Some of you may have noticed that on Monday night our site went into maintenance mode for about 5 hours. This was because we moved hosting companies from SiteGround to Kinsta. This post started out as a general update but after the over the top experience with Kinsta support I’ve taken the time to write up a longer post, they deserve it.
We looked at Kinsta after a customer of ours recommended it to us since we were having continual issues with SiteGround hosting timing out our website. Our website gets a lot of traffic every day and it’s also an ecommerce site. One thing we did to alleviate some of the load was move the support documentation and forum from this site to a Zendesk hosted platform. This helped the load on the server over at SiteGround a little but we still had issues.
When we were on SiteGround we were renting a “cloud server” with 12 cores and 8GB of ram with SSD for storage. Despite our CPU usage and memory usage showing no issues on their control panel we constantly experienced timeouts and crashed of the site. This was something that happened when we were in the backend doing updates and inventory. SiteGround’s response can be summed up to remove plugins (we don’t have that many) and use the site less heavily. Considering we were not showing high usage on the server and we were paying close to $300 a month for the server this was unacceptable.
After getting nowhere with SiteGround support after 12+ support tickets for the same issues, we decided to pull the trigger on Kinsta. All Kinsta does is WordPress hosting, that is it. Their staff know WordPress (and from what we can tell they definitely do). That is what we use and their team so far is amazing. They did the migration in about 45 minutes and the extended downtime was from us setting up DNS records and transferring the domain name to DreamHost (Kinsta doesn’t do domain registration). Once DNS propagated and we put the site live the change was immediately noticeable. Our backend has not crashed once and we’ve been using it heavily now. The orders page would take 10-45 seconds to load on Siteground, on Kinsta its less than 1 second.
We used their support a few times to customize the setup and allow access to some resources for automations we have. Every time they replied on the live chat in under 5 minutes and addressed the issue. SiteGround would reply quick but not actually fix anything.
To sweeten the deal, the plan we are on also includes up to 200GB of CDN usage with really reasonable overages. The CDN is pushing files from 20+ datacenters and the response/load times are very quick no matter where you are in the world. We tried using CloudFlare with SiteGround but their integration always botches the DNS record setup (its automated on their system) for us and took the site down.
I just wanted to give them a huge shout out for not only providing a better service but its also less than HALF THE PRICE of what we were paying SiteGround to host the site before. I’ll be using them going forward for any high traffic WordPress sites in the future and recommending them to anyone that uses WordPress. If we have any issues with them we will be sure to update this post.
Want to check out Kinsta? Click here to use our link.
We love them so much just from this initial impression of the service, migration, and speed that we’ve signed up to be an affiliate with them. We get a small kickback or credit on our hosting bill when you use our link and it does not cost you anything to use it.
You all know how it goes here. If we don’t use it ourselves we don’t sell or recommend it and we can definitely recommend Kinsta for WordPress hosting. Take it easy everyone and I hope you enjoy the quicker site. I’ll be sure to update you if we do have issues with them in the future, but I am very optimistic based on what we’ve seen so far.
Happy Printing (and browsing),
~Tim Hoogland