o2switch Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta
Shared hosting is a decent option for small and simple projects, but it often falls short for growing or complex websites. Unlike providers like o2switch, Kinsta offers a scalable, innovative solution for WordPress hosting.
Powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform, our platform is optimized for speed and performance. We’re unlike any other hosting provider you’ve used in the past. Let’s break down why!
Introduction
Most people start off using shared hosting for their first websites. When you initially launch a WordPress site, it’s common to want to spend as little money as possible, especially while you’re still learning the ins and outs of the Content Management System (CMS).
However, as your website grows, shared hosting plans can limit your website’s performance. This means if you use a web host that only offers shared hosting plans, such as o2switch, at some point you’ll need to switch platforms.
At Kinsta, we don’t fall into the traditional categories of web hosting, nor we offer shared plans. We provide a unique, sophisticated managed WordPress hosting service that includes a broad range of plans designed for all types of projects. Unlike many shared hosting providers, we take care of the heavy lifting so you can focus on running and managing your websites.
We often hear from clients who are frustrated with shared hosting. Many are looking for an o2switch alternative, and want to learn what makes Kinsta so special. That’s what we’ll answer here. We’ll explore what separates Kinsta from o2switch, and help you learn why Kinsta is the best hosting option for your WordPress site.
How Kinsta Compares to o2switch in a Nutshell
Before we discuss web hosting specifics such as performance, features, and security, let’s take a quick look at some of the key differences between o2switch and Kinsta.
At their core, these web hosting platforms offer many different services. Kinsta is a cloud hosting provider powered by the Google Cloud Platform. Google’s top-notch infrastructure enables us to provide a premium level of performance for every website on our platform.
You don’t have to take our word for it either, as we’re the highest-rated WordPress host on G2:
#1 Managed Hosting Provider by G2
Enjoy a 20% Faster Website Simply by Moving From o2switch 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 o2switch 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!
o2switch offers a different hosting model. Whereas Kinsta enables you to choose from among a broad range of plans, o2switch only has one shared hosting option.
With shared hosting plans, including the one offered by o2switch, you’re often on your own in terms of configuring and optimizing your WordPress website. You also have limited and shared resources, which can hamper performance and security.
Kinsta offers managed hosting solutions. In a nutshell, this means that our team of system administrators work to ensure that your server and website are both running at peak performance, 24/7. By taking hosting maintenance tasks off your hands, we give back the time you need to grow your website even further.
Some additional differences between Kinsta vs o2switch include:
- Kinsta offers a feature-packed, developer-friendly hosting platform that includes 10 plan tiers (not including our custom packages). o2switch only has one plan.
- Kinsta lets you choose between 35 data centers spanning five continents, whereas France is the only data center location o2switch has to offer.
- Kinsta includes 24/7 premium support on all plans. Our support team is made up of WordPress and Linux experts, and available anytime via chat. o2switch doesn’t offer chat support and has tiered support techs.
- 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.
- Kinsta offers free, expert-performed services with all of our plans. There’s always a real person handling the process, and ensuring that your website transfers without any issues. o2switch says that it will handle one site migration for customers, but this service is available “on request and subject to feasibility”.
- Kinsta offers six types of backups: free automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system-generated, downloadable, and external backups sent automatically to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. We also offer one-click backup and restore features. With o2switch, all backups are made behind the scenes. If you need to restore or download a backup, you’ll have to open a support ticket.
- Sites hosted on Kinsta are automatically protected by Cloudflare SSL certificates, and custom SSLs are supported as well. With o2switch, you’ll need to set them up via cPanel.
- Kinsta offers a custom online portal, called the MyKinsta dashboard, that was built from the ground up specifically for WordPress users. It’s loaded with helpful tools and one-click features to make site management as simple as possible. o2switch relies on the often confusing cPanel as its control panel.
- With Kinsta, you get access to intuitive and one-click website staging capabilities. If you’re using o2switch, you can clone your websites through cPanel, which can be more time-consuming.
- Unlike o2switch, all Kinsta plans include a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) and free premium DNS powered by Amazon Route53.
- Kinsta’s platform is optimized for WooCommerce, while o2switch doesn’t have any WooCommerce-specific features.
- Kinsta has a unique caching system that automatically caches pages on the server level, which eliminates the need for any plugins or add-ons. o2switch offers two caching tools to users, XtremCache (Varnish) and LiteSpeed LSCache.
Kinsta is Built for Performance and Scalability
o2switch falls firmly into the category of shared hosting. With only a single hosting plan, there are limited growth opportunities. If your website starts getting too much traffic, you’ll need to migrate to a web host that offers a broader range of hosting plans and solutions.
