We have super exciting news! We’ve moved our high end website hosting and care plans to Kinsta, a great managed WordPress website hosting company. If you are on the Mt Aspiring plan or higher, you have already been moved. This website is running on Kinsta right now.
Why is this a big deal?
Our current hosting is great, it’s fast (faster than any company we’d used previously) and secure. So why are we making a song and dance about moving our higher website care and hosting plans to Kinsta?
Partnering with Kinsta to provide this service has huge benefits for both us and our clients (we really like win win scenarios). Kinsta is as good as it gets:
- Lightning fast: We’re seeing average speed gains of 47% for site load speeds for the sites that we’ve moved to Kinsta from our current hosting (which was no slouch). This has an influence on improving search engine position and bounce rates.
- Much faster admin performance: Those same speed gains are also visible when editing content on the site. It’s much quicker to load and that means you get your editing done faster and spend more time doing the things you love.
- More support coverage: We pride ourselves on taking care of your websites like they are our own. However, we have a small team. By partnering with Kinsta we have many more knowledgable support staff, who specialise in WordPress, to call on and issues and tweaks get resolved faster. We can even add you to the Kinsta Dashboard so you can chat with them directly if the situation warrants it.
- Google Cloud Platform: We don’t like talking tech too much but we have to mention that Kinsta runs on the same platform that powers Gmail and Google’s search infrastructure. That’s one of the reasons it’s insanely fast. It’s also why it’s super secure.
- Secure like Fort Knox: We’ve never had a WordPress site on our hosting hacked because we do the right things to manage site security. However, the security setup at Kinsta is next level. They are doing things at scale that exceed what we can offer on our lower plans.
How do you know Kinsta is better than the competition?
We’re a bit obsessed with WordPress hosting here at Avoca. While searching for the best in speed and security and reliability, we’ve been through many of the high end hosting options on the market. Here’s a brief list of the hosting we’ve used over the years
- Openhost
- Dreamhost
- Media Temple Grid
- Media Temple VPS
- WP Engine
- Web Synthesis (now merged with WP Engine)
- Siteground Shared
- Siteground VPS
- Cloudways
- Serverpilot + Vultr VPS’s
- Kloste
- Runcloud + Vultr VPS’s
- Flywheel
- Kinsta
We’ve also dealt with client websites that have their own plans on other hosting companies like Godaddy, Hostgator, Bluehost and many more. So we feel pretty well qualified to give some opinions on what a good host is.
So why choose Kinsta as our managed WordPress hosting partner?
Let’s dive a little deeper into some of the websites that we have moved to Kinsta and why we chose to use them.
1. Fast website loading speeds
Website loading speed is vital to improve your clients and customers experience on your website. It is also a key ranking factor for search engine optimisation that Google pays close attention too. Faster loading websites tend to convert better and help achieve your online goals
We’ve been very impressed with how fast Kinsta loads websites, we haven’t experienced performance like it on any other hosting we have tried. Here’s some impressive numbers from sites that we’ve moved over from our current hosting platform:
Avoca.design
45% speed gain
Client site 1
51% speed gain
Client site 2
43% speed gain
Client site 3
50% speed gain
This website, avoca.design, now loads in under a second (see the speed test). We’ve also noticed a 12.5% decrease in the bounce rate since we moved the website. That means that visitors are more engaged in the website, purely because it loads faster
2. Stellar support, truely, we’re not just saying that…
We’ve been running some sites with Kinsta for about a year and recently moved a bunch more over to them. Inevitably over that time we’ve had some questions, even some quite tricky ones. Their support team has a response time of mere minutes, I think the longest we have waited to get an initial response from a support agent is around 5 minutes. That’s practically unheard of in the website hosting industry.
