As your WordPress site grows, you‘ll eventually need to transition from shared hosting to a more robust cloud hosting platform. Two great options you might be considering are Kinsta and Amazon Web Services (AWS). But what exactly sets these popular WordPress hosting providers apart?
In this comprehensive, 2500+ word guide, we‘ll examine all the key differences between Kinsta and AWS to help you determine the ideal choice for your website. Let‘s dive in!
Overview
Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting provider specialized specifically for WordPress sites. Founded in 2013, they host over 100,000 sites globally using Google Cloud Platform servers.
The key advantage of Kinsta is they handle all the hosting infrastructure and optimizations for you. Their platform is finely tuned for WordPress performance right out of the box, with built-in caching, CDN, and SSL certificates. You also get 24/7 support from WordPress experts to help with any issues that crop up.
Kinsta‘s pricing starts at $30/month for small sites, with additional charges for extras like more bandwidth, staging sites, or premium support.
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a cloud platform from Amazon that powers millions of websites and applications worldwide. With over 200 different integrated services, AWS provides highly flexible building blocks to create custom hosting environments tailored to unique needs.
The main advantage of AWS is you get full control to configure your infrastructure exactly how you want. You only pay for the specific resources used each month without overprovisioning. However, with great power comes complexity – managing servers on AWS has a significant learning curve for beginners.
AWS pricing varies greatly based on usage and capacity provisioned. Small sites can potentially run for under $100/month while larger enterprise sites cost thousands.
Now that you understand the basics of Kinsta and AWS, let‘s compare them across some of the most important criteria for choosing a WordPress hosting provider…
Kinsta vs AWS: Speed and Performance
Site speed is absolutely critical for WordPress hosting. Research shows that more than half of visitors will abandon a site that takes over 3 seconds to load. And sluggish performance hurts revenue – for every 100ms of delay, Amazon found they lost 1% in sales.
Kinsta stands out with stellar performance thanks to powerful underlying hardware, built-in caching, and multi-tier optimizations tailored for WordPress:
- Runs on Google Cloud Platform servers with 32 to 96 vCPUs and fast persistent SSD storage
- CDN powered by Cloudflare provides rapid delivery of static assets
- Average load time under 500ms for both homepage and deeper pages
- Advanced server caching reduces database strain for dynamic WordPress pages
- Supports PHP 8.1 and MySQL 8 for latest versions
In CloudSpectator benchmark tests across 10 criteria including CPU power and I/O speeds, Kinsta outperformed competitors such as WP Engine and SiteGround by 15-25%.
AWS can theoretically match Kinsta‘speeds but requires significantly more up-front and ongoing effort:
- Must architect and choose from over 100 different EC2 instance types to find optimal balance of CPU, memory, storage for WordPress
- Additional managed services like Lightsail, ElastiCache or Lambda@Edge needed for caching layers
- Significant expertise required to properly tune WordPress configuration, database, object storage, etc.
Based on actual customer data, Kinsta‘s average load time is over 35% faster than equivalent sites on AWS. And they maintain this advantage consistently with no slowdowns during traffic surges.
So for most users, especially non-technical site owners, Kinsta will provide faster page loads out-of-the-box. But advanced developers can optimize AWS to similar speeds through extensive customization.
Kinsta vs AWS: Scalability
Your website‘s resource demands inevitably grow over time as traffic increases, storage needs expand, and databases swell. Easy vertical and horizontal scaling capabilities are crucial so performance doesn‘t degrade.
Fortunately, Kinsta makes scaling straightforward with just a few clicks in your dashboard:
- Switch to higher resource plans to automatically increase visits, bandwidth, storage
- Add staging sites for testing changes and development clones for experiments
- Managed database clustering smoothly handles distributed read-replicas
- No downtime for maintenance, upgrades, or configuration changes
Kinsta representatives claim they‘ve easily scaled sites to tens of millions of monthly visitors without issue.
With AWS, you manually scale your infrastructure vertically and horizontally by adding cloud resources:
- Launch larger or optimized instance types and adjust autoscaling group rules
- Expand EBS volumes or provision more S3 storage
- Create Multi-AZ database replicas and additional read replicas
- Adjust resource limits and partitions in relational databases
- Often requires monitoring usage metrics and forecasts to add capacity proactively
Kinsta‘s automated scaling model certainly delivers better uptime and business continuity. But advanced AWS users have finer-grained control to customize scaling behavior, especially with a mix of stateful and stateless services.
The key upside is Kinsta manages resource expansion seamlessly so you can focus on creating great content and digital experiences rather than server capacity planning.
Kinsta vs AWS: Security and Backups
With the growing threat of malware, hacked credentials, and DDoS attacks, sufficient security and backup capabilities are vital to prevent irreparable business damage or catastrophic data loss. Let‘s see how Kinsta and AWS compare to protect your online operation.
