Pressable vs. Kinsta:
A Managed Web Hosting Comparison

Why Compare?

There’s perhaps no greater consideration when it comes to your website than the host you’ll choose to partner with. You could spend months designing the perfect user experience, but if the site takes forever to load, gets hacked, or is impossible to maintain, all of that work is pretty pointless.

It’s worth investing some time into making the best decision. Both Pressable and Kinsta offer managed WordPress hosting solutions, but there are some key differences between the two.

While Pressable is one of the hosting providers we’re comparing here, our mission is to provide you with an honest overview of our services in comparison to Kinsta’s and help you choose the right host for your specific needs.

An Overview of Pressable

Pressable is a world-class managed WordPress hosting provider owned by Automattic (the parent company of WordPress.com, Jetpack, and WooCommerce, and others). You’d be hard-pressed to find a host with more intimate knowledge of WordPress.

Pressable’s focus is on reliable, scalable, and highly-available web hosting, so plans are crafted with the latest technology to keep your visitors happy and your projects safe. Pressable uses superior WP Cloud infrastructure, the first and only cloud platform solely dedicated to WordPress.

Pressable allows maximum developer freedom while requiring minimal hands-on work from busy site owners. An easy-to-use dashboard simplifies the management of all aspects of your hosting experience, including integrations with top-performing applications, website monitoring reports, and free migrations. Paired with 24/7 support from top WordPress experts, Pressable is a great alternative to Kinsta.

An Overview of Kinsta

Kinsta is a managed WordPress host built on Google Cloud servers, a reputable infrastructure, but not one that’s exclusively dedicated to WordPress. It provides scalable plans for websites of all sizes, including multi-site installations.

Hosting plans and general solutions at Kinsta focus on website performance. For example, they perform weekly automatic MySQL optimization on every website to remove unnecessary bloat and improve site load times.

However, as we’ll cover later, some of their best features come with added fees or are only available for higher-tier plans.

Pressable vs. Kinsta Comparison Table

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty details, here’s a quick breakdown of how Pressable and Kinsta stack up against each other.

Hosting Package Options

Hosting plans, along with the resources and features included, add-ons available, and final price, differ for each provider. Keep in mind that, for the purposes of this article, we’ll focus primarily on the entry-level plans from Pressable and Kinsta. Keep both the current and future needs of your website in mind as you make your comparison.

Resources and Pricing

Server resources affect your website’s performance and overall functionality. If you exceed your limits, depending on how your host handles overages, your site could slow down dramatically, or even crash. Or your host could bill for additional fees. So, it’s important that you understand the resources allotted with each plan.

Let’s compare Pressable and Kinsta when it comes to resources:

• Pressable’s starting plan provides 20GB of storage, while Kinsta’s starts at 10GB
• Pressable has unlimited bandwidth on all plans. Kinsta discontinued their legacy bandwidth plans and now charges based on user visits. Should your site exceed these limits, you will incur an overage fee.
• Pressable provides 5 base PHP workers (5 vCPUs) per site. PHP workers are background processes that execute your website’s code and impact your site’s performance. Kinsta only provides two base PHP workers per site unless you have a custom plan.
• Pressable has a 100% uptime guarantee, ensuring that your site is always reachable. Although Kinsta comes close with their uptime SLA is 99.9%.

When it comes to pricing, both companies offer a wide range of plans for businesses of all sizes:

• Pressable plans start at $20.83 per month ($250/year)
• Kinsta’s Single 35k plan starts at $30 per month ($350/year)

Features and Premium Add-ons

Base level features are not the only consideration when choosing your hosting partner. Let’s look at the free and premium bonuses offered by each company.

Ease of Use

The resources available and features included with your hosting plan are important, but there are other factors you can’t ignore — like day-to-day account management.

Pressable’s easy-to-use dashboard offers quick access to critical tools for advanced developers and the tech-averse alike.

Here’s what you can expect to see when you log in to your account dashboard at Pressable:

• Sites: Get a high-level view of your websites, their status, and current performance metrics.
• Domains: View your current domains, set up a new one, or customize DNS records.
• Collaboration: Add or access your team members’ information and modify their permissions.
• Usage and reports: Review your disk usage report across your websites.
• Billing and tools: Here, you’ll find the information you need to stay up-to-date on your account status and make any changes.
• API applications and documentation: Learn about the Pressable API, how to generate tokens, and ways to utilize your connection.
• Knowledge base: Navigate to the knowledge base tab to get full access to Pressable’s documentation right from your dashboard.

The MyKinsta dashboard provides access to domain, database, and website management tools, as well as resource usage logs.

Developer Friendliness

When it comes to ease of use for developers, both Pressable and Kinsta score high points.

For example, Pressable is loaded with developer-friendly tools and resources, including:

• API applications and documentation
• GitHub integration
• SSH and WP-CLI access
• Staging environments
• Optimization tools
• Plugin update scheduling
• Uptime and security monitoring
• SFTP access

To streamline the development process, account admins can edit and modify user access and permissions at a granular level directly from the Collaborations tab on the dashboard. This makes managing teams a simple process.

Kinsta also includes a variety of tools for developers:

• Kinsta API and documentation
• SFTP access
• Optimization tools
• Uptime and security monitoring

Kinsta also has DevKinsta, a free local WordPress development suite, powered by Docker, to create and test website updates or develop new themes or plugins.

