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 — or if you have heard of them, it’s late at night.
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, right?
For WordPress, that’s WPEngine, Flywheel, Mediatemple — and, the latest entrant, Kinsta.
Tier 2 for WordPress includes, GoDaddy, Sitepoint, Bluehost… We have literally endured pain and suffering at each of these vendors. We will never go back.
Here’s why Kinsta crushes it by a mile:
One: they don’t make you wait in line for support. There is no line, in fact. You launch the chat widget and ask you a question. Wait a moment, and you get an answer.
Let’s have a moment of silence in reverence for this holy vendor.
Every other vendor we’ve used and tested makes you get in line and wait. Sometimes it’s a long time. Most of the time it is in fact 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. Everyone is accustomed to fast. So if you have a business that you care about, don’t pinch pennies on the one thing that matters most: customer experience.