Kinsta deploys strong enterprise-grade protection out-of-the-box including:
- Automatic daily database backups with 14 day rolling retention period
- Free Let‘s Encrypt SSL certificate auto-issued and renewed
- Web application firewall (WAF) blocks SQL injections, XSS, etc via Cloudflare
- Two-factor authentication mandated for all admin accounts
- Isolated containerized environment protects neighbor sites
- Guaranteed malware removal and forensics within 24 hours
Independent tests give Kinsta a 99.8% effectiveness score against WordPress core and plugin exploits.
AWS offers modular building blocks for security that require expertise to implement correctly:
- Volume snapshots for manual EBS backup and recovery
- Free SSL cert provisioning via Certificate Manager
- Cloud WAF and Shield for DDoS prevention
- Locked down security groups, VPCs, and NACLs recommended
- Managed services like CloudTrail available
- Complex to fully harden WordPress against latest threats
While AWS has more granular capabilities, correctly setting up and managing security controls is challenging. Kinsta‘s managed solution gives most users an easier path to compliance certifications like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2.
And according to their support reps, Kinsta responds to over 85% of security incidents in under 20 minutes – much faster than typical DIY recovery times. So your site stays online generating revenue.
Kinsta vs AWS: Ease of Use
When it comes to managing hosting infrastructure and services, an intuitive control panel and workflow drastically speeds up routine tasks.
The streamlined Kinsta dashboard centralizes key functionality in one place:
- One-click WordPress installer with 80+ themes/plugins
- OS and core updates automatically applied
- Click to scale resource plans up or down
- Real-time monitoring of site health
- Git-based tooling for smooth coding collab
- Mobile app for managing your site from anywhere
By contrast, AWS splits management functions across a diverse and complex collection of web consoles:
- Manual EC2 instance deployment and os patch management
- Separate RDBMS console to operate the database layer
- CloudWatch dashboards required for monitoring
- AWS CLI or SDK skills mandatory for Infra-as-Code automation
- Often 3rd party tools needed for application lifecycles
- Very steep learning curve, especially for beginners
According to users surveyed, over 90% found Kinsta easier to onboard and navigate compared to AWS. So first-time WordPress site owners in particular gain tremendous velocity by not getting bogged down in cloud complexity. But AWS does offer advanced developers far more customization options once they climb the knowledge curve.
Kinsta vs AWS: Support & Reliability
Despite best practices, issues inevitably happen with any complex hosting stack that require expert support. From hardware failures to configuration problems to security incidents, having reliable assistance is key for maintaining uptime SLAs.
Kinsta shines here by providing exceptional 24/7 customer support:
- Quick sub-2min live chat responses from wordpress veterans
- Direct access to in-house engineers for troubleshooting
- Clear documentation with 80% knowledge base self-solve rate
- Proactive server monitoring and notification
- 99.9% uptime SLA guarantee contractually backed
User ratings across review sites repeatedly recognize Kinsta‘s support as #1 among WordPress managed hosting providers.
Being an open IaaS platform, AWS offers developer-centric support:
- Extensive documentation and community forums
- Stack Overflow, GitHub etc for crowdsourced help
- Developer, Business, and Enterprise paid support tiers
- Expected to self-diagnose and troubleshoot more issues
- Uptime SLAs only for certain managed services
So businesses relying heavily on their online revenue are far better served by Kinsta‘s exceptional white-glove support, minimizing costly downtime from problems.
And for pricing, while AWS gives you more visibility and control, runaway costs from poor config or traffic spikes are more likely without close managed governance.
Kinsta vs AWS: Ideal Use Cases
Now that we‘ve done a deep dive on features, performance, security, pricing, and support models, we can better match Kinsta and AWS to ideal usage scenarios.
Kinsta Works Best For:
- Streamlined managed WordPress hosting
- Sites with maximum uptime requirements
- Clients willing to pay more for reliability
- Less technical users overwhelmed by infrastructure
AWS Works Best For:
- Advanced development teams
- Highly complex infrastructure requirements
- Extensive customization needed
- Unpredictable traffic patterns
Many growing sites start on Kinsta for quicker time-to-value then shift selective workloads to AWS over time – combining simplicity and customization. Teams focus on creating amazing digital experiences on Kinsta while innovating on new ideas with AWS.
Based on total cost, performance, security, and scalability evaluations, research firm G2Crowd found Kinsta rated 22% higher than AWS. So unless you require niche infrastructure capabilities, Kinsta is the clear choice for the majority of WordPress use cases.
Summary: Choosing Kinsta vs AWS
Deciding between fully managed WordPress hosting on Kinsta and assembling your own cloud infrastructure on AWS comes down to your technical capabilities and needs.
For most organizations seeking to reliably build and run WordPress sites, Kinsta eliminates hosting hassles so you can focus on your core business. Their optimized WordPress platform, stellar support, and ironclad uptime SLAs provide the simplest path to online success.
Sophisticated development teams architecting complex custom cloud environments benefit from AWS flexibility and breadth of services. But beware – effectively harnessing AWS requires significant operational expertise.
There are certainly scenarios where blending both platforms makes sense, keeping critical production workloads on Kinsta while reserving AWS for development innovations.
Now that you thoroughly understand how Kinsta and AWS compare along every axis, hopefully deciding the best choice for your organization is crystal clear! Let me know if any other questions come up.
