DigitalOcean vs. Kinsta

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
DigitalOcean
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York. It is known for its support of managed Kubernetes clusters and “droplets” feature.
$5
Starting Price Per Month
Kinsta
Score 8.2 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
DigitalOceanKinsta
Editions & Modules
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price 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
DigitalOceanKinsta
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
DigitalOceanKinsta
Considered Both Products
DigitalOcean
Chose DigitalOcean
The target segment of DigitalOcean is application developers and small teams working in startups for easily configuring and deploying infrastructure in the cloud. We selected DigitalOcean for some of our usecases as it is cost effective and easy to integrate with compared to …
Chose DigitalOcean
Simple, and quick setup, competitive pricing as well as geographically you can choose the location of the datacenter. The setup of the machine with RAM / CPU and SDD gives all options, it is just what we always needed and find our self very well with such type of service by …
Chose DigitalOcean
I chose DigitalOcean over Oracle Cloud because it's simpler, more cost-effective, and quicker to deploy. DigitalOcean’s intuitive interface allows me to manage servers easily, while Oracle Cloud is more complex and suited for larger enterprises. Also, DigitalOcean’s transparent …
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is an inexpensive product as compared to other products available in the market. The UI is easy and the beginner can also understand the UI with the step by step guide. It provides a lot of custom features and the user needs to pay only for what they are using. …
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is really one of the cheapest options out there for dedicated servers. Plus, their pay-per-use pricing helps companies to grow at their own pace without having to pay for a higher performance or service they don't need initially. Their platform is well built and …
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is an easier and cheaper way to [set up] new machines. The UX is really good and it's easy to find what you need. Competition offer[s] a complicated way to manage machines and the cost is sometimes more than [...] double of what DigitalOcean offer[s]. However[,] …
Chose DigitalOcean
As I have said, DigitalOcean was slightly more expensive than something like HostGator, but the amount of customization and quality of service make it worth any difference. AWS was always a pain to set up and use, but DigitalOcean makes it cake.
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is not quite as simple as Heroku to get up and running, but it provides a better price point and more configurability. However, in my opinion it's much simpler to get up and running with than AWS Opsworks and even Google App Engine. It also provides a better price …
Chose DigitalOcean
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Heroku Platform and Google Compute Engine
Chose DigitalOcean
Digital Ocean is easier to start with and was a great choice for that project. On other projects, I may choose Google Cloud products because of their more complex product offerings and advanced features.
Products like Storage or Pub/Sub isn't available on Digital Ocean and the …
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean can be seen more like a Rackspace or a similar provider. They aren't offering more extended services such as AWS Redshift of something on a larger scale. They are great for just vanilla virtualization and maintaining uptime for those resources across a large set of …
Chose DigitalOcean
Amazon has a very complex UI and many products to offer. They haven't polished up their UI and it has a much greater learning curve compared to DigitalOcean. However, Amazon Web Services (AWS) does have more comprehensive cloud computing services, which forces some companies to …
Chose DigitalOcean
Initially we started using DigitalOcean due to their pricing point as we were in development phase. Slowly when we used it, we starting liking it a lot as it is very fast & easy to get started, compared to the other Cloud Providers we've used. Also they have blogs and …
Chose DigitalOcean
Site5's customer service and support have declined over the recent years. The last couple of tickets that I submitted in 2016 were never addressed by their help team. The only customer service agent seems to be on their Twitter account. Site5 does not allow any configuration of …
Chose DigitalOcean
Vultr is a new player in the game. They don't advertise their hardware model and for that reason, people may not trust them. I have run few benchmarks on Vultr, they performed slightly better than DigitalOcean but they aren't trustworthy. Their transparency index is very low …
Chose DigitalOcean
Compared service to service, Digitalocean comes out on top usually, for smaller better spec servers. This is what they do, and specialty shops are always the best route, with no exception here. However, if you need more than a server, or are not comfortable doing more than …
Chose DigitalOcean
Cheaper than Heroku which is prohibitively expensive for a small self-funded startup. We quickly outgrew their free tier and migrated to DigitalOcean. AWS is more feature complete however, we found its maintenance overly confusing and not as well thought out. For many use cases …
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean has a much lower price point for VPS - but they are not fully managed as with other services. DigitalOcean VPSs are good for quick simple applications that we are comfortable and efficient at deploying ourselves. We do not generally recommend them for clients, as …
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean isn't nearly as robust as Google Cloud. DigitalOcean provides VPSs, as does Google Cloud. However, Google Cloud offers many other products as well.