Instead of standard solutions, Kinsta uses a custom-built infrastructure that’s designed to offer unparalleled WordPress performance. We don’t offer shared hosting, which means our customers never have to worry about sharing resources on overloaded servers.
By opting for managed WordPress hosting, you get experts who ensure that your website is at peak performance at all times. Kinsta offers a broad range of plans that give you plenty of room to scale.
Starting at just $35 per month, all Kinsta plans leverage compute-optimized C2 Google Cloud machines, LXD managed hosts, and orchestrated LXC software containers. Each WordPress site hosted on our platform has its own isolated container that has all of the necessary software resources for running the site. This includes Nginx, PHP, Linux, and MySQL.
Kinsta also offers over 30 different software packages and PHP extensions, as well as custom-compiled Linux packages and Nginx rulesets. With our scalable cloud infrastructure, you can upgrade or downgrade with ease.
Another distinguishing advantage of using Kinsta as your WordPress host is our unique caching system, which helps to optimize the speed and performance of your site.
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%!
Unlike o2switch, Kinsta doesn’t rely on caching plugins or tools. Kinsta uses a variety of advanced caching systems to reduce server load and accelerate response times, including:
- Bytecode
- Query cache
- Page cache
- CDN cache
- Object cache
By providing a WordPress environment that’s already optimized, Kinsta plans prevent you from having to deal with complicated plugins and tools that end up causing more problems than they solve.
Although o2switch is the cheaper hosting option between the two, you have to decide whether the difference in pricing is worth all the extra optimization and maintenance tasks that you’ll have to perform regularly. Kinsta provides a level of performance, security, support, and scalability that isn’t available with other providers.
Kinsta is the best WordPress host I’ve had so far. They are quick to help, easy to deal with, and really know their stuff. Plus their servers are super fast!
Kinsta is Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
Although o2switch supports WordPress and all of its plugins, it doesn’t offer any ecommerce-specific optimizations that make managing or optimizing your store easier. At Kinsta, we recognize the unique performance and security challenges that come with managing an online store.
This is why we optimized our platform specifically for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads. Kinsta plans can help you increase the speed of your ecommerce site and ensure a smooth checkout process.
Kinsta offers several features that make it the best choice for WordPress ecommerce sites, including:
- Implementing server-level page caching, with specific rules to enable EDD and WooCommerce functionality
- Automatically bypassing the cache for users when “edit_items_in_cart” or “woocommerce_items_in_cart cookie” are detected
- Excluding pages that shouldn’t be cached by default, including ‘my account’, checkout, and cart pages
To further demonstrate the reliability of Kinsta, consider Review Signal’s annual benchmarks. Each year, they conduct a performance test and review for the top hosting companies in the industry.
For the past five years, Kinsta has scored top-tier performance! o2switch has never participated in these benchmark tests, as it’s not a WordPress-focused host.
Expert Support for WordPress
At some point, every WordPress website runs into technical issues. How these problems are handled depends on both your technical expertise and your web hosting provider.
If you’re not technically savvy or wish to turn matters over to your web host’s support team, you’ll likely expect a fast response from experienced agents.
Both Kinsta and o2switch offer 24/7 technical support. However, Kinsta response times via chat tend to be a lot faster. In fact, we have an initial ticket response time of under two minutes!
Also, unlike o2switch, Kinsta is a WordPress-specific hosting provider. Our agents are WordPress experts who know the CMS inside and out and can help you troubleshoot issues quickly and efficiently. To illustrate this, take a look at our customer satisfaction scores for chat support:
Although o2switch is a WordPress-friendly web host, it lets users set up and use a variety of CMS options through cPanel. This could be helpful if you want to use a platform such as Joomla, but it also means that you’re not going to get specialized technical support.
Another difference between Kinsta and o2switch is that Kinsta does not separate support into multiple tiers. At Kinsta, we treat every customer as a mission-critical priority, regardless of their plan. All plans include 24/7 premium, multilingual support, with resources that are available in over 10 languages.
We also use the Intercom customer messaging platform to make communication quick and convenient. All communications are logged, so you won’t ever need to repeat yourself to multiple support agents.
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
With o2switch, you get access to a cPanel installation that you can use as your control panel. Although cPanel is a popular solution used by many standard hosting providers, it’s not a solution built with WordPress websites in mind.
