Kinsta vs. Rackspace Managed Hosting

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.

I would choose zero, but it's not an option. In my opinion, STAY away from this company. Problems can occur, but responsiveness should occur when problems do. In my experience, I've been on hold for more than 9 hours, waiting for promised callbacks for more than 30 hours, and don't have any hope for a near-term resolution.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Fanatical Support - I can't stress how great their team is. Not only are they knowledgeable, whenever I call in (during the day or in the middle of the night), I never have to wait more than a minute to speak to someone.
• Webmail, Hosted Exchange, and Office365 Support - As an IT team of one, Rackspace's cloud solution and migration team has really helped me over the years to minimize issues for users, but also provide a reliable and flexible email platform.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Pricing is competitive, but other providers do beat them out with some of their pricing "features".
• The Cloud Files offering is relatively slow and wasn't usable for us.
• The automated backup feature that is offered for the Cloud Servers is pretty limited and wasn't usable for us.
• There are 2-3 different web management panels, with different logins. It's hard to keep track of which one is which, and can be frustrating/confusing when trying to log in to your panel and choosing the wrong one.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

If I wake tomorrow completely incapable of managing a client cloud operation, our dedicated Rackspace Cloud Engineering Team is deployable as literal extension of our business, immediately addressing all needs and requirements without cause of business disruption for our consultancy, and more importantly for the mission-critical ones of our clients. For this reason alone, Rackspace is our choice of choices!

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

The company does not put as much focus on usability as other cloud competitors and it is kind of clear. It would be good to take a quarter and gather intense feedback, and then another quarter and focus purely on UI enhancements and backend interoperability

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

As mentioned before the performance was amazing and pages were loading quickly. They also provide other tools to help you improve further.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!

Incentivized

Not really it's a really easy to use system and straightforward!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Rackspace is a premier IaaS company with vast resources and an excellent reputation for reliability and support. We have used AWS and Rackspace extensively over the last 10 years, while trying other providers for smaller, less mission critical, requirements. Rackspace has been solid throughout that time, experiencing very little unplanned downtime. During their planned maintenance windows, they were incredibly responsive and helpful in coming up with solutions to deal with the scheduled downtime so as to minimize, or eliminate, the downtime experienced by our customers. We originally started working with Rackspace due to a major outage in the AWS platform, which opened our eyes to needing to diversify where our servers are located so as to reduce the risk on a single point of failure with any single provider. Compared to Linode and Digital Ocean, specifically, Rackspace's offering is much more robust. While those other companies do have a good offering, they did not provide cloud servers with enough resources for our needs (MySQL databases with fast solid state disks, and large amounts of memory available). We did host many machines with Joyent for a time, however, they were very focused on the SuSe operating system, which we wanted to move away from due to it's waning community support and relatively esoteric package management system. Ultimately, Amazon and Rackspace were our two providers for hosting our infrastructure, consisting of several (4-10) application servers, database servers (typically 1 MySQL master with multiple slaves for reporting, backups, and failover), and micro-service host machines.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• We've found it helpful to host our own web sites on their cloud servers, which is a positive.
• We've also hosted our Nagios instance on a low-end cloud server, which is also a positive.
• A negative impact is that they've now decided to start charging for their support.

Incentivized