HostGator Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta (original) (raw)

Are you looking for a HostGator alternative? You’ve come to the right place. Our unique, powerful solution for managed WordPress hosting is optimized for speed and performance. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

Introduction

HostGator provides cheap, entry-level hosting plans for starter websites. However, if you want to get the most from your web host, then speed, security, and reliability should be among your top considerations.

Kinsta is an expert in managed WP hosting for 10+ years and is well-known for top website performance, world-class support, and the powerful MyKinsta dashboard that makes website management a breeze. More than 230,000+ clients all across the world, including some of the biggest companies in the world, rely on Kinsta.

I am certain there is no better hosting than Kinsta. I have used GoDaddy, Bluehost, and HostGator, and a few others for a total of 17 years with over 200 websites. Kinsta is in a class in itself far above and beyond ALL others I’ve used, and cannot be compared to any I mentioned or have compared online in thorough search. The hosting platform is exceptionally superior to all in every respect

How Kinsta Compares to HostGator in a Nutshell

Kinsta’s infrastructure is fully containerized and enables us to provide you with a large selection of the fastest data servers, incredible performance, server-level caching, dedicated resources, and enhanced security. Gone are the days of worrying about sharing resources with other sites, including your own!

All sites on Kinsta are protected by our enterprise-level premium Cloudflare integration, free for all customers. It includes a secure firewall, HTTP/3 support, DDoS protection, free CDN, and other benefits. You also experience transparent resource consumption, costs, and pricing.

We are also proud to be the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2, the world’s leading software review and comparison site.

Feature Comparison Overview

Let’s take a moment to review some of the key differences between Kinsta and HostGator:

On select plans

At Kinsta, we only allow encrypted SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) and SSH connections for direct WordPress access. HostGator, on the other hand, only allows less secure FTP connections. Also, SSH access isn’t available by default at HostGator and requires shared or dedicated hosting.

Enjoy a 29% Faster Website Simply by Moving From HostGator to Kinsta

We measured 3,200+ migrations over the course of a three-month span. On average, client sites that came from HostGator to Kinsta experienced 29% faster load times.

How is this possible? Our customers enjoy:

• The latest generation of virtual machines.
• A stack that’s been fine-tuned for WordPress over the past 8 years.
• Free CDN powered by Cloudflare’s global network of 300+ locations.
• Built-in Edge Caching that cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
• Containerized sites, meaning no more shared hosting/resources at any plan level.
• Early Hints feature, a modern web standard that can help immediately improve how quickly your pages load by providing additional information on what resources to preload, resulting in faster page rendering speed.

Migrate from HostGator to Kinsta hassle-free with our free expert migration service. With our 30-day money-back guarantee, you can test out the service and improved speeds completely risk-free. You only lose if you don’t give this a try!

Kinsta vs HostGator

Let’s take a look at some of the major differences between Kinsta and HostGator:

