In light of some recent inaccurate comparisons between WPX and Kinsta that ‘accidentally’ omitted quite a few facts, I decided to set the record a little straighter with this comparison below (especially tests that don’t show the test URLs for independent verification: sneaky!).
In terms of similarity, both Kinsta and WPX began around 2013, Kinsta in Hungary and WPX in Bulgaria (like SiteGround, also headquartered here in Sofia).
Both Kinsta and WPX chose to support WordPress as a Web host, to the exclusion of any other platform, more specifically ‘Managed WordPress Hosting‘.
We both also rejected cPanel and built our user admin panels (we will have an all-new updated one in 2021).
What WPX did do differently than Kinsta?
However, that’s where we went in different directions.
1. Kinsta chose to go for the Enterprise market with much higher pricing and WPX went for the solopreneur, small online business owner, and/or blogger with medium-level pricing.
Kinsta also chose to use Google Cloud for their hosting infrastructure whereas we at WPX own all our servers, running on Litespeed, arguably the fastest current server platform for WordPress. We did that for two main reasons:
1. We didn’t want to be stuck with the constraints and inflexibility of using somebody else’s hardware platform – something that would hugely stifle innovation at WPX, and,
2. From my own experience across different Google services, Google is horrible at customer support and service and if WPX were using Google Cloud for hosting infrastructure, WPX would be the customer of Google. Intolerable in my view.
Plus, just like Amazon AWS’s recent downtime and any infrastructure provider, Google also had recent uptime issues that affected a lot of online businesses:
Google is also the company that brought you Google Glass, Google Buzz, Google Wave, Google+ and Orkut etc. In short, Google may be big and have resources but fails just like any other big or small company.
Kinsta may have been the first host to adopt Google Cloud for its hosting infrastructure but now WP Engine and SiteGround also offer that.
But What About Speed?
In the last 2 independent speed & support tests by respected SEO blogger Matthew Woodward, Kinsta couldn’t beat WPX’s average page loading times – possible because of our ability to independently innovate such as being the only host to build and continually optimize our own 26-endpoint CDN network, free to all WPX customers:
In Kevin Ohashi’s 2020 independent WordPress Performance testing for his site at ReviewSignal.com, Kinsta did not compete while WPX was awarded the highest rank of ‘Top Tier’ host across all 3 entered categories, same in 2019:
And What About Price and Value For Money?
To host 1 website on Kinsta costs $30 a month.
To host 5 websites on WPX costs $24.99 a month.
To host 10 websites on Kinsta costs $200 a month.
On WPX, you can host 15 websites for $49.99 and 35 websites for $99 a month.
WPX also offers email which Kinsta does not, despite the much higher price of Kinsta.
For heavy business users, we do recommend an external mail service like Zoho but for normal bloggers’ use, the WPX email service is adequate.
WPX also AVERAGES under 30 seconds response time on live chat, according to Live Chat Inc., the software provider that we use – usually the agent who can resolve the issues is the first responder without the need for escalation – and from our test accounts at Kinsta, we know their support takes a lot longer to respond:
At the time of writing, WPX has over 940 customer reviews on Trustpilot.com, arguably the world’s largest customer review platform, with a 4.9 out of 5 combined Trustscore. Kinsta has 346 customer reviews there with a combined Trustscore of 4.8 out of 5, at the time of writing.
WPX is also very active in trying to change one broken part of the world through its own nonprofit NGO, Every Dog Matters (EU) where WPX is the main sponsor and direct manager:
To my knowledge, Kinsta is not involved in any philanthropic work, though that may not be important to you and I get that.
Hopefully, now you have a clearer picture of the differences between Kinsta and WPX – you can even test out our claimed support response time by clicking on the bottom right-hand chat widget now!
