Kinsta vs DreamHost
Kinsta and DreamHost 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
Independent since 1997: three shared plans with renewals printed on the card, daily backups and a 100% uptime credit
Kinsta wins 5 of the six sub-scores and comes out ahead overall (7.9 vs 7.6).
How do the scores compare?
Kinsta leads on 5 sub-scores, DreamHost on 1. Higher is better.
Which one is faster and more reliable?
Which one costs less?
On renewal, DreamHost is cheaper ($10.99/mo vs $30.00/mo). Intro prices need the listed term.
What does each include?
| Kinsta | DreamHost | |
|---|---|---|
| Free domain | No | First year, on annual and multi-year terms only |
| Free SSL | Wildcard certificates through Cloudflare on every plan | Unlimited certificates on every plan |
| 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 | Daily automated backups on every plan, restored from the panel |
| Free migration | Unlimited migrations by Kinsta's team | The product page links a migration path for existing sites; terms not read |
| 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 | No |
| Staging | Free one-click staging environments on every plan | No |
| No | 20, 40 or 60 mailboxes free for the first three months, then billed separately | |
| 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 | No |
| Data center choice | 30 locations chosen per site at creation | Oregon, Virginia, Amsterdam and Singapore per the product page and help center; the panel shows where each service lives |
| 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 | 100% in the terms, with a credit of one day of hosting per hour of qualifying downtime, up to 10% of the next renewal, counted from the support ticket |
| Security | Fully managed WAF with DDoS protection, bot protection, free malware removal, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 | Not stated |
| Developer tools | SSH, WP-CLI, Git, DevKinsta local environment, Kinsta API, built-in APM | Not stated |
| Phone support | No | No |
| Windows hosting | No | No |
| Performance scans | Not stated | Automated and on-demand performance scans on every plan |