• Kinsta is a leading managed WordPress hosting provider that offers all-in-one solutions for managing your website and supports 27 data centers across a global network, while HostGator has 2 disclosed locations.
• Kinsta uses high-performance servers for all plans in supported locations.
• Containerized Solution. Kinsta offers a unique infrastructure that containerizes site resources so they don’t have to share. This increases and levels your performance on a per-site basis. No more worrying about sites you don’t manage potentially stealing your resources. It also helps minimize your time spent troubleshooting performance issues as you no longer have to account for potential resource stealing.
• Because of Kinsta’s unique containerized hosting, you can also host multiple sites on multiple data centers, all within the same plan! No more having to pay for multiple servers just to host sites in different locations. Help your clients get an instant performance boost by simply hosting their site on a server that’s more appropriately located for their customer base.
• Kinsta CDN takes advantage of our Cloudflare integration and its worldwide network that spans almost 300 cities in more than 100 countries. We don’t need to know where you are to know there is a Cloudflare server near you. That means lightning-fast server requests to your website. It’s available at no extra cost on any Kinsta plan.
• Kinsta offers six types of backups: free automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system-generated, downloadable, and external backups sent automatically to your Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. We also store two weeks of backups at all times, with the possibility to increase data retention.
• Kinsta is well-known for its world-class support, composed of WordPress experts and Linux engineers, available 24/7 for all our customers via live chat, with an average response time of under 2 minutes. We offer multilingual support across all of our plans, and our engineers are experienced and capable of solving any hosting issue on your WP site.
• Kinsta performs continuous MySQL database optimization on all your sites to ensure better performance.
• All Kinsta plans include free access to our custom application performance monitoring tool (Kinsta APM) for debugging WordPress performance issues. For customers who prefer New Relic, we support that as well, but you must have your own license.
• Sites on Kinsta are equipped with a self-healing PHP feature. We monitor all sites on our infrastructure 480 times per day and offer an uptime guarantee.
• Kinsta provides free website migrations for all plans. HostGator offers free content migrations within 30 days and after that for a fee. Also, the number of sites you can migrate for free with HostGator varies by plan.
• Rather than the traditional cPanel that HostGator offers, Kinsta provides a custom-built, WordPress-specific MyKinsta dashboard.
• You’ll get a free staging environment and SSH access with all Kinsta plans. SSH access is only available to HostGator users on shared and dedicated plans.
• There’s reverse proxy support on all Kinsta plans.
• Our custom MyKinsta dashboard includes a variety of useful site management tools that are not available on HostGator, such as database search and replace, APM tool, free IP Geolocation manager, PHP restart, and more. HostGator uses the general cPanel control panel that’s lacking a lot of site management tools.
• Kinsta has a unique system that caches pages at the server level. Our built-in Edge Caching cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
• For developers and agencies, Kinsta offers a powerful local development tool called DevKinsta. With DevKinsta, you can clone and develop your projects locally and push updates to Kinsta when ready.
• Kinsta is well-known for its world-class support, composed of WordPress experts and Linux engineers, available 24/7 for all our customers via live chat, with an average response time of under 2 minutes. We offer multilingual support across all of our plans, and our engineers are experienced and capable of solving any hosting issue on your WP site.
• Kinsta is SOC2 compliant, which provides independent proof that we have established security procedures and adhered to those procedures over time. HostGator is not SOC2 compliant. See Kinsta’s Trust Report for additional information.
• Kinsta offers premium, 24/7 multilingual support to all customers.
• Kinsta provides an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee on all plans.
• Kinsta provides a 30-day no questions asked money-back guarantee.
• Kinsta offers a 100% Malware Security Pledge.

Read on to see the details of each Kinsta feature and how they compare to HostGator. Or try it out right now with our risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee.

Kinsta Is Built for Performance and Scalability

If you’re looking for a performance-oriented and scalable host, Kinsta’s got you covered. Our custom-built hosting platform is optimized to deliver incredible speed, performance, and scalability, whether you’re running a personal blog or an ecommerce store doing millions in revenue.

At Kinsta, you can scale up and down between plans with just a few clicks and transparent resource consumption. Best of all, there is no downtime when switching plans, and your hosting bill is automatically prorated with a transparent and controlled cost!

With our powerful cloud infrastructure, we ensure that the traffic to and from our customers’ sites is routed around the world as quickly as possible. When it comes to page load times and site performance, every millisecond counts!

High-performance virtual machines form the foundation of our hosting infrastructure. Beyond that, our high-performance hosting stack consists of orchestrated containerized software containers and managed hosts and highly tuned configurations for Nginx, PHP, and MariaDB. Our unique containerized infrastructure allows sites hosted on Kinsta to automatically scale CPU and RAM usage in response to traffic surges.

As part of our Cloudflare integration, Edge Caching saves your Kinsta site/page cache to any of Cloudflare’s global network of 300+ data centers.

HostGator offers affordable discount plans, many of which are lacking in advanced features and tools that you would need for large or high-performance websites (such as e-commerce stores). As one customer pointed out:

“You pretty much get what you pay for in terms of performance, disk space, and bandwidth. This is the perfect place for hosting sites that you don’t want to spend much money on and where you don’t care about performance, at a low, fixed, annual cost.”

