Kinsta vs Cloudways
Kinsta and Cloudways compared on measured uptime, response time, pricing and features from our own tests. Kinsta scores higher overall.
By Jennifer T. · Updated
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Verdict
KinstaWins overall
Managed WordPress hosting from $30 a month with flat renewals, 30 data centers, edge caching and 14-day backups
DigitalOcean's managed cloud layer: servers from $11 a month on five clouds, billed hourly, staging and caching included
Kinsta wins 3 of the six sub-scores and comes out ahead overall (7.9 vs 7.8).
How do the scores compare?
Kinsta leads on 3 sub-scores, Cloudways on 1. Higher is better.
Which one is faster and more reliable?
Which one costs less?
On renewal, Cloudways is cheaper ($14.00/mo vs $30.00/mo). Intro prices need the listed term.
| Kinsta | Cloudways | |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest plan | Single 20GB | DigitalOcean Premium Micro |
| Intro price | $30.00/mo | $14.00/mo (better) |
| Renewal price | $30.00/mo | $14.00/mo (better) |
| Required term | 12 months | 1 months (better) |
| Websites | 1 | unlimited |
| Storage | 10 GB | 25 GB |
| Money back | 30 days (better) | 0 days |
What does each include?
| Kinsta | Cloudways | |
|---|---|---|
| Free domain | No | No |
| Free SSL | Wildcard certificates through Cloudflare on every plan | Let's Encrypt certificates on every application |
| Backups | Daily automatic backups kept 14 days on the entry plans (20 or 30 days higher up), plus manual, downloadable and hourly add-on backups | On-demand and scheduled server backups with one-click restore; offsite storage billed at $0.033 per GB per server |
| Free migration | Unlimited migrations by Kinsta's team | Free migration of existing sites |
| Free CDN | Cloudflare CDN with edge caching, 260+ points of presence per the pricing page; 125 GB of CDN bandwidth a month on the entry plans | No |
| Caching | Server-level caching and edge caching through Cloudflare | Lightning Stack (NGINX), Object Cache Pro and Redis included on every plan |
| Staging | Free one-click staging environments on every plan | Advanced staging and cloning on every plan |
| No | No | |
| Resource limits | Each site runs in its own container; plans are sized by server bandwidth or visits, storage and CDN bandwidth, with PHP worker counts in the compare table | A whole server per customer: 1 to 8 GB RAM and 1 to 4 vCPU on the listed sizes, larger sizes and other providers available |
| Data center choice | 30 locations chosen per site at creation | The provider's regions, chosen per server: DigitalOcean 9, Vultr 30, Linode 25, AWS 28, Google Cloud 28 |
| Uptime guarantee | 99.9% per month in the SLA updated 25 September 2025, with credits as a percentage of the monthly value once downtime passes 43 minutes; up to 99.99% on custom plans | No |
| Security | Fully managed WAF with DDoS protection, bot protection, free malware removal, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 | Built-in firewall with IP blocking, WordPress vulnerability scanner, bot protection and dedicated firewalls per the pricing page |
| Developer tools | SSH, WP-CLI, Git, DevKinsta local environment, Kinsta API, built-in APM | Not stated |
| Phone support | No | No |
| Windows hosting | No | No |
| Free trial | Not stated | 3 days without a credit card |