In contrast, Kinsta offers a custom hosting dashboard called MyKinsta that includes all the options you need for WordPress management. Our powerful, custom-built online portal gives you access to critical website metrics right out of the gate:
Through MyKinsta, you also get access to all of the following features, which you don’t necessarily get with cPanel:
- Easy one-click backup and restore functionality. o2switch creates backups for you but does it behind the scenes. To restore and download those copies, you’ll need to contact its support.
- One-click staging environments, and an option to restore backups to production or staging. o2switch only lets you clone a website if you have installed it throughout the Softaculous App.
- Premium Amazon Route 53 DNS to manage your DNS records directly in the dashboard. o2switch doesn’t offer a premium DNS.
- Analytics that include visitor, bandwidth, and performance analysis data. o2switch doesn’t provide detailed performance analytics, only basic information about usage and stats.
- A quick-purge option for your cache.
- The ability to switch quickly between PHP versions, which o2switch also offers through cPanel (although it involves a more complex process).
- Quick access to phpMyAdmin, as well as a search-and-replace tool so you can perform bulk updates with ease. o2switch lets you access phpMyAdmin via cPanel, but does not include a search and replace feature for WordPress databases.
- Free automatic Cloudflare SSL certificates. o2switch enables you to add custom SSL certificates, but you have to do it manually.
- A custom WordPress debugging tool.
- Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool that logs information about your website’s performance, including PHP processes, database queries, and more. O2switch doesn’t offer a comparable feature.
- Automatic MySQL database optimizations.
- A multilingual dashboard that’s available in 10 languages: English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch. o2switch users can leverage cPanel translations.
At Kinsta, we also take the opinions and feedback from our users seriously. It’s their input that has enabled us to decide what features are most important, as well as how to optimize our dashboard to make site management as easy as possible. If you have any suggestions for how we can improve our services, we want to hear them!
Kinsta is Developer-Friendly
Kinsta is a developer-friendly WordPress hosting platform. Although many of the features we offer are designed to simplify site maintenance and management tasks, you’ll also get a high degree of control over your server’s configuration.
Some of the developer-friendly options that you get access to with any Kinsta plan include:
- One-click staging environments. With o2switch you can make copies of your site using cPanel, but it’s a more convoluted process.
- Unrestricted access to your site’s critical files, including Git, WP-CLI, and SSH access on every plan. o2switch requires you to reach out to support to open SSH access to a specific IP address.
- Six different types of backups available: automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system generated, downloadable, and backups sent automatically to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. We also offer one-click backup and restore features. o2switch creates backups of your site automatically, but you need to contact support to restore or download them.
- The option to load your site over reverse proxy, which isn’t available from o2switch.
- 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. o2switch lets you change PHP versions through cPanel, but you can’t assign specific versions to each copy of your site.
- The option to use custom setups such as Bedrock and Trellis, which are not available with o2switch.
- APM enables you to debug your website thanks to in-depth logs you can access from the MyKinsta dashboard.
One-click staging functionality is at the heart of our developer-friendly platform. By simplifying the process of creating staging environments and pushing them to production, our goal is to help you update and further develop your site more safely.
Thanks to Kinsta’s APM functionality, you get access to metrics that reflect your website’s true performance, such as the average time it takes to process PHP requests and database queries:
By providing you with access to performance analytics, you’ll be able to spot and debug issues such as slow database queries, poorly optimized plugins, and ensure that your website’s performance remains in top shape.
Finally, our system also supports restoring backups to staging sites. Also, your staging websites aren’t included in your total disk space usage, which is particularly helpful for massive projects.
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! O2switch 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.
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.
o2switch plans do not come with a free APM tool, which makes it very difficult to quickly troubleshoot performance issues on your WordPress site.
Kinsta is Safe and Secure
Another major difference between Kinsta and shared hosting providers such as o2switch is security. Although o2switch may point you toward tools for hardening and safeguarding your site, it doesn’t take the kind of measures Kinsta does to prevent malicious intruders from getting into your network.
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.
As your managed WordPress host, Kinsta takes both active and passive measures to secure your site, including:
- Monitoring sites every two minutes for uptime, which adds up to 720 times every day
- Implementing strict software-based restrictions
- Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) support
- A Cloudflare firewall with built-in DDoS protection
- Automated backups for all plans
- Isolated LXC containers
- Self-healing PHP
- Only support for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP)
Kinsta provides premium uptime monitoring for all of your WordPress sites via our in-house developed monitoring system. o2switch, on the other hand, doesn’t include uptime monitoring with its plan.
Additionally, the status of sites hosted with Kinsta are checked every two minutes. On the off-chance that something were to happen to your site, we offer a free 100% hack-fix guarantee (unlike o2switch).
