AWS Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta
If you’re looking for an Amazon Web Services (AWS) alternative for WordPress hosting, Kinsta has you covered. Powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform, Kinsta offers a unique, powerful solution for managed WordPress hosting. Optimized for speed and performance, the Kinsta platform is unlike anything else you’ll find. Let’s explore why!
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 an AWS 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
For developers and other technically-literate WordPress users, Amazon Web Services (AWS) can be a viable option for hosting your WordPress site. By setting up your hosting environment directly on virtual machines, you could learn more about the technology that powers the modern internet.
However, relying on Amazon for your WordPress hosting isn’t without issues. Maintaining peak performance on an AWS setup requires a level of technical expertise, confidence, and dedication that most website owners just don’t have. For webmasters who simply want a “set-it-and-forget-it” solution, AWS isn’t a viable option.
Every day we encounter AWS clients who are looking for an easier hosting solution with more accessible support. Many also want to learn what makes Kinsta so unique.
That’s what we’ll answer here. We’ll explain what makes Kinsta unlike other solutions, and discuss the major benefits of using Kinsta as your managed WordPress host.
Mightycause is an online fundraising and donor management platform for nonprofits. While we have our own development team, we utilize WordPress for hosting our educational and blog content. Initially we self hosted on AWS but found it time consuming to manage updates and servers. After looking for a cost effective and turn-key solution we found Kinsta. Our engineering team had strict requirements for stability, speed, and maintainability. Kinsta checked the box on all of these and more! The move to Kinsta was really painless and quick, compared to other WordPress migrations we have done. They had one-on-one support to help us migrate from our AWS instances to their service. Since moving to Kinsta our team has been able to focus on our core product and not on managing a WordPress blog. We are beyond thrilled with the support and service we have received and recommend Kinsta to anyone running a WordPress blog.
How Kinsta Compares to AWS in a Nutshell
Before we take a deep dive into the specifics of Kinsta vs AWS, we first want to offer a brief breakdown of the key differences between these two solutions.
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 network.
We are also proud to be the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2, the world’s leading software review and comparison site:
#1 Managed Hosting Provider by G2
Enjoy a 26% Faster Website Simply by Moving From AWS to Kinsta
We measured 3,200+ migrations over the course of a three-month span. On average, client sites that came from AWS to Kinsta experienced 26% faster load times.
How is this possible? Our customers enjoy:
- The fastest Compute-Optimized C2 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 275+ locations
- Built-in Edge Caching that cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
Migrate from AWS 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!
Let’s take a look at some other differences between us and AWS:
- AWS is a generic cloud services provider, while Kinsta is a specialized managed WordPress hosting provider.
- Kinsta’s singular focus enables us to offer a better user experience for hosting WordPress sites.
- The Kinsta setup is WordPress-optimized, which makes creating and managing your site simple and straightforward. With AWS, you need to set up and configure your own virtual machines, which is complicated and resource-consuming.
- Kinsta includes everything you need to maximize website performance and security on each of our plans. With AWS, you’ll be responsible for collecting, purchasing, and combining the tools together yourself.
- Kinsta provides premium 24/7 support on all our plans, no matter if you’re a startup, a small business, or a Fortune 500 company. AWS offers support only for server-related issues and requires you to pay extra for technical support (starting at $29 per month). In addition, AWS doesn’t provide WordPress-specific support.
- All Kinsta plans come with our custom-built, WordPress-specific MyKinsta dashboard with one-click WordPress installation and staging features.
- Kinsta has scored “top tier performance” for the past five years on Review Signal’s annual performance reviews. As AWS is a cloud provider and not a WordPress host, AWS isn’t involved in these benchmark tests. However, on Review Signal AWS has an overall rating of 67%, a support rating of 55%, and an uptime monitoring rating of 98%.
- Kinsta offers simple, straightforward hosting plans and packages, which can be easily integrated with add-on solutions. AWS plans can be complex and confusing.
- Kinsta takes active and passive measures to safeguard your site and prevent malicious code from entering our network. AWS doesn’t provide any WordPress-specific security features.
- Kinsta offers 35 global data center locations, as compared to AWS’s 13.
- All Kinsta plans included a free CDN and premium DNS. AWS, on the other hand, charges for CDN traffic on top of regular cloud storage and usage fees.
- Kinsta automatically performs weekly database optimization for all your sites, whereas with AWS you’d need to take care of database optimization tasks yourself.
- Unlike AWS, Kinsta offers out-of-the-box ecommerce-optimized caching.
- All Kinsta plans come with a one-click staging environment feature. At AWS, you need to set up and manage staging environments from scratch yourself
- Kinsta provides easy SSL implementation using free Cloudflare certificates, which aren’t provided with AWS.
- All Kinsta customers benefit from Google Cloud’s premium global tier network, which provides faster load times for your website visitors.
