Anyone have experience with Kinsta?
I am currently using WPEngine, but wondering if Kinsta offers any real advantages.
If it makes a difference, the majority of my users in Central/South America and Spain. And the site is using Wordpress.
Or is there another hosting option which would be even faster than both of these?
While both WPEngine and Kinsta are reputated hosts, instead of using a managed WordPress host, you may host the site yourself (or with the help of a server admin). There are some advantages of using your own hosting. For example, you may enable the latest technologies such as Brotli compression that makes the site a bit leaner thus faster.
You mean to just pay for a dedicated server somewhere and set it up myself?
Would I be able to see a significant boost in speed?
No comparison of speed.
WPEngine refugees represent my highest client density. Their tech is great for low/no traffic sites, then circles the drain under high traffic load. Also you have zero access to system logs, so no way to debug how to fix the problem.
Kinsta I haven’t used.
If you have a low traffic site, you can use any hosting.
If you expect to have significant traffic, the consider dedicated iron/servers (OVH or KimSufi).
Dedicated servers require you do your own admin or hire someone, so you will have additional costs.
You other option is to look for LXD hosting, which provides the best of all worlds, so long as the hosting company personnel know what they’re doing.
Look for someone who can deliver between 100K-1M+ requests/minute throughput for your WordPress site, when running h2load on the command line.
I use LXD for 100s of sites + the 1M+ requests/minute is very doable on garden variety OVH machines.
@Pothi brings up a good point about mod_brotli which also applies to every layer of tech.
The only way for you to control this + use latest tech, is by using dedicated servers.
For example, on 2018-06-29 PayPal began rollout of banned use of TLSv1.0 + TLSv1.1 SSL protocols.
For all my LAMP stacks, I fixed this months before the apocalypse date hit.
The fix, a single line change in my global Apache config file.
Many big sites were hit by this. For example, Ontraport forms all broke, when PayPal rollout was applied to the Ontraport site.
My point. The only way for you to control your destiny is admin your own machine or have someone smart admin your machine or LXD container for you.
Yes, that’s what I meant.
It depends on what you meant by significant boost and your site’s existing speed. It is very easy to bring down the load time from say 1 minute to 20 seconds. From 20 seconds to 10 seconds, it is easy too. From 10 seconds to 5 seconds, we need to work a bit. From 5 seconds to 3 seconds, we may need to put a lot more work. From 3 seconds to 2 or to 1, much more effort is needed. Going further below 1 second requires a lot of work, time and money.
You said, “You mean to just pay for a dedicated server somewhere and set it up myself?”
You said, “Would I be able to see a significant boost in speed?”
Correct. I you have the experience to setup + also tune (that’s the big one) every layer of the LAMP stack, then you’ll likely see significant speed increases…
If… you make good choices about your selection of theme + plugins.
For example, recently I tested a social sharing plugin.
Just by adding this plugin to a page, increased page load time by 12 seconds.
Point being, WordPress is fast.
The only way WordPress ever slows down relates directly to theme + plugin choices.