When you’re considering WordPress hosting, it’s like picking a car rental company at the airport: there are two tiers.

Tier 1 is the credible, professional tier.

Tier 2 is includes the companies you’ve never heard of.

Unless you’re under financial duress or a penny pincher, you are going to choose a professional vendor.

So for cars, that’s Enterprise, Avis and Hertz.

For WordPress, that’s WPEngine, Flywheel, Mediatemple — and, the latest entrant, Kinsta. Tier 2 for WordPress includes, GoDaddy, Sitepoint, Bluehost… I have literally endured pain and suffering at each of these vendors. 

Here’s why Kinsta crushes it by a mile:

One: they don’t make you queue for support. You launch the chat widget and ask you a question. Wait a moment, and you get an answer. Every other vendor I’ve used and tested makes you get in line and wait. Sometimes it’s a long time. Most of the time it’s a long time. 

“You’re number 15 in line.”

No thanks.

Two: Kinsta has the most PHP workers available for its business tiers. Why does this matter?

PHP workers determine how many simultaneous requests your site can handle at a given time. WordPress’s pages are put together “on the fly” so concurrent requests happen 100% of the time. Practically speaking, this is about user experience — both inside of WordPress (as an admin or content writer) and outside of WordPress (as a visitor to the site). Kinsta’s business tiers start with 4 php workers. It has literally made working with WordPress a joy again.

WSL had considered moving off of Kinsta at the end of last year — to save a few bucks — but the moment I saw an announcement that they were increasing the number of php workers across the board, I aborted that endeavor. Why, because page speed is king. User experience is king. 

So if you have a business that you care about, don’t pinch pennies on the one thing that matters most: speed.