- Kinsta provides free, human-performed migrations with all of our plans, offloading you from the time-consuming website migration process.
- Kinsta has a 30-day money-back guarantee, while AWS doesn’t provide full refunds.
- Kinsta provides an automatic site healing feature and monitors your website for uptime 720 times a day.
- We offer six types of backups including automatic daily backups. At AWS, you need to take care of backups on your own.
- Kinsta offers a 100% hack-fix guarantee for all sites hosted on the platform.
- Kinsta has a very attractive affiliate program with recurring commission.
Kinsta is Built for Performance and Scalability
If you’ve gone out of your way to set up a WordPress site with an IaaS cloud solution like AWS, you value performance. In that case, the last thing you probably want is to switch over to a shared host. That’s good news, since what Kinsta offers is nothing like shared hosting.
Our hosting platform uses the Google Cloud Platform as its backbone — the first managed WordPress hosting provider to do so. Rather than standard shared hosting and VPS, we make use of the newest hosting technologies to provide cutting-edge infrastructure.
We use a combination of LXD managed hosts and orchestrated LXC software containers for each client. That means that your site will be isolated in a container of its own, with all the necessary software included such as Linux, Nginx, PHP, and MySQL.
When you host your site with Kinsta, your resources are 100% private. You don’t even share them with your other sites.
We’re fast:
“We monitored speeds of test sites and Kinsta’s network always produced one second faster load times than those hosted on AWS. In eCommerce, loading one second faster is everything, because user attention and conversions are directly correlated with this metric.”
Kinsta’s infrastructure is set up to automatically scale, adding more cloud computing resources as needed in real time. In addition to making it easy to upgrade or downgrade with ease, our custom-compiled Linux packages and Nginx rulesets enable us to maximize your site’s performance.
The configuration is also never an issue. You can quickly launch a new WordPress site directly from your MyKinsta dashboard. Plus, you can choose from any of the 35 global data centers we run.
Another advantage that Kinsta brings you is a unique caching system that eliminates the need for 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 275+ 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%!
With Kinsta as your WordPress host, uptime is constant. We use the latest compute-optimized C2 Google Cloud machines that provide significant improvements in average response times over a platform like AWS. Depending on the type of site you have, simply switching to Kinsta could result in a speed improvement between 20% and 300%!
Kinsta’s managed WordPress hosting enhances your sites with the power, scalability, and speed of a distributed cloud infrastructure, without having to set up and maintain complex virtual machine architecture by yourself.
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.
Uncover your web app’s performance bottlenecks.
Our experts will run a free performance audit of your website or app and share the results within 24 hours.
MyKinsta: A Custom-Built Dashboard for Powerful Site Management
At Kinsta, we know that our clients deserve the best. We weren’t satisfied with any of the open source or premium control panel options on the market. That’s why our talented team of developers developed a custom hosting dashboard that is tailor-made for WordPress site management:
Let’s take a look at some of the features that make our MyKinsta dashboard so powerful:
- Toggle between different PHP versions with the click of a button.
- Get detailed analytics on bandwidth and visitors, CDN usage, cache HIT & MISS rates, and more.
- Access one-click staging environments, and the option to restore backups to production or staging.
- Benefit from quick phpMyAdmin access.
- Use premium Amazon Route 53 DNS to manage your DNS records directly in the dashboard.
- Get one-click CDN setup.
- Use a dashboard tool to purge the site cache easily.
- Leverage simple redirect management.
- Quickly and easily block IP addresses via the IP Deny tool.
- Make use of New Relic (license required) integration.
- Free Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard support, or import your own.
- Access a WordPress debugging tool.
- 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.
- Get password protection for your environment, and the ability to strengthen login security by adding your SSH keys to the dashboard.
- Use 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 ways to improve. We regularly incorporate the requests and feedback we get to better our products. If there’s a way to make your experience better, we’ll definitely pursue it!
Kinsta is Safe and Secure
At Kinsta, we know the security of your data is a critical priority for most webmasters. That is why we’re dedicated to providing the most secure hosting service on the market.
We take active and passive measures to safeguard your site. Some of Kinsta’s most important security measures include:
- Monitoring sites every two minutes for uptime, 720 times a day.
- Putting strict software-based restrictions in place.
- Free DDoS protection, and stopping malicious code from entering our network.
- Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) support.
- Dedicated malware and abuse team.
- Secure firewall powered by Cloudflare.
- Automated backups for all plans, so you never lose your site or data. We also store two weeks of backups at all times, with the possibility to increase data retention.
- Self-healing PHP.
- Only support for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP).
- Completely isolated containers (LXC), using LXD to orchestrate them so there’s no chance of cross-infection from other clients.
- Automatic bans for IPs that have more than 6 failed login attempts in a minute.
- Free Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard support.
- 100% hack-fix guarantee.
