Bluehost vs. Kinsta

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Bluehost
Score 5.4 out of 10
N/A
Bluehost, headquartered in Orem, Utah, offers website hosting. Bluehost also offers managed WordPress hosting, with optional SEO and marketing tools for WordPress plans.
$19.95
per month for 36 month term
Kinsta
Score 8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Kinsta offers WordPress hosting with daily backups, Cloudflare integration, and 24/7 human-only support available in 10 languages. Boasting users among more than 120,000 businesses in over 128 countries, Kinsta helps to keep sites running smoothly wherever they're accessed and is SOC 2 audited and ISO 27001 certified to meet rigorous standards for security and data protection.
$7
per month 0.3 CPU, 0.3GB RAM
Pricing
BluehostKinsta
Editions & Modules
Shared WordPress Hosting
$3.95-$16.99
per month
Shared Web Hosting
$3.95-$26.99
per month for 36 month term
eCommerce - WooCommerce Hosting
$15.95-$49.95
per month, 1 month to 36 month terms available
Managed WordPress (beta)
$19.95
per month for 36 month term
VPS Hosting
$19.99 - $119.99
per month
Blue Sky Live WordPress Support
$29.00-$149.00
per month
Dedicated Hosting
$79.99-$209.99
per month
WordPress Hosting - Starter
$35
per month 1 WordPress install, 25,000 monthly visits, 10 GB SSD storage
Application Hosting - Hobby
Starting at $7
per month 0.3 CPU, 0.3GB RAM
Application Hosting - Standard
Starting at $20
per month 0.5 CPU, 1GB RAM
Application Hosting - Memory Optimized
Starting at $35
per month 0.5 CPU, 2GB RAM
Application Hosting - CPU Optimized
Starting at $36
per month 1 CPU, 1GB RAM
Database Hosting
Starting at $18
per month Starting at 0.25 CPU, 256MB RAM, and 1GB Storage
WordPress Hosting - Business
Starting at $115
per month 5 WordPress installs, 100,000+ monthly visits, 30+ GB SSD storage
WordPress Hosting - Agency
Starting at $340
per month 20+ WordPress installs, 400,000 monthly visits, 50+ GB SSD storage
WordPress Hosting - Enterprise
Contact Us
per month 60+ WordPress installs, 1,000,000+ monthly visits, 100+ GB SSD storage
Static Site Hosting
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BluehostKinsta
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
BluehostKinsta
Considered Both Products
Bluehost
Chose Bluehost
Bluehost stacks up against them by providing a variety of plans which gives decision-making power to the customers. Also, it has a built-in website builder.
Chose Bluehost
I enjoy DreamHost Over Bluehost, but our business already had many settings set up through Bluehost.
Chose Bluehost
Bluehost is better - easier to use, more reliable, have better customer service and offer more for the price you pay.
Chose Bluehost
Bluehost is somewhat similar in terms of their tech stack and somewhat similar in terms of pricing. I think for websites that want to remain small and operate on the lowest budget possible, Bluehost is sufficient. For websites that are interested in scaling, or need top-tier, …
Chose Bluehost
Bluehost did not stack up against HostGator; in fact, HostGator was where we ended up migrating after we realized Bluehost was not for us. Bluehost is not geared toward businesses, especially ones like ours that have a very customized site. HostGator allowed us the …
Chose Bluehost
Bluehost is more expensive, but they offer a more complete set of tools and seem far better equipped to handle WordPress sites. We wanted the ability to grow our site if necessary and felt Bluehost offered more potential than GoDaddy for long-term support.
Chose Bluehost
GoDaddy & Network Solutions are both priced similarly. I recommend Bluehost over both of these because of its support and upgrade cycles. NS hasn't been updated in what seems like a decade. GoDaddy, on top of its shady advertising and predatory behavior, has terrible support.
Chose Bluehost
Prior to moving over to Bluehost, I was using GoDaddy for 3 years which initially suited me but as I wanted more features and planned on selling products online I noticed the add-ons started adding up. For example, I had to find a free SSL certificate outside of Godaddy as they …
Chose Bluehost
I originally started in Bluehost when I took on a portfolio of existing business websites to manage. In an effort to consolidate my client base into one hosting service, I opted to move hosting and domains to GoDaddy, who is my preferred hosting service. When I started the …
Chose Bluehost
I found WordPress installation to be easier with Bluehost. 1&1 offers a monthly payment plan whereas you have to pay for the entire year with Bluehost.
