CDN). Our content delivery architecture is optimized for high throughput and low latency.

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.

WPX Hosting uses its own WPX Cloud CDN, which offers fewer end-point locations. There are also bandwidth limitations that, if exceeded, put you at risk of suspension.

Expert Support for WordPress

At Kinsta, our customers come first. No problem is too big or too small for our highly-skilled support engineers and WordPress experts. We’re always here to help with 24/7 premium support, regardless of your plan. 

No matter what time of day it is or where you are in the world, you’ll be able to chat with our knowledgeable support team via Intercom, a unified customer messaging platform. All communications are logged, so our engineers are always up-to-date on your issue, you and won’t ever need you to repeat yourself to multiple agents.

Kinsta’s WordPress hosting support conversation ratings chart.
Kinsta’s WordPress hosting support conversation ratings chart.

In addition to being knowledgeable and convenient, our support is also incredibly quick. We have an average initial ticket response time of under two minutes! We also offer multilingual support, including a knowledge base with resources available in 10 languages.

The free migration I received was the first time a host migrated a site and got all the little details correct, not forgetting things, etc. and they were incredibly friendly and patient.

We also monitor websites every three minutes for uptime. So if there’s ever an issue with your site, we’ll get in touch with you ASAP. With WPX Hosting, if you experience a problem, you’ll have to submit a ticket to its support team.

Best Affiliate Program in the Industry

Kinsta always strives to exceed our clients’ expectations. Our happy customers are eager to spread the word about our managed WordPress hosting solutions, which has helped us become one of the fastest-growing hosts in the industry. 

It’s also one of the reasons we provide one of the highest-paying affiliate programs you can find. Our affiliate program gives you the opportunity to share in our profits and earn a passive income!

As a Kinsta affiliate partner, you can earn as much as $500 for every signup you refer to us, depending on the plan. Plus, you’ll receive a 10% monthly recurring commission for the lifetime of the referred customer. Kinsta customers have an impressively low churn rate, so it’s a powerful way to earn a passive income.

We always aim to make things simple and straightforward for our affiliates. This is why we use a custom WordPress hosting affiliate dashboard, to prevent you from having to deal with complex third-party platforms. 

WPX Hosting also has an affiliate program. However, the tiers and commission structure can be confusing, so it’s difficult to know upfront how much you’d be able to make.

Join Others Making the Switch to Kinsta

We take innovation seriously, and are proud to offer the fastest and latest technology possible. This is why we’re always evolving and leveraging the best solutions available. If you check out our many feature updates, you’ll see that no other hosting provider releases new tools, features, and integrations at the rate we do. 

We are confident in our solutions, and want you to be completely satisfied with your hosting. This is why we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you’re ready to make the move away from WPX Hosting and switch to a powerful managed hosting provider, try out Kinsta risk-free for 30 days!