- Automatic security checks for every plugin installed, to discover vulnerability and/or security issues.
Kinsta provides premium uptime monitoring for all of your WordPress sites via our in-house monitoring system. Even in the worst-case scenario, our security guarantee means you will get hands-on help from our engineers, free of charge, to restore your site and make sure it’s free of backdoors that hackers can take advantage of.
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.
With AWS, you also have access to basic virtual firewalls, DDOS-protection, monitoring, and HTTPS through Let’s Encrypt. However, you don’t get any of the WordPress-specific security measures we offer.
Expert Support
At Kinsta, we pride ourselves on delivering a premium level of support to all our customers. You don’t need to pass a million-dollar threshold of expenditure before you get attention from our support team.
Our support team is available 24 hours a day year-round, including holidays, weekends, and late nights. Therefore, you don’t need to worry about being left hanging if you’re faced with an urgent issue. Kinsta WordPress experts and Linux engineers are always ready to provide quick answers to your questions.
We treat every customer and site as a mission-critical priority, whether you’re a solopreneur, agency, or global enterprise. In addition to multilingual support and resources that are available in over 10 languages, we also maintain an initial ticket response time average of under two minutes.
Just ask our clients! For the past two years, over 97 percent of our customers closed a chat support session happy or satisfied with the support they received:
Our agency has worked with all the major hosting platforms. Kinsta is crazy fast and the support is stellar! We moved all our clients to Kinsta and haven’t looked back.
To make Kinsta’s customer support as convenient as possible, we use the Intercom customer messaging platform. All communications are logged, so you won’t ever need to repeat yourself to support agents. Instead of wasting resources on a call center and phone support, we’ve created an efficient support machine that focuses on solving issues as fast as humanly possible.
Our process enables us to give you direct access to engineers who know what they are talking about, which makes getting to the bottom of issues and resolving them a lot quicker. Plus, our robust infrastructure and dedication to uptime monitoring and other failsafes means you don’t need to contact support as often.
Out of the handful of hosts and solutions we tested, Kinsta provided the best-in-class performance while reducing our team’s dependency on DevOps support — Kinsta’s support team is second to none.
With AWS, you need to pay extra if you want access to any sort of technical support, starting at $29 per month.
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.
Amazon Web Services is a fully unmanaged service, so it doesn’t come with any built-in APM tools. You have the option of installing other APM tools on AWS servers, but the setup process is fully manual and often very complex.
Furthermore, after installing server-side APM packages, most services will require an expensive monthly subscription to read and analyze the data. With Kinsta APM, you get a custom-built performance monitoring tool specifically built for WordPress – for free.
Kinsta is Developer-Friendly
The core team at Kinsta is mostly made up of developers, which has made it easy for us to develop a WordPress hosting solution tailored to the needs of those users. Everything from our custom dashboard to our products and tools is built to help improve your productivity.
Plus, there are no restrictions in place to interfere with your workflow or unique WordPress settings. Some of the developer-friendly features you’ll have access to at Kinsta, which you won’t necessarily get with AWS, include:
- Full phpMyAdmin access to your 100% private MySQL database (hosted on localhost in your isolated container).
- One-click staging environments for all plans.
- The option to work with custom setups like Bedrock or Trellis.
- Git, WP-CLI, and SSH access included, regardless of your plan. You can control SSH access by adding your keys through the MyKinsta dashboard.
- Six different types of backups: automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system generated, downloadable, and external backups to Google Cloud Storage or Amazon S3. You can also restore backups to staging as well as production.
- 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 run a different version of PHP on the staging and live versions of your site, to easily test for potential bugs post-switch.
- Default enabled post and page revisions.
With Kinsta, nothing stands in the way of the custom workflow you’ve likely developed for your public cloud setup. If you’re used to AWS’s high-performance Route 53 DNS, don’t worry: that’s what Kinsta uses as well.
AWS offers no restrictions in terms of access to your features. However, spending the time to manually set up a virtual machine and optimize it for WordPress on that platform is time-consuming, even for experienced users. At Kinsta, we make everything quick, simple, and effective.
Feature Comparison Overview
It can be difficult to compare the functionality of a cloud provider like AWS vs Azure, or Google Cloud, and a managed WordPress host such as Kinsta. However, we’ve highlighted the most important features and distinctions below.