Kinsta Is Safe and Secure

At Kinsta, we know that the security of your data is of the utmost importance, which is why we’re dedicated to providing the most secure hosting service by taking a variety of active and passive measures to safeguard your site.

All sites on Kinsta are protected by our free Cloudflare integration, which includes an enterprise-level firewall with a custom ruleset and DDoS protection. With our Cloudflare integration, you’ll get the benefits of enhanced security and performance without having to manage your own Cloudflare account.

Some of Kinsta’s key security measures include:

• Monitoring sites every three minutes for uptime, 480 times a day.
• Rigid software-based restrictions to stop malicious code from entering your website.
• Real-time DDoS attack detection and mitigation.
• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) support and automatic bans for IPs that have more than six failed login attempts in a minute.
• A dedicated Security Team to address malicious attackers, hacks, and exploits.
• Free Cloudflare integration with a secure firewall and built-in DDoS protection.
• Only support for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP).
• Completely isolated containers to prevent cross-infection from other clients.
• Free Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard domain support.
• 100% Malware Security Pledge if your site is infected with malware while hosted on Kinsta.
• Automatic security checks for every plugin installed to discover vulnerabilities and/or security issues.

In the rare event that something were to happen to your site, our Malware Security Pledge means you will get hands-on assistance from our engineers free of charge. We’ll restore your site and make sure it’s free of backdoors that hackers can take advantage of.

With HostGator, advanced security features are only included on high-performance plans. Most plans only include weekly backups. If you want daily backups, you’ll need to handle them yourself.

Kinsta Is Developer-Friendly

We created a WordPress hosting solution tailored for developers without sacrificing ease of use. Everything from our custom dashboard to our products and tools is built to help improve your productivity.

Some developer-friendly features and tools you’ll have access to as a Kinsta customer include:

• SSH, Git, and WP-CLI access on all plans.
• Custom setups like Bedrock and Trellis, as well as starter themes such as Sage.
• One-click WordPress staging environments that allow you to easily push changes from staging to production as well as conveniently clone your site.
• Run a different version of PHP for each live site and staging site, and switch between PHP engines takes just one click. We currently support 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5.
• Post and page revisions enabled by default. While we recommend limiting or disabling these, we believe this should be your choice.
• Load your site over a reverse proxy.
• Built-in free APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tool for troubleshooting WordPress performance issues.
• DevKinsta, a free local development tool.
• Restore backups to staging as well as production.

With Kinsta as your hosting provider, you have all the tools needed to manage your WordPress site, regardless of your technical knowledge.

Interested in moving to Kinsta? We’ll do it for you!

Let our migration team take care of everything for you. It’s free, fast, and easy.

MyKinsta: A Custom-Built Dashboard for Powerful Site Management

At Kinsta, we believe in empowering our customers with powerful features to make WordPress site management a breeze. MyKinsta dashboard is built with usability in mind.

With features like search and replace, force HTTPS, URL redirects with IP geolocation support, IP deny, Application Performance Monitoring, Edge Caching, Early Hints, Cron Jobs, PHP threads, and more, you have a wide array of powerful tools for managing your WordPress site. MyKinsta even includes a comprehensive analytics dashboard that provides insights into key site metrics.

The MyKinsta dashboard.

Let’s look at some of the features that make our MyKinsta dashboard so powerful:

• Toggle between different PHP versions. Kinsta supports PHP 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5.
• Application Performance Monitoring tool that gives you all the necessary PHP and MySQL data to debug WordPress performance issues.
• High-performance object caching with our Redis add-on.
• Get detailed analytics on bandwidth and visitors, CDN usage, cache HIT & MISS rates, and more.
• Access to one-click staging environments and the option to restore backups to production or staging.
• Quick phpMyAdmin access.
• Automatic MySQL database optimizations.
• One-click ionCube enabler.
• Free Kinsta DNS (powered by Amazon Route53) to manage your DNS records directly in the dashboard.
• One-click CDN setup with Kinsta CDN.
• Purge the site cache directly from the dashboard.
• Redirect management with IP geolocation support.
• IP Deny tool that lets you quickly block IP addresses before they reach your site. Free automatic Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard domain support and the option to import your own.
• A toggle for enabling WP_DEBUG mode.
• Password protection for your environment and the ability to strengthen login security by adding your SSH keys to the dashboard.
• The dashboard is available in 10 languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Swedish, Danish.