Once we do hear from them, ALL their agents are knowledgable and we’ve never needed to be escalated up the chain to solve an issue. Many of the other hosts we’ve dealt with, even so called “Managed WordPress web hosts”, don’t always have the knowledge to solve all the issues with their primary support staff. This can result in the issue needing to be escalated to a higher level of support which always leads to delays. The odd time we’ve run into issues with websites we’ve been able to solve them faster on Kinsta.
That means our website care clients get faster resolution to any issues that crop up and a better hosting experience.
3. Reliability
We’ve had very few issues with reliability and “uptime” (the amount of time your website is online without an interruption in service) since switching to Kinsta. NCMA.nz has a 99.99% uptime record over the last three months on Kinsta. Other sites that we host there have a 100% uptime record over that same period. That’s truely remarkable reliability.
Both Avoca and our clients can relax knowing that their websites are in good hands and issues will be extremely rare. This is largely due to the use of the well engineered Google Cloud Platform that also powers all of Google’s online tools.
Even if there is an issue, Kinsta monitor each site on their platform every 2 minutes to make sure it is working well. Often if there is a problem they are already fixing it by the time we can load the chat window to contact support. That sounds like it should be standard across the hosting industry, but we can assure you that it is not.
4. Security
Kinsta take security extremely seriously. So do we, therefore it’s a match made in heaven. They employ advanced security monitoring and prevention tools across their network at a scale that is truely impressive. It’s a bit geeky so we won’t go into details here but rest assured, it’s top notch.
See what Kinsta have to say about their secure platform: https://kinsta.com/secure-wordpress-hosting/
5. Perfect for hosting your Woocommerce online store
When you run an online store you’ll want the best performance and reliability. Woocommerce, the powerful online store add on for WordPress does require some extra resources.
Also online shoppers are particularly picky. Amazon, the biggest online retailer in the world has researched this and found that for every extra 0.1 seconds in website load time, they potentially lose over 290 million dollars. In websites as in life, time is money!
Kinsta are specialists in hosting woocommerce stores, you can rest assured that your store will load fast and you’ll experience the best possible customer experience.
Case study data from real clients after two months on the Kinsta WordPress hosting platform
Our clients are definitely experiencing the benefits of the the higher quality hosting platform.
We analysed two months worth of Google analytics data for two case study clients that we moved to the Kinsta Platform, comparing them with the two months prior on our older hosting platform. Here’s how they performed on Kinsta:
| ‘Client A’ – an ecommerce store | ‘Client B’ – a national non-profit | |
| Page views | 24% more page views on Kinsta | 14% more page views |
| Sessions (visits) | 28% more visits | 23% more visits |
| Unique users | 35% more users | 19% more users |
| Search engine traffic | 21% more traffic from search | 18% more traffic from search |
| Goal Conversions | 115% increase in conversions | 28% increase in conversions |
| Avg Monthly sales | 230% increase | N/A |
Why not use a New Zealand based website hosting solution?
That’s a great question.
Many of the sites we manage have a largely New Zealand audience so why not use a New Zealand web host to make sure that the site is located as close to the audience as possible?
Simple, we haven’t been able to find a New Zealand based web host that can match the blend of speed, security, WordPress know how and reliability that Kinsta offers. As we said earlier, we’ve tried a lot of website hosting companies and we know what makes a good one.
Also Kinsta offers datacenter options in Sydney, this is geographically close to New Zealand meaning that you are not needing to load the website from the other side of the world. Also we employ Cloudflare for it’s security and content delivery network (CDN). Cloudflare has an endpoint in New Zealand meaning that many of the sites files are often accessed from a New Zealand location anyway.
Sounds awesome, how do I get my website onto Kinsta?
If you are an Avoca Web Design website care and hosting client then reach out to us to discuss upgrading your website care plan.
If you are not currently one of our clients then we’d love to chat to you to see how we can help manage your site and improve your website loading speed. If we migrate your website and it’s not faster than your existing hosting then we’ll refund your first months hosting fee.
If you just want to check out Kinsta to see what all the fuss is about, then visit them here kinsta.com