| Kinsta | AWS | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Plans start at $35/month | Plans start at $3.50/month for an Amazon Lightsail VM |
| Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days on all plans | X |
| Global Data Centers | 35 | 13 (Lightsail) |
| Performance Analytics | Included on all plans | X |
| Hosting Dashboard | MyKinsta | AWS Console |
| Storage | SSD | SSD |
| PHP Versions | PHP 8.0, 8.1, 8.2 | PHP 7.0 (can upgrade manually) |
| Free APM Tool | Kinsta APM | Not specified |
| Backups | ✓ (14-30 days) | ✓ (7 days) |
| Firewall Powered by Cloudflare | ✓ | X |
| Free DDoS Protection | ✓ | X |
| One-Click WordPress Installs | ✓ | ✓ |
| CDN | 275+ PoPs (All regions) | Amazon CloudFront (separate pricing) |
| Built-in Edge Caching | ✓ | Not specified |
| Uptime Monitoring | ✓ | ✓ (Manually via CloudWatch) |
Amazon Lightsail is a basic virtual machine or instance on a cloud server, which covers most of the necessities for a basic WordPress site. However, to even come close to creating a WordPress hosting environment like the one we’ve built from scratch at Kinsta, you would need a combination of AWS services like cloud storage, databases, a CDN, and several open-source solutions.
If you want the same performance and scalability you’d get from a cloud hosting provider, but with better user experience and less required ‘extras’, Kinsta is the obvious choice.
Free Migrations by Real People – We Save you Time and Money
If you’re interested in moving your site to managed WordPress hosting, Kinsta offers one or more free premium migrations on all hosting plans!
Whether you want to move one site or 100, our hassle-free migrations make doing so quick and easy. We handle the entire migration process for you, so you won’t have to deal with complex technology or risk losing critical data.
To get started, simply complete our site migration request form, and our migration experts will reach out to schedule a time for the migration. Then you can track the migration status directly from your MyKinsta dashboard.
I am pleasantly surprised at the ease and speed of setting up WordPress with Kinsta. I love the staging environment and the deployment to production!
No AWS services offer free migrations of any kind. Paid migrations are only available through third-party consulting companies.
Kinsta Has a Global Presence
Amazon Lightsail (starting at $3.50 per month) is available in 13 different data centers across 11 countries, while Kinsta has a more global presence, with a network of 35 data centers (and counting) located throughout the world and powered by the Google Cloud Platform.
- 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
- 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
Kinsta’s massive global footprint, which spans five continents, makes it easy for you to choose the perfect data center for your site.
Plus, there are no extra fees or hidden charges. Even on our starter plan ($35 per month), you can choose any data center listed above. On multisite plans, you can even use a different data center for each website.
Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
As a managed WordPress hosting company, we pride ourselves on offering scalable and flexible solutions for supporting high-traffic, resource-intensive ecommerce sites.
At Kinsta, we appreciate that these sites often dynamically generate personalized content, rather than serving static, cached HTML pages. We also recognize that these unique and often complicated demands often make ecommerce sites a major challenge for shared hosting providers.
Since Kinsta’s foundation is the Google Cloud Platform (and every site has its own private virtual machine) our clients don’t have those kinds of problems. Our platform is optimized for ecommerce stores, and can help speed up the loading times for your WordPress, WooCommerce, and Easy Digital Download sites.
Our expert engineers are very familiar with WooCommerce, and have developed a custom workflow that optimizes performance. We take care of caching for you at the server level, to deliver fast page loading times and offer automatic purging of cache and archive pages.
In addition, we enhance the ecommerce experience by:
- 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.
Amazon Lightsail and other AWS services, on the other hand, do not offer ecommerce-optimized caching by default.
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 275+ 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.
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! AWS doesn’t have an integration with a local WordPress development tool, which means there is no way to clone and push local WordPress sites for AWS customers. If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver.
Best Affiliate Program in the Industry
Kinsta is constantly exceeding our clients’ expectations. Our satisfied customers have spread the word about our products and services, which has helped us become one of the fastest-growing hosts in the industry.
That’s why we’ve doubled down on our custom affiliate program, to create the best affiliate experience in the industry. As one of the highest-paying programs in web hosting, our affiliates have the opportunity to share in our profits and earn a passive income.
The Kinsta affiliate program includes:
- A custom-developed, easy-to-use affiliate dashboard — no clunky, outdated UX or confusing third-party platforms to deal with!
- The ability to earn from $50 to $500 in referral commissions, based on the type of plan the customer chooses. (We can offer these commission rates because of our high customer satisfaction and lifetime value.)
- 10% monthly recurring commissions for the entire lifetime of the referred customer.
AWS does not currently offer an affiliate or referral program, and is not included in Amazon Associates.
Join Others Making the Switch to Kinsta
At Kinsta, we offer the fastest, latest technology possible and are constantly evolving and adapting to leverage the most innovative solutions available. You can see for yourself by checking out our feature updates!
If you don’t want to deal with the tedious, time-consuming daily tasks of managing your own servers, the GCP-powered Kinsta platform is the perfect alternative to your AWS setup.
We are confident in our solutions and want you to be 100% satisfied with your hosting, which is why we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you’re ready to make the move away from AWS and switch to a managed WordPress hosting provider, try out Kinsta risk-free for 30 days!