There’s no need to simply take our word for it, though. Schedule a live demo today and explore the user-friendly interface and plethora of tools to see firsthand what makes MyKinsta different from the competition.

Kinsta API

Say goodbye to the limitations of the past and enjoy a revolutionary era where machines can seamlessly interact with our services. Kinsta API (Application Programming Interface) allows you to perform tasks on your Kinsta site without logging in to the MyKinsta dashboard.

Create an API key

What’s possible with Kinsta API?

• Reporting: seamlessly integrate Kinsta Services into your internal tracking systems and retrieve Kinsta analytics data effortlessly.
• Scheduled Tasks: create applications to schedule tasks, ensuring minimal disruption to your visitors.
• WordPress Site Creation: create a new WordPress site installation automatically and take control of your site’s functionality. You can also create WordPress Multisite installations.

Enjoy more automation than ever before on the Kinsta platform by taking advantage of Kinsta API.

Expert Support for WordPress

At Kinsta, we treat every customer as a mission-critical priority, whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, agency, or global enterprise. Our support team of WordPress experts is available 24 hours a day year-round, including holidays, weekends, and late nights (wherever you are).

Kinsta’s WordPress hosting support conversation rating chart.

We don’t rely on a tiered support system, which means we won’t waste your time with escalations and transfers. No matter the plan you are on, you have access to the same team of WordPress experts.

HostGator’s low score on Trustpilot.

In addition to multilingual support and resources available in over 10 languages, we’re also proud to maintain an initial ticket response time average of under two minutes!

Unlike HostGator, our 24/7 support also includes technical support. While HostGator says it includes 24/7 support for all its plans, it only lists “live 24/7 support” for the dedicated plans. Plus, there’s no guarantee you’ll get a response in mere seconds like you do with Kinsta.

Kinsta provides a fantastic product and rock-solid support when it’s needed. We are recommending the platform more and more to our clients. The bonus of reduced pricing for non-profits makes it a no-brainer for hosting your WordPress site.

All Kinsta plans come with a free custom-built APM tool that can be easily accessed in the MyKinsta dashboard. Kinsta APM provides you with key WordPress performance insights and metrics without the need to pay for third-party subscriptions to other APM services.

With the information you get from Kinsta APM, you can debug and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks, These include:

• Slow WordPress plugins and themes.
• Long calls to external APIs and domains.
• Unoptimized MySQL database queries.
• PHP execution time

HostGator plans do not come with a free APM tool, which makes it very difficult to quickly troubleshoot performance issues on your WordPress site.

Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads

As a managed WordPress hosting company, we understand the importance of a platform capable of supporting high-traffic, resource-intensive ecommerce sites. We also recognize the unique and demanding challenges that come with powering online stores. This is why we optimized our platform for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.

WooCommerce and other WordPress ecommerce plugins rely heavily on CPU performance because they cannot be efficiently cached. This is where our next-generation hosting architecture really shines.

Kinsta has allowed us to offer a bulletproof service to our top tier clients and keep them happy. Especially those who have traffic spikes with sudden server demand.

Our expert engineers are very familiar with WooCommerce and have developed a custom workflow that optimizes performance. Some of the ways we enhance the WordPress ecommerce experience include:

• Excluding ‘My Account,’ checkout, cart, and other pages that shouldn’t be cached.
• Ensuring a smooth checkout process by automatically bypassing the cache for users when woocommerce_items_in_cart or edit_items_in_cart are detected.
• Implementing specific rules to allow EDD and WooCommerce functionality during server-level page caching.

HostGator offers ecommerce features only with the highest plan.

Develop Locally With DevKinsta

With DevKinsta, you can launch WordPress sites with a full hosting stack and SSL support on your local computer (macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu) with just a few clicks.

DevKinsta is fully integrated with MyKinsta and Kinsta’s hosting platform, so you can join the 60,000+ community members using DevKinsta to develop locally and push updates directly to a staging environment on Kinsta!

