AWS Alternative : Top Managed wordpress hosting

If you’re looking for an Amazon Web Services (AWS) alternative for WordPress hosting, Kinsta has you covered.  From the Google Cloud Platform to our unique architecture, scalability, and developer-friendly features, Kinsta offers a unique, powerful solution for managed WordPress hosting.

Kinsta is a bit different from the other WordPress hosting companies out there. Yes, we provide 24/7 WordPress support, but what really sets us apart is our Google Cloud-powered infrastructure. That’s right; we don’t run on AWS! We offer blazing fast performance and top-notch security based on Google Cloud Platform services. And if you have a Kinsta account, you can even access the Google Cloud Console and check out GCP for yourself.

Introduction

For developers and other technically-literate WordPress users, Amazon Web Services (AWS) can be a viable option for hosting your WordPress site. By setting up your hosting environment directly on virtual machines, you could learn more about the technology that powers the modern internet. 

However, relying on Amazon for your WordPress hosting isn’t without issues. Maintaining peak performance on an AWS setup requires a level of technical expertise, confidence, and dedication that most website owners just don’t have. For webmasters who simply want a “set-it-and-forget-it” solution, AWS isn’t a viable option. 

Every day we encounter AWS clients who are looking for an easier hosting solution with more accessible support. Many also want to learn what makes Kinsta so unique.

That’s what we’ll answer here. We’ll explain what makes Kinsta unlike other solutions, and discuss the major benefits of using Kinsta as your managed WordPress host.

How Kinsta Compares to AWS in a Nutshell

Before we take a deep dive into the specifics of Kinsta vs AWS, we first want to offer a brief breakdown of the key differences between these two solutions.

Kinsta is the first host to be powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform. Google’s premium-tier network positions us to maximize the speed, security, and performance of each site hosted on our network.

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

Let’s take a look at some other differences between us and AWS:

• AWS is a generic cloud services provider, while Kinsta is a specialized managed WordPress hosting provider.
• Kinsta’s singular focus enables us to offer a better user experience for hosting WordPress sites.
• The Kinsta setup is WordPress-optimized, which makes creating and managing your site simple and straightforward. With AWS, you need to set up and configure your own virtual machines, which is complicated and resource-consuming.
• Kinsta includes everything you need to maximize website performance and security on each of our plans. With AWS, you’ll be responsible for collecting, purchasing, and combining the tools together yourself. 
• Kinsta provides premium 24/7 support on all our plans, no matter if you’re a startup, a small business, or a Fortune 500 company. AWS offers support only for server-related issues and requires you to pay extra for technical support (starting at $29 per month). In addition, AWS doesn’t provide WordPress-specific support.
• All Kinsta plans come with our custom-built, WordPress-specific MyKinsta dashboard with one-click WordPress installation and staging features.
• Kinsta has scored “top tier performance” for the past five years on Review Signal’s annual performance reviews. As AWS is a cloud provider and not a WordPress host, AWS isn’t involved in these benchmark tests. However, on Review Signal AWS has an overall rating of 67%, a support rating of 55%, and an uptime monitoring rating of 98%.
• Kinsta offers simple, straightforward hosting plans and packages, which can be easily integrated with add-on solutions. AWS plans can be complex and confusing.
• Kinsta takes active and passive measures to safeguard your site and prevent malicious code from entering our network. AWS doesn’t provide any WordPress-specific security features.
• Kinsta offers 29 global data center locations, as compared to AWS’s 13.
• All Kinsta plans included a free CDN and premium DNS. AWS, on the other hand, charges for CDN traffic on top of regular cloud storage and usage fees.
• Kinsta automatically performs weekly database optimization for all your sites, whereas with AWS you’d need to take care of database optimization tasks yourself.
• Unlike AWS, Kinsta offers out-of-the-box ecommerce-optimized caching.
• All Kinsta plans come with a one-click staging environment feature. At AWS, you need to set up and manage staging environments from scratch yourself
• Kinsta provides easy SSL implementation using free Cloudflare certificates, which aren’t provided with AWS.
• All Kinsta customers benefit from Google Cloud’s premium global tier network, which provides faster load times for your website visitors.
• Kinsta provides free, human-performed migrations with all of our plans, offloading you from the time-consuming website migration process.
• Kinsta has a 30-day money-back guarantee, while AWS doesn’t provide full refunds.
• Kinsta provides an automatic site healing feature and monitors your website for uptime 720 times a day.
• We offer six types of backups including automatic daily backups. At AWS, you need to take care of backups on your own.
• Kinsta offers a 100% hack-fix guarantee for all sites hosted on the platform.
• Kinsta has a very attractive affiliate program with recurring commission.

Try it out for yourself with our free MyKinsta dashboard demo! Register your account to see the user-friendly interface and explore our various tools.

MyKinsta: A Custom-Built Dashboard for Powerful Site Management

At Kinsta, we know that our clients deserve the best. We weren’t satisfied with any of the open source or premium control panel options on the market. That’s why our talented team of developers developed a custom hosting dashboard that is tailor-made for WordPress site management:

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

• Toggle between different PHP versions with the click of a button.
• Get detailed analytics on bandwidth and visitors, CDN usage, cache HIT & MISS rates, and more. 
• Access one-click staging environments, and the option to restore backups to production or staging. 
• Benefit from quick phpMyAdmin access.
• Use premium Amazon Route 53 DNS to manage your DNS records directly in the dashboard.
• Get one-click CDN setup.
• Use a dashboard tool to purge the site cache easily.
• Leverage simple redirect management.
• Quickly and easily block IP addresses via the IP Deny tool.
• Make use of New Relic integration.
• Free Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard support, or import your own. 
• Access a WordPress debugging tool.
• A built-in Cloudflare integration with optimized settings to secure and boost the performance of your site without the need for a separate Cloudflare subscription.
• Get password protection for your environment, and the ability to strengthen login security by adding your SSH keys to the dashboard. 
• Use a multilingual dashboard that’s available in 10 languages: English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch.

Why take our word for it, though, when you can try our dashboard out for yourself! Simply register for a free account to explore the user-friendly interface and plethora of tools, and see firsthand what makes MyKinsta different from the competition.

Kinsta is Safe and Secure

At Kinsta, we know the security of your data is a critical priority for most webmasters. That is why we’re dedicated to providing the most secure hosting service on the market.

We take active and passive measures to safeguard your site. Some of Kinsta’s most important security measures include:

• Monitoring sites every two minutes for uptime, 720 times a day.
• Putting strict software-based restrictions in place.
• Free DDoS protection, and stopping malicious code from entering our network.
• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) support.
• Dedicated malware and abuse team.
• Secure firewall powered by Cloudflare.
• Automated backups for all plans, so you never lose your site or data. We also store two weeks of backups at all times, with the possibility to increase data retention.
• Self-healing PHP.
• Only support for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP).
• Completely isolated containers (LXC), using LXD to orchestrate them so there’s no chance of cross-infection from other clients.
• Automatic bans for IPs that have more than 6 failed login attempts in a minute.
• Free Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard support.
• 100% hack-fix guarantee.
• Automatic security checks for every plugin installed, to discover vulnerability and/or security issues.

Kinsta provides premium uptime monitoring for all of your WordPress sites via our in-house monitoring system. Even in the worst-case scenario, our security guarantee means you will get hands-on help from our engineers, free of charge, to restore your site and make sure it’s free of backdoors that hackers can take advantage of.

All sites on Kinsta are automatically protected by Cloudflare’s firewall, which includes free DDoS protection. With our Cloudflare integration, you’ll get the benefits of enhanced security and performance without having to configure your own Cloudflare account.

With AWS, you also have access to basic virtual firewalls, DDOS protection, monitoring, and HTTPS through Let’s Encrypