Media Temple Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta

If you’re looking for a Media Temple alternative for your WordPress hosting, Kinsta has you covered. Our unique, speed-optimized hosting is powered by the Google Cloud Platform. We only use the latest and greatest technology to deliver unmatched performance and state-of-the-art security. From our custom-built dashboard to our developer-friendly tools, no other solution compares.

Introduction

Bought by GoDaddy in 2013, Media Temple is a general web host that offers shared, VPS, dedicated, and WordPress hosting.  

One of the biggest issues users experience with Media Temple is that it’s not very straightforward and transparent, particularly when it comes to its plans and services. Some users find its architecture of clustered servers (the “Grid”) confusing. Plus, although Media Temple plans are not cheap, most premium security, support, and performance features require an additional fee. 

Every day at Kinsta, we hear from unhappy customers looking for a better Media Temple alternative. Many are interested in learning more about what makes Kinsta so different from other providers in the industry. We’re excited to answer that here, and take you through the key benefits of using Kinsta for your managed WordPress hosting!

How Kinsta Compares to Media Temple in a Nutshell

Before we discuss Kinsta vs Media Temple in detail, we want to provide a brief summary of the key differences between the two hosting providers. 

Kinsta is the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2, which is the world’s leading software review and comparison site:

Enjoy a 20% Faster Website Simply by Moving From Media Temple 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 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 Media Temple 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!

The Kinsta platform is powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform. Using Google’s premium-tier network enables us to maximize website performance for each site we host. 

Let’s take a look at some of the other major differences between Kinsta and Media Temple:

• Kinsta is a WordPress-specific host, with a team of experienced engineers and WordPress experts. Media Temple does not specialize in WordPress specifically.
• Kinsta is the fastest WordPress host and it has been for 5 years in a row (independent benchmark).
• Kinsta has 35 data centers across the globe, while Media Temple only has servers located in California. What’s more, Kinsta’s global CDN spans over 200 regions, as compared to Media Temple’s 11.
• All sites on Kinsta are monitored for uptime 720 times a day. Media Temple provides uptime monitoring only as an additional advanced support add-on for $199 per month.
• Unlike Media Temple, Kinsta includes a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) and free premium DNS with all of its plans. Media Temple charges $10 per month for CDN plans for a single site or $30 for 5 installs.
• All sites on Kinsta are secured by a Cloudflare integration, which includes a secure firewall and free DDoS protection. Media Temple doesn’t provide any WAF with its plans, and uses the Sucuri firewall as a paid add-on for up to $30 per month. Kinsta works with Google Cloud’s premium global tier network to provide the fastest speed and lower latency.
• Kinsta includes a free one-click SSL with our Let’s Encrypt integration on every plan, as well as the option to import your own certificate. Media Temple plans don’t offer free SSL certificates unless you opt for a Pro plan with yearly billing. They also do not support third-party SSL certificates.
• For its managed WordPress plans, Media Temple includes only daily backups with a 1GB size limit. At Kinsta, we don’t have limits like this in place.
• Kinsta provides free, human-performed website migrations for all plans. Media Temple offers migrations for an extra fee of $150 per site
• Kinsta provides our custom-built, WordPress-specific MyKinsta dashboard. Media Temple uses cPanel and Plesk.
• Kinsta offers a free hack-fix guarantee, meaning that if your site gets hacked, we fix it for free. Although Media Temple offers disaster recovery and malware removal services, these also incur an additional one-time fee of $150 per website. 
• Kinsta performs weekly automatic MySQL database optimization on all sites to ensure better performance, whereas Media Temple only lets you optimize the database yourself or pay an additional fee for the advanced support package, which is $199 per month.
• Kinsta allows you to load your site over reverse proxy. Media Temple only makes this available for VPS and dedicated plans.
• Media Temple’s managed WordPress plans don’t support HTTP/2 connections at all. All Kinsta plans come with HTTP/2 support.
• WordPress Multisite features are not supported by Media Temple’s dedicated Managed WordPress products. Kinsta supports multisite setup on the Pro plan and above.
• Kinsta offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. While Media Temple also offers this deal, it doesn’t offer cash-back refunds but only hosting credit.

Kinsta is Built for Performance and Scalability

Unlike Media Temple, Kinsta doesn’t fall into traditional hosting categories such as shared, VPS, and/or dedicated. We carved a unique path to provide a platform and infrastructure that’s unlike any other in the industry. 

Kinsta is the first managed WordPress host to exclusively use the Google Cloud Platform, which allows us to deliver unmatched performance, speed, and scalability to every site hosted with us. For each site, we use LXD-managed hosts and LXC software containers that include all necessary resources, such as Linux, Nginx, MySQL, and PHP. 

To put it simply, all your resources are always isolated, and therefore protected. We don’t offer shared hosting, so privacy is never a concern, nor are overloaded remote servers or limited resources.

At Kinsta, your MySQL databases are hosted at localhost, leading to faster queries and loading times. Thanks to our scalable cloud infrastructure, you can upgrade or downgrade with ease, without ever having to worry about uptime.

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%!

We use Google Cloud Platform’s compute-optimized C2 machines that enable our clients to see significant average response time improvements. Simply by moving to our platform, Kinsta can provide a speed improvement of up to 300% (depending on the type of site you have). As you can see below:

While it offers managed WordPress hosting, Media Temple is not a WordPress-specific host. It also provides generic shared and VPS hosting. 

Kinsta plans start at just $35 per month, and include all the advanced technologies and features needed to maximize site speed, performance, and security. Although Media Temple has comparable prices, its plans don’t include nearly the same amount of features, control, and extras that we provide.

Most security, monitoring, and support services at Media Temple are only available as premium add-ons or via additional subscription plans. This means your monthly hosting bill can be significantly higher than planned

According to research gathered by SoftwareFindr, in addition to features and functionality, Kinsta outperforms Media Temple in terms of value for your money, ease of use, and customer support.

Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads

Kinsta’s platform is optimized to effectively handle the complex intricacies and unique challenges that come with managing ecommerce sites. Our hosting solutions can help boost the speed and performance of your WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads store.

We do this in a variety of ways, including:

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

While Media Temple does offer self-managed ecommerce services, it provides no specific features aimed at WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads users on its shared and WordPress hosting plans.

Instead, ecommerce uses are pointed to either the VPS plans or managed plans for Amazon Web Services (AWS). For any specific details or pricing information, you’ll need to reach out to the Media Temple team.

It’s also important to remember that when it comes to online storefronts, speed is essential. As the fastest WordPress host out there, Kinsta makes sure performance is never a concern.

Every year, Review Signal conducts and publishes a performance testing review on some of the most popular web hosts in the industry. Kinsta has achieved “top tier” performance five years in a row!

Let’s take a look at how Media Temple stacked up against Kinsta in the most recent round both hosts participated in. Both Kinsta’s and Media Temple’s managed WordPress business plans were reviewed. Review Signal created identical dummy sites with each provider in order to conduct the tests.

Free Migrations

Another key aspect that distinguishes Kinsta from Media Temple is migrations. Kinsta’s team of experts handles the entire migration process for you, eliminating the need for you to deal with complex technology or risk losing critical data.

All Kinsta plans comes with one or more free premium migrations, which means you won’t have to worry about paying extra just to move to Kinsta!

To get started, the only thing you need to do is 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.

This is quite different from the migration experience you could expect as a Media Temple user. Media Temple doesn’t offer free migrations from other hosting providers. 

If you want its team to perform a migration for you, you’ll need to pay a fee for the on-demand service add-on ($150 per site), or purchase an Advanced Support subscription plan ($199 per month).

At Kinsta, our WordPress experts will move your site(s) for you free of charge, saving you both time and money.

Expert Support

At Kinsta, it doesn’t matter what plan you have or what time of day it is. We always put our clients first. Our experts are available 24/7 and always treat every issue as a mission-critical priority. 

We use the Intercom messaging platform to ensure that our communications are as convenient as possible. Plus, we always log discussions, so you’ll never find yourself repeating yourself to our agents. 

Kinsta support isn’t just convenient, it’s also incredibly quick. In fact, our average initial ticket response time is under two minutes!

Our rapid responses aren’t subpar either. Kinsta’s WordPress experts always provide knowledgeable advice and guidance, which is why our customer support ratings are so high.

For the past two years, nearly all of our customers left a chat support session happy or satisfied:

Kinsta also offers multilingual customer support, including a knowledge base with resources available in 10 languages.

Media Temple doesn’t offer the same level of support, at least not without a fee. It has tiered support options, with Advanced Support subscription services available for $199 per month.

Safe and Secure

At Kinsta, we believe that security features are a staple of reliable hosting services. That is why we take active and passive measures to keep your site safe and secure from malicious intruders.

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.

Kinsta monitors your site every two minutes for uptime, and puts software-based restrictions in place. We’re able to detect DDoS attacks as they happen, and stop malicious code from invading our network.

Some of the advanced security features we offer with our plans include:

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

We always act swiftly and communicate clearly. If we’re notified of a vulnerability on your site, we inform you ASAP to update you on the next steps. Also, in the event that something does happen to your site, we’ll fix it for free.

Unfortunately, this degree of high-level security isn’t included with all Media Temple plans. For example, to leverage a Web Application Firewall (WAF), you’ll need to buy a security pack add-on or purchase it as a standalone service. The same applies to disaster recovery, malware scanning and removal, and SSL certificates.

Kinsta Has a Global Presence

Kinsta has a massive global presence that includes 35 data centers (and counting) spanning five continents. Regardless of your plan, you can choose a different data center for each of your websites for free. 

Kinsta’s current locations include:

When it comes to data centers, Media Temple simply doesn’t compare. It only has servers located in California.

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.

Media Temple does not include a global CDN with its plans. That feature is only available as a part of its Security Pack service ($19 per month for one site), or as a standalone feature (for an additional $10 or $30 per month fee).

Best Affiliate Program in the Industry

At Kinsta, we value our customers and always go above and beyond to exceed your expectations. Our satisfied clients are often eager to help us spread the word about our valuable products and services, which has helped us become one of the fastest-growing managed WordPress hosting providers.

Our appreciation has helped to fuel our affiliate program — one of the highest-paying affiliate programs in the hosting industry. Whether you’re a blogger or Fortune 500 company, you can partner with us to benefit from true profit sharing and join in our earnings.

Kinsta affiliates can earn between $50 and $500 (depending on the plan) for each referred signup. You will receive a 10% monthly recurring commission for the lifetime of the referred customers. Given Kinsta’s impressively low 4% churn rate, this is a great opportunity to earn a passive income.

Also, we won’t make you deal with any confusing or complicated third-party platforms. We created our own unique WordPress hosting affiliate dashboard to make things clean, simple, and straightforward. 

Media Temple has an affiliate program. However, it is not as transparent about the payouts or earnings on its website, aside from claiming “unlimited earning potential”. It also runs this program through a third-party affiliate network.