HostGator doesn’t have an integration with a local WordPress development tool, which means there is no way to clone and push WordPress sites for HostGator customers.

If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver.

Free Migrations From Real People

Whether you want to move one site or 100, Kinsta provides hassle-free migrations that are handled by our skilled WordPress experts. You won’t have to deal with complex technology or risk losing critical data.

If you’re interested in moving your site to managed WordPress hosting, we offer unlimited free migrations from HostGator! Our migrations are performed by an expert migrations engineer.

To get started, simply complete our site migration request form, and our experts will reach out to schedule a time. Then you can track the migration’s status directly from your MyKinsta dashboard.

Kinsta is reliable and makes shipping changes easy. The support team was exceedingly helpful when we needed to migrate our blog. A+ on their support team.

Things are very different with HostGator. Technically, migrations are free, yet there are some important caveats to note. First, the migration options HostGator provides vary by plan. For example, you can only migrate up to one site on the WordPress hosting starter plan, with a maximum of three for the business plan.

Also, for fully-managed dedicated plans at HostGator, offsite backup solutions are available only as an option, and data migrations are ‘upon request.’ With HostGator’s semi-managed plans, you need to perform your own data backups and migrations.

Rather than DIY migrations, our WordPress experts take care of everything for you, free of charge. You save time and money!

Turbocharging Your Content Delivery With Kinsta CDN

In addition to free bandwidth, all Kinsta plans include a free Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is a premium HTTP/3-enabled CDN to deliver your content lightning-fast across the globe.

As part of our Cloudflare integration, our built-in Edge Caching saves your Kinsta site/page cache to any of Cloudflare’s global network of 300+ data centers.

When site visitors load your website in their browser, cached responses will be delivered from the location closest to them. Edge Caching is free with all Kinsta plans and doesn’t require a separate plugin.

Our content delivery architecture was tailor-made for high throughput and low latency. You can enable the CDN directly from your MyKinsta dashboard.

With HostGator, CDN is available as an add-on feature for SiteLock plans.

Agency Partner Program

Kinsta has an Agency Partner Program specifically designed for agencies looking for a powerful and secure hosting platform with minimal overhead. After joining our Agency Partner Program, your agency will be able to focus on developing client projects and expanding your business while we handle the hosting side of things.

Our Agency Partner Program also comes with a number of perks:

• Free hosting for your agency site on a Kinsta WP 2 plan (a $70/month value).
• Unlimited free migrations for your client sites.
• White-label our cache-clearing plugin with your agency’s logo and branding.

As a member of our Agency Partner Program, all your client sites will receive the same level of support, features, and tooling offered on our normal plan tiers!

Affiliate Program With Recurring Commissions

Kinsta is constantly exceeding our client’s expectations. Our satisfied customers are eager to spread the word about our products and services, which has helped us become one of the fastest-growing hosts in the industry.

For every referral of Managed WordPress Hosting, you earn both:

• An initial one-time bonus, between 50and50 and 50and500, is calculated based on the plan of the customer.
• A 10% monthly recurring commission is paid every month for the lifetime of the customer. The 10% is calculated out of the plan’s monthly fee (discounts applied). Add-ons are not included.

This is a powerful opportunity to earn a passive income!

To make the Kinsta affiliate experience even more enjoyable, we custom-built our own easy-to-use affiliate dashboard. Therefore, you won’t have to deal with complicated or confusing third-party platforms.

HostGator also has an affiliate program. However, the max commission you can make per month is $125 (and that would require at least 21 qualified signups).

HostGator doesn’t pay recurring commissions for the lifetime of a referred customer. This means the HostGator affiliate program doesn’t allow you to build a passive income stream.

Join Others Making the Switch to Kinsta

At Kinsta, we offer the fastest, latest technology possible. We’re constantly evolving and adapting to leverage the most innovative solutions available. You can see for yourself simply by checking out our Changelog!

We are confident in our solutions and want you to be 100% satisfied with your hosting, which is why we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee and free migrations from HostGator. It’s time to move away from HostGator and switch to our managed WordPress hosting platform.