On the organization administration side, Kinsta, like Pressable, has a user menu that allows admins to specify the roles and access of your team members and clients.

Performance

The speed and reliability of your website is affected, in large part, by the technology used by your hosting provider and the resources included with your plan.

Why is a fast-loading website so critical? Websites that load in one second have three times the conversion rate of sites that load in five seconds. And most people will simply leave a site altogether if it takes much longer than that.

Let’s look further at how Pressable and Kinsta stack up for performance.

Resource Allocation

Pressable has the advantage on this front, as you get more allocated resources to power your website. This includes more CPU storage, unlimited bandwidth, and 5 Base PHP workers (5 vCPUs) per site (up to 100 PHP workers to handle traffic spikes). This is a big win in Pressable’s column, as Kinsta’s low PHP worker count has been a continuous contention point for customers in the past.

According to the latest performance review by WP Hosting Benchmarks, Pressable is nearly untouchable when it comes to speed: “Pressable brought the speed again this year. Pressable had:

• The fastest p95 on the Load Storm test and the second fastest Asset speed.
• the fastest Static test, with an average response time of 5.2ms and 12ms p95.
• Perfect uptime on both monitors.

Another year, another Top Tier for Pressable.”

Scalability and Traffic Spikes

As your website grows, the resources allocated to your plan may not be enough to handle the incoming volume, especially during a large influx of traffic.

So how do hosts handle this? Pressable includes an auto-scaling feature with all plans, which adapts to your traffic and ensures that your site stays online. And if you exceed the resources available with your plan, Pressable won’t throttle your site as other providers do. There are no extra fees, and no downtime.

Kinsta does offer scalable hosting, but it’s limited to their agency and application hosting packages, and overage fees will apply to your account if you surpass their resource limits.

Site and Data Security

With cyberattacks an ever-present threat, your hosting provider should prioritize security with all of their plans.

Both Kinsta and Pressable provide the following security services to their customers:

• DDoS protection: Prevents distributed denial-of-service attacks, which flood your server with traffic, slowing down your site and potentially even taking it down entirely
• A web application firewall (WAF): Filters out malicious traffic that could lead to SQL injections, cross-site forgery, and more
• Spam protection: Keeps your comment sections, forms, and user registration fields free from annoying and dangerous spam
• Malware scanning: Constantly scans your website files for infection and immediately alerts you when something is wrong.
• Hack recovery: Gets your site back up and running thanks to a team of malware and security experts
• Downtime monitoring: Monitors your website for any disruptions and alerts you if it finds anything

Pressable takes things a few steps further by offering Jetpack Security (a $239 value) with all of their plans. Pressable also employs a dedicated security team and has a bug bounty program with HackerOne to continually track and mitigate vulnerabilities.

Website Backups

As its name suggests, a backup is an archived version of your site that you can restore should something go wrong with the live version. Any hosting provider you choose should include a robust backup program.

Backups aren’t just a security feature, either. If a plugin update breaks your site or a developer makes a mistake, restoring a backup could save you hours of downtime.

Pressable plans come with daily, hourly, and on-demand backups completely free. These files are also held for 30 days, meaning you can breathe easy — even if you realize that a change you made two weeks ago caused an error. And if you take advantage of the included Jetpack Security plan, you’ll benefit from real-time, off-site backups so every change, order, comment, or form submission is always safe.

Kinsta provides all customers with free daily and up to five on-demand backups, but only holds them for 14 days. If you need something more frequent, you’ll have to pay a fee of up to $100/month, per site, for backups every six hours.

WooCommerce Support

If you run an ecommerce store, you need features and tools that support store management as you scale. Many companies charge premium prices for “specialized” ecommerce hosting plans. But at the end of the day, they have the same features and resources as the rest of their plans.

All Pressable plans are ecommerce-ready. The features you need for a successful WooCommerce store — like auto-scaling, real-time backups with Jetpack Security, and top-tier website protection — are built into every single plan.

In terms of customer support for WooCommerce stores, you won’t find better than Pressable. Since they’re an Automattic company, their support team understands the needs of WooCommerce stores and can provide specialized help.

Kinsta does offer WooCommerce hosting, but the plans are the same as their standard WordPress hosting packages. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good fit for certain stores. International ecommerce stores will benefit from more than 35 data centers around the globe so that their sites load quickly no matter where customers are located. They’ll also benefit from automatic scaling during times of peak traffic and a built-in analytics dashboard.

Agency Support

If you run an agency, you understand the importance of a quality hosting provider that you can not only recommend to your clients, but that also simplifies your project management and workflow.

Pressable has lots of tools geared towards agenies:

• 100% uptime guarantee
• Auto-scaling and performance optimization
• Jetpack Security plan
• Streamlined dashboard to manage multiple websites
• Create team and client accounts with super customizable, granular permissions
• Schedule custom plugin updates
• Staging tools
• GitHub integrations to thoroughly test and develop, then push client sites live
• 24/7 customer support from knowledgeable WordPress experts

Pressable is also part of Automattic for Agencies. This is a partnership program that grants agencies access to specialized support, centralized billing, and a dashboard to manage all client licenses for Automattic products.