Kinsta vs IONOS
Kinsta and IONOS 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
The former 1&1: unlimited sites and traffic from $8 a month at renewal, with a free domain and wildcard SSL
Kinsta wins 5 of the six sub-scores and comes out ahead overall (7.9 vs 7.1).
How do the scores compare?
Kinsta leads on 5 sub-scores, IONOS on 1. Higher is better.
Which one is faster and more reliable?
Which one costs less?
On renewal, IONOS is cheaper ($14.00/mo vs $30.00/mo). Intro prices need the listed term.
What does each include?
| Kinsta | IONOS | |
|---|---|---|
| Free domain | No | One domain free for the first year on every plan: .us, .ca, .com, .net, .org, .info, .me, .biz or .online |
| Free SSL | Wildcard certificates through Cloudflare on every plan | One DV wildcard certificate on Essential, Starter and Plus; unlimited wildcard certificates on Ultimate |
| 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 backup of storage and databases with data recovery, every plan |
| Free migration | Unlimited migrations by Kinsta's team | No |
| 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 | Starter, Plus and Ultimate; not on Essential |
| Caching | Server-level caching and edge caching through Cloudflare | Server compression and HTTP/2 listed; no caching layer named on the plan page |
| Staging | Free one-click staging environments on every plan | No |
| No | 1, 2, 4 or 5 accounts of 2 GB by plan, with forwarding, webmail and anti-spam | |
| 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 | CPU priority 1x, 3x, 5x and 10x by plan; 262,144 inodes on every plan; cron jobs 10, 25, 50 and 100 |
| Data center choice | 30 locations chosen per site at creation | No |
| 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 | 99.99% in the general terms, with a credit for the month proportional to the downtime, on request and at IONOS's discretion |
| Security | Fully managed WAF with DDoS protection, bot protection, free malware removal, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 | Daily malware scanning (basic, or advanced with automatic removal on Ultimate), DDoS protection, geo-redundancy |
| Developer tools | SSH, WP-CLI, Git, DevKinsta local environment, Kinsta API, built-in APM | Not stated |
| Phone support | No | 24/7, with a personal consultant |
| Windows hosting | No | No |
| SSH, SFTP, WP-CLI and Git | Not stated | Every plan, with 200 SFTP accounts, Perl and Python |
| PHP versions | Not stated | 8.4, 8.3 and 8.2, with paid extended support for 5.6 and later |
| Websites and traffic | Not stated | Unlimited websites and unlimited traffic on every plan; 5,000 subdomains |