Chose Bluehost
Bluehost was much better at customer support, and easy of use and initial setup compared to Site5. We were much happier when switching to Bluehost.
Chose Bluehost
I found that Bluehost had a better UX and better prices. It was easier to navigate, easy to update key settings and the 1 touch Wordpress install and automatic Wordpress updates (at the time) made Bluehost a better choice. Also, GoDaddy was having issues with uptime at that …
Chose Bluehost
We now use WP Engine exclusively. We have found the hosting platform and customer service to be well worth the extra money.
Chose Bluehost
We have used other hosting systems such as HostGator and GoDaddy. We had security problems with GoDaddy and HostGator had performance difficulties. With Bluehost we were able to get a solid, secure hosting service overcome our security and performance concerns. While GoDaddy …
Chose Bluehost
Bluehost's VPS offering gives me full control over my container which I don't get with Dreamhost. The size of the container is much more desirable for hosting multiple products, over and above DigitalOcean, and the control panel for Bluehost is far more intuitive than AWS'.
Kinsta
Chose Kinsta
Whilst SiteGround can be cheaper, it uses a lower-tier Google Cloud server infrastructure for hosting compared to Kinsta. SiteGround's support is inferior (it used to be very good) and the new SiteGround UI is not as easy to use or as intuitive as Kinsta. SiteGround also does …
Chose Kinsta
GoDaddy is the one that drove me nuts. Downtime, poor performance, abysmal customer service. I switched to Kinsta because they looked like they’d do right everything GoDaddy did wrong (and they have). Hostinger is a company whose services I still use and am pleased with them. …
Chose Kinsta
We previously used Inmotion Hosting and found their performance, which initially was good, fell away over the years.
Chose Kinsta
Kinsta is the best. There are no alternatives that compare. Someone inside of Kinsta is actually running business development to improve the experience from the bottom position up to the top. There is literally no comparison.
Chose Kinsta
GoDaddy is absolute trash compared to Kinsta Hosting. GoDaddy is the classic case of great marketing, poor service, and even poorer value. I feel bad any time I find a client or someone else using a service like GoDaddy instead of a premium product like Kinsta. The price …
Chose Kinsta
There is no comparison between Just Host and Kinsta. It's like going from driving a junky old sluggish car to driving a brand new fully-loaded race car. Kinsta is so much better, in every way imaginable. Now that I'm with Kinsta, I see the difference and I'll go back to cheap …
Chose Kinsta
The performance of our sites on Kinsta has been an enormous improvement over our prior hosting solution. Also, the admin tools (and the UI that supports it) are far superior.
Chose Kinsta
Both of these two competitors provide different options in terms of comparison to Kinsta. EasyWP is a cheaper option but I have found with shared hosting that our company has spent way more time debugging strange issues b/c of the limitations of shared hosting. We are either …
Chose Kinsta
Our other websites are hosted on a variety of services. The majority are on an onsite host in Texas. The rest are distributed between Linode and DigitalOcean. The nice things about our onsite host and Linode and DigitalOcean is that we have complete control over our servers, …
Chose Kinsta
From a pricing standpoint, Kinsta is a deal that we haven't found can be beat. They are always innovating and adding features to their service, they aren't as inflexible and rigid as many hosted services are. Kinsta often reaches out for feedback, feature requests and including …
Best Alternatives
BluehostKinsta
Small Businesses
SiteGround
SiteGround
Score 9.8 out of 10
SiteGround
SiteGround
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 8.9 out of 10
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
AccuWebHosting.Com
AccuWebHosting.Com
Score 9.9 out of 10
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
BluehostKinsta
Likelihood to Recommend
4.9
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
4.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
3.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
BluehostKinsta
Likelihood to Recommend
Bluehost is a decent all-around choice for web hosting with professional web development and domain management features that are particularly ideal for WordPress websites and blogs. They have a good reputation within the industry as a company that invests heavily in new technology and platform innovation. Bluehost has made a lot of improvements to customize their back-end administration (AMP & control panel) by working to improve the usability and design of the browser interface. Bluehost is primarily focused on customers who use WordPress and we would recommend either their hybrid cloud or managed WordPress platform, which provides everything that you need to build and maintain a popular website. All in all, Bluehost is a well-established brand that continually improves its hosting products, regularly upgrades their data center hardware, and is generally considered a leader in the development of new cloud hosting platform services.
