GoDaddy Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta

Introduction

We don’t have anything against GoDaddy. It‘s a popular web host that offers a variety of hosting plans at reasonable prices. However, it lacks the advanced technologies and unique, innovative solutions that Kinsta provides. 

GoDaddy can also be somewhat confusing when it comes to its terms, features, and pricing. While it boasts about the free features included with its plans, there are also limitations and caveats that aren’t immediately obvious. Although the discounted prices can be a major selling point, there’s more to a hosting plan’s value than its cost. 

Every day at Kinsta, we hear from unhappy customers looking for a better GoDaddy alternative, one that’s able to provide more tools and flexibility for WordPress users. Many are curious to learn more about what makes Kinsta special.

We’re excited to answer that here. We’ll explore what makes Kinsta so powerful and distinct, and detail the major benefits we have to offer as your managed WordPress host!

Kinsta is Built for Performance and Scalability

As a website owner, you want to feel confident knowing that your site is equipped to  handle sudden surges in traffic. When faced with unexpected traffic or requests, you don’t want to have to worry about downtime.

With Kinsta, this isn’t an issue. We don’t fall into traditional hosting categories such as shared, VPS, and/or dedicated (like GoDaddy). Our platform and infrastructure was built unlike any other to ensure the highest possible level of performance to all sites we host.

To start with, we’re the first managed WordPress host to use the Google Cloud Platform exclusively. On each site hosted with us, we use LXD-managed hosts and LXC software containers. 

Simply put, every site at Kinsta has an isolated container consisting of all its necessary resources, such as Linux, Nginx, MySQL, and PHP. We don’t offer shared hosting, so privacy is never a concern. 

Instead of an overloaded remote server, here at Kinsta your MySQL databases are hosted at localhost. This translates into faster queries and quicker loading times. We also have a scalable infrastructure that makes it easy to upgrade or downgrade your plan whenever you need. 

At Kinsta, stability and uptime are constants. Our compute-optimized C2 machines allow our clients to see dramatic improvements in average response times. In fact, depending on the type of site you have, simply moving to Kinsta can help you see a speed improvement between 20 and 300%!

When it comes to speed and performance, many clients find that their experience with Kinsta is unmatched:

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%!

Although it offers managed WordPress hosting, GoDaddy isn’t a WordPress-specific host. Instead, it provides traditional shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting.

An important thing about GoDaddy’s pricing strategy is that, although it offers basic and affordable starter plans, the features and tools you’ll need to truly maximize site speed and performance are only available with certain premium plans (or come as add-ons with a high price tag). 

Nevertheless, GoDaddy doesn’t deliver the way Kinsta does. Not even on enterprise-level plans:

Kinsta is Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads

At Kinsta,  we know that ecommerce sites can be challenging and complicated to manage effectively.

Fortunately, with us as your managed WordPress host, that’s not an obstacle you’ll have to worry about. Kinsta is optimized for ecommerce sites, and can help boost the speed and performance of your WooCommerce or your Easy Digital Downloads store.

Some of the ways we do this are by:

• Excluding pages such as ‘my account’, checkout, and cart pages that shouldn’t be cached.
• Providing server-level page caching with specific rules to allow EDD and WooCommerce functionality. 
• Automatically bypassing the cache for users when “edit_items_in_cart” or “woocommerce_items_in_cart cookie” are detected, to deliver a smooth and seamless checkout process.

GoDaddy offers two standard ecommerce services, a basic one for non-WordPress users and a Premium Web Store for WordPress and WooCommerce users. However, the platform offers very little technical information and insight into these solutions, so it’s tough to be sure exactly what kind of experience you could expect. 

Speed is of the utmost importance for online storefronts, which is one of the reasons Kinsta is the fastest WordPress host out there. Each year, Review Signal releases a  performance testing review on some of the most popular web hosts in the industry. For the past five years, Kinsta has achieved “top tier” performance!

In the most recent round, GoDaddy participated, but only the starter shared plan ($12.99/month) was tested. So we’ll be comparing that below with the Kinsta starter plan ($35/month).

Kinsta is Developer-Friendly

At Kinsta, many of our team members are developers. Therefore everything we create, from our dashboard to our products and tools, is built with the goal of delivering a developer-friendly experience. 