Kinsta Has a Global Presence
Kinsta has a global presence with 35 data centers (and counting) spanning five continents. Our massive footprint makes it easy for you to pick a different data center for each of your websites. Plus, there are no extra fees or hidden charges!
Our data center locations include:
- 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
This is a considerable difference compared to what you get with o2switch because it has only one data center location in Clermont Ferrand, France. This might be a suitable option for websites with a primarily European audience. However, it’s not helpful if you want fast performance for a global audience, or to choose a different location for each site.
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.
o2switch doesn’t offer CDN integration out of the box. That means that you’re free to use any service you want, but you’ll need to set it up for your website manually and pay for the additional costs.
Feature Comparison Overview
At this point, we want to take a moment to look at some of the biggest differences between Kinsta and o2switch:
| Kinsta | o2switch | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Plans start at $35/month | Plans start at $6/month |
| Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days on all plans | 30 days on the platform’s only plan |
| Premium 24×7 Support | All plans | Tiered |
| Core Infrastructure | Same across all plans (GCP) | Private Datacenter (Cloud Linux) |
| Free Cloudflare Integration | ✓ | X |
| SSH Access | All plans | Via support ticket |
| Global Data Centers | 35 locations | 1 |
| Continent Locations | 5 | 1 |
| Bandwidth Limits | No limits (within AUP) | No limits |
| Container Technology | 100% resource isolation on all plans | X |
| Free Migrations | All plans | X |
| Staging Environment | All plans | X |
| One-Click Backup and Restore | All plans | X |
| PHP Versions | PHP 8.0, 8.1, 8.2 | PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.2, 7.3 |
| Switch PHP Engine | One-click change in dashboard | Manually |
| Cloudflare Firewall | ✓ | X |
| Free CDN | 200+ PoPs (All regions) | X |
| Built-in Edge Caching | 275+ | Not specified |
| Free Premium DNS | Amazon R53 | X |
| Free DDoS Protection | ✓ | X |
| Free SSL Certificates | All plans | Manual setup via cPanel |
| Uptime Monitoring | All plans | No |
| Resource Limits | Only limited by PHP workers | 8 CPU threads, 16 GB RAM |
| Multisite Support | Pro plans and higher | Yes |
| Free APM Tool | Kinsta APM | X |
| IP Geolocation | ✓ | Not specified |
| Reverse Proxy Support | ✓ | X |
| Redis Add-on | ✓ | X |
| New Relic APM (license required) | ✓ | X |
| Multilingual Dashboard | English, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, French, Swedish, Danish, Japan | cPanel translations |
Free WordPress Migrations
A lot of other web hosts advertise free migrations, but rely on plugins to do the work for them. Although there are a lot of quality migration plugins for WordPress, they often stumble when it comes to transferring complex websites. If you run into an error while migrating your site, you want experts at hand to help you troubleshoot them.
This is why Kinsta offers a hassle-free migration process that’s performed by actual humans. All Kinsta plans come with one or more free premium migrations. If you want to schedule a migration, all you have to do is complete a simple request form. Then one of our experts will reach out to schedule the transfer. You’ll be able to follow the entire process from your MyKinsta dashboard.
Best Affiliate Program in the Industry
At Kinsta, we’re proud to offer one of the best hosting experiences in the market for WordPress enthusiasts. Our happy customer base is one of the reasons so many new users sign up for our plans.
To keep up that rapid growth, we’re proud to offer one of the highest-paying affiliate programs in the hosting industry. This provides the opportunity for true profit sharing, and is an effective way to earn a passive income.
As a Kinsta affiliate partner, you can earn as much as $500 (depending on the plan) for every signup referred to us. In addition, for the lifetime of the customers referred, you’ll receive a 10% monthly recurring commission.
Another benefit of our affiliate program is that we use a custom built dashboard, so you won’t ever have to deal with confusing third-party platforms. Everything is accessible and straightforward.
o2switch has an affiliate program, but it’s not as rewarding and participating in it is a more complicated process. You can receive 25% of the web hosting sale price, excluding tax. You’ll also need to open an account with Awin, the third-party intermediary software that o2switch uses to manage its affiliate program.
Join Others Making the Switch to Kinsta
At Kinsta, our mission is to offer the fastest, latest technology possible. We’re always evolving and adapting to use the most innovative solutions available. When you check out our many feature updates, you can see that no other hosting provider releases new options, tools, and integrations at the same rate and frequency.
Although o2switch offers a standard shared hosting experience, it’s rather limiting in terms of scalability. If you’re ready to unlock your WordPress website’s true potential and experience some of the best performance on the market, try out Kinsta risk-free for 30 days!