Read full review
Kinsta is perfect if you host with WordPress, which means the team there totally understands every aspect of the CMS and they even suggested changes to the way we host subdomains I hadn’t thought of before. As far as I know, they don’t offer hosting for non-Wordpress websites.
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Pros
  • Bluehost provides a cost-effective website hosting bundle for WordPress.
  • Transferring a domain name was super easy and saved me money on the domain name and domain privacy renewal.
  • Provides a basic free SSL certificate for all websites and offers unlimited websites on the pro plan.
Read full review
  • Developer friendly; WP-CLI; SSH access
  • Amazing support - I never have to wait more than a minute or two to get a response!
  • Kinsta is also willing to troubleshoot issues that are not their own. They don't just say "It's not our problem" without helping to debug the issue.
Read full review
Cons
  • Sometimes the login page does not function properly.
  • You have to purchase hosting for the whole year instead of being able to pay monthly.
  • It doesn't have the option to transfer hosting to another account. My customers have to sign up on their own.
Read full review
  • The ability to restore database only or files only (selection) from a backup
  • Only single staging environments are offered and it would be good to have multiple
  • More control over Cloudflare features within the Kinsta control panel
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
This is an extremely solid hosting product that I have yet to find clients who use it disappointed. I have had clients move from other competitors several times in search of something more reliable and scalable but not after they moved to Kinsta.
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Usability
I use Wordpress for my website on Bluehost, so I already know how it works and happy with it. I gave it this rating as I love the fact that If you do plan on creating multiple websites on Bluehost you'll be able to create specific login access for each website sites making it less likely to enter into the wrong website accounts. Which makes it even easier to manage client websites if you plan to create and host websites on behalf of your clients.
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Their dashboard is really well layed out and simple to use for most users. I also really appreciate the fact that our clients are able to collaborate with us by granting us access. Their site migration tool is straightforward and painless to use as well!
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
We never had any major downtimes with our service, and I believe that's because it's based in a cloud-based network so therefore our system is being shared amongst multiple points.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
As mentioned before the performance was amazing and pages were loading quickly. They also provide other tools to help you improve further.
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Support Rating
When we decided to migrate away from Bluehost, a quick call to their tech-support solved most of our problems, and we immediately got our money back. They did — to their credit — try to accommodate us, but they realize that we needed something else that they couldn’t accommodate. And once that realization set in, customer service immediately refunded us our money.
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They are quick to respond, very knowledgeable and I don't have to be escalated to get my problems resolved quickly. They have an efficient chat system that allows for support requests to be handled quickly and easily picked up by another specialist if the need arises. They are always there when I need them.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Not really it's a really easy to use system and straightforward!
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Alternatives Considered
Bluehost is somewhat similar in terms of their tech stack and somewhat similar in terms of pricing. I think for websites that want to remain small and operate on the lowest budget possible, Bluehost is sufficient. For websites that are interested in scaling, or need top-tier, USA-based tech support 24/7 at their fingertips, then other hosting providers may be better.
Read full review
Whilst SiteGround can be cheaper, it uses a lower-tier Google Cloud server infrastructure for hosting compared to Kinsta. SiteGround's support is inferior (it used to be very good) and the new SiteGround UI is not as easy to use or as intuitive as Kinsta. SiteGround also does not offer as many server-side tools.
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Scalability
The website is slow. The speed is not reliable. Sometimes, sites would go down without warning. You would have to get a VPS to get consistent speed. If you have small website as a hobby, then Bluehost will be sufficient. Otherwise, I recommend looking for something more fast. Storage is good, but speed is lacking
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We worked with clients who have major surges of visitor hits on a Buddhist website, and Kinsta was definitely up to the job. They were able to handle this and still provide excellent performance. As well, it was easy to track down other barriers for Google Ratings using their system to further improve the performance of these clients.
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Return on Investment
  • Because of their level of service and support, we were able to create our web presence in-house without the need to hire an external firm or consultant. Consequently, Bluehost has more than paid for itself.
  • The efficiency of the all-in-one solution means our web person doesn't have to spend time logging into different sites and managing different accounts, and the business office only has to pay one vendor.
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  • Our website was up and running in less than a day
  • Despite not doing a huge advertising drive yet (we're still not ready at the moment), we've noticed a steady increase of organic visitors to the site, at least by 30%, which still isn't a lot in overall numbers at the moment, but that is expected
  • Cost is higher, so we've had to separate a budget just for Kinsta
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ScreenShots

Kinsta Screenshots

Screenshot of the MyKinsta dashboard