We can help you enhance your workflow efficiency, and we do that in a wide variety of ways. When you use Kinsta as your managed WordPress host, you’ll have access to features that you wouldn’t necessarily get with a host like GoDaddy, including:

• Unrestricted access to your site’s critical files. 
• Git, WP-CLI, and SSH access included, regardless of your plan. SSH isn’t available on GoDaddy Basic plans.
• Staging environment on all plans, which can be quickly set up.We also provide the possibility to turn on caching on the staging environment. GoDaddy limits its staging environments to certain plans. Also, because GoDaddy staging sites are persistent, some synchronization issues are a possibility.
• Five types of backups: free automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system generated, and downloadable. GoDaddy offers daily automated backups, as well as a standalone paid website backup service. While one-click restore is available, you cannot restore a production backup to a staging website. 
• Quicker database performance through the Redis add-on. GoDaddy doesn’t mention any specific add-ons available for this purpose.
• The ability to load your site over reverse proxy. GoDaddy doesn’t allow reverse proxy on shared hosting, only on Linux-based VPS and dedicated servers.
• Kinsta lets you run a different version of PHP for every live and staging site, as well as switching your PHP version with one click..
• Post and page revisions are enabled by default. 

Another difference we want to touch on, and an important one at that, is in regards to SSL certificates. It’s very difficult to install a Let’s Encrypt certificate on GoDaddy. Let’s Encrypt advises against it, and the time you would spend trying to make it work would be better spent elsewhere.

While the platform does offer custom SSL certificates, support varies by plan. GoDaddy’s own SSL certificates start at $79.99 per year, while free SSL certificates are only included with Ultimate plans (or higher).

At Kinsta, we offer free Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard support on every plan. You can also install your own certificate if required. You can enable HTTPS and import your SSL certificate directly from the MyKinsta dashboard. Just by moving to us, therefore, you can save a lot of dollars and get better support!

Free Migrations

Another aspect of Kinsta that distinguishes us from GoDaddy is that we provide one or more free premium migrations with all of our hosting plans. Our experienced and skilled experts take care of the entire migration process for you. You won’t have to deal with any of the complex technology, or worry about the possibility of losing critical data. 

To get started, the only thing you need is to complete our site migration request form. From there, our team will contact you to schedule a time based on minimizing downtime and disruptions. Also, you can easily track the migration status via your MyKinsta dashboard. 

Technically, migrations are also a free feature available for GoDaddy users. However, the support you receive isn’t on par with Kinsta. Users have to manage the migrations themselves via the auto-migration feature.

In the event that you do need help, you would have to pay a $99.99 fee for expert service. Migrations can take anywhere from seven to 10 days.

At Kinsta we save you time and money. Instead of DIY migrations with ineffective plugins, our WordPress experts will move your site(s) for you free of charge.

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

Safe and Secure

Kinsta understands how essential security is, which is why we take both active and passive measures to safeguard your sites. 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.

Our secure hosting platform monitors your site every two minutes for uptime, and has software-based restrictions in place. For that reason, we’re able to detect DDoS attacks as they happen, and stop malicious code from entering our network. Kinsta’s security features include:

• Cloudflare firewall with included DDoS protection
• Two-Factor Authentication support
• Isolated LXC containers
• Automated backups with all plans
• Self-healing PHP
• Free hack-fix guarantee
• Only support for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP)

If we’re notified about a vulnerability on your site, we contact you ASAP to keep you updated about the next steps. Our goal is to act swiftly and efficiently, making sure you also always stay in the know.

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.

GoDaddy only offers a CDN feature for its Deluxe, Ultimate, and Express plans.

Join Others Making the Switch to Kinsta

At Kinsta, our mission is to provide you with the fastest, most secure, and latest technology possible. It’s why we’re always evolving, adapting, and innovating.

If you want proof, just check out our many feature updates! No other host in the industry releases new features, tools, and integrations at the speed and frequency Kinsta does.

We are proud of our platform and confident in our service. We also want you to be completely satisfied with your hosting. That’s why we always offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, and don’t require long-term contracts.

If you’re ready to make the move away from GoDaddy and switch to a new hosting provider, try out Kinsta risk-free for 30 days!