You’d want to go for something that has excellent support, security, performance, and an interface that doesn’t put you in a tough spot. Luckily, there are quite a good amount of such hosting providers out there, and one of them is Kinsta. They’re powerful yet very user-friendly. And because I think they’re worth talking about, I’ll be testing out a small portion of their performance today, particularly page load time and TTFB. I’ll be using different tools for it, and from different locations. If that sounds interesting, then stick around till the very end.
Overview of Kinsta’s Performance
Top performance is necessary for any site if you want to retain users and rank higher on search engines. It’s a smart move to check how a hosting provider does when it comes to performance, and I understand that’s why you’re here to read this article. Fortunately, Kinsta is known for being great at the performance aspect, and why wouldn’t it be, after all its underlying infrastructure is Google Cloud Platform. It gives you that extra reliability and pushes towards an impressive performance. With that being said, that’s really not the only reason why Kinsta does so well. It’s actually their offerings, which include:
Solid-state drive (SSD) storageServer-level caching (which eliminates the need for an additional caching plugin)Integrated Content delivery network (CDN)Servers that are run on modern technologies, such as Linux, NGINX, MariaDB, and othersRegular optimization of server and database tailored towards specific WordPress needs
The fact that Kinsta has 24 different datacenter locations gives you the freedom to choose a server that is closest to your users. This helps in delivering better speed and overall performance.
My Test of Kinsta’s Performance
After seeing all that hype and claims around Kinsta’s performance, I decided to take the matter into my own hands and went ahead to test it for myself. I’ll be using geekflarelab.com for this test. Since Kinsta has servers in many locations, I decided to host this particular site on Los Angeles’s server. There are also no caching plugins installed on it, and it uses the popular Astra theme on it. Keep in mind; I’ve included some dummy content on the site to mimic a real-functioning site so that the test results are fair. With all that cleared, let’s first jump into the page loading time via different tools.
Pingdom
Let’s start with the popular one – Pingdom Speed test. 1.29 seconds, pretty cool. Isn’t it?
GTmetrix
GTmetrix shows 1.4 seconds on the “fully load time” tab. This is from Vancouver, Canada location. It is also worth looking at TTFB (Time to First Byte), so here is the result: I’d say 188ms for the first byte is quite amazing.
Dotcom-tools
It would be unfair to test page speed from only one location, so I went ahead and used Dotcom-tools that test the page load from 25 different locations. As you can see, it was loaded in less than 2 seconds from most of the places. One thing you’ll notice is that, since my demo site is hosted in Los Angeles, it receives a way better speed from the nearby locations as compared to the ones that are far away. The learning point? Always host your website as close as possible to your audience.
Geekflare Audit
Let’s try with Geekflare Website Audit, which leverages Google Lighthouse. That was impressive! Let’s see how it performs on a mobile device. In less than 1 second, it was fully loaded on mobile. And the time to the first byte is 118ms on desktop and 119ms on the mobile.
BlazeMeter
How about performing load tests to see how it behaves when there is traffic? I am using BlazeMeter, which is a cloud-based load testing performance. I am testing with 50 concurrent users for 5 minutes. And, the result surprised me. As you can see, it performed consistently with a response time around 700ms, which is fantastic.
Conclusion
Kinsta is definitely one of the performance-based hosting providers out there, and the speed test above totally reveals that. It really does balance things as opposed to being heavy on only one area. It provides great speed, support, security, and as well as affordable pricing. You get to enjoy every aspect of it while also not burning your wallet. I hope this performance test helps you in deciding whether this hosting company is good for you or not. If you ask me, I’d say it’s a pretty good package.