ChunkHost is very similar to DigitalOcean, but doesn't have the infrastructure that DigitalOcean has. Geographical …
Chose DigitalOcean
AWS: Too complex to set things up. Period.
Mediatemple: Great features, services and customer service. Prices are a bit high for what they offer.
Linode: Outstanding features and customer support. Difficult to start with for novice users.
Chose DigitalOcean
My cost savings were significant and I felt like I was much more in control of the hardware and processes. I also had issues with certain marketing decisions my former hosting company made, DigitalOcean was an easy choice!
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean's dead simple pricing and solid but basic feature set combine for a no-nonsense way to get your product shipped. Its API makes it nicely scriptable/automate-able compared to traditional shared hosting providers like Dreamhost. I think it compares most closely with …
Chose DigitalOcean
Linode was my long time go-to and we still have several sites hosted and maintained on their servers. Initially, I was skeptical of DigitalOcean's pricing, but they've proven to be an excellent alternative. Linode is more mature in their toolset, but both are really great …
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 …
Features
DigitalOceanKinsta
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
DigitalOcean
8.3
Ratings
3% above category average
Kinsta
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime9.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images7.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support8.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation5.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DigitalOceanKinsta
Small Businesses
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
SiteGround
SiteGround
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DigitalOceanKinsta
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(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
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DigitalOceanKinsta
Likelihood to Recommend
DigitalOcean is a powerful tool with respect to the services and pricing that it offers. It is easier than other products and also provides servers that are inexpensive with great performance. DigitalOcean also offers additional add-ons such as additional IP addresses, scheduling of backups, etc. One of the best advantages is that it is efficient and is open source. Although, it is suited for a firm that is looking to cut down cost. Also, it is not suited for an organization where the dev/platform/DBA team is less experienced.
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.
Read full review
Pros
  • Ease of use - You can get set up with a new server in a matter of minutes. It doesn't get any easier than that.
  • Support - The public forums are incredibly helpful as are the official help articles. I've never needed to contact the support team because of this. All of the information is at my fingertips.
  • Pricing - We're only paying $10/mo for a solution that gives our customers more confidence in us and is a selling point for us.
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
  • Some products/services available on other Cloud providers aren't available, but they seem to be catching up as they add new products like Managed SQL DBs.
  • While they have FreeBSD droplets (VMs), support for *BSD OSs is limited. I.e. the new monitoring agent only works on Linux.
  • There are no regions available on South America.
  • They don't seem to offer enterprise-level products, even basic ones as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle products, etc.
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  • 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
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Likelihood to Renew
I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!
Read full review
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
With DigitalOcean it is very easy to start up a server/droplet. They have several templates and server images to select from, and they have good instructions on how to get a server set up and started. The monitoring tools in the dashboard look good and are easy to understand.
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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
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
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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
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
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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
They have always been fast, and the process has been straight-forward. I haven't had to use it enough to be frustrated with it, to be honest, and when I have an issue they fix it. As with all support, I wish it felt more human, but they are doing aces.
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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
I chose DigitalOcean over Oracle Cloud because it's simpler, more cost-effective, and quicker to deploy. DigitalOcean’s intuitive interface allows me to manage servers easily, while Oracle Cloud is more complex and suited for larger enterprises. Also, DigitalOcean’s transparent pricing helps control costs, unlike Oracle’s more intricate and complex pricing model.
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
Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
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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
  • DigitalOcean has very competitive egress pricing, which has been positive for reducing our costs when running services with a large amounts of data transfer
  • DigitalOcean templates have helped us quickly launch services that would otherwise require a lot of configuration (saving time)
  • We haven't had much in the way of negative ROI impacts using DigitalOcean as we don't use it extensively for our core product, but based on personal project experience it can require more engineering time to get up and running with than some other infrastructure services like Heroku. This has been one of the greatest barriers in pushing its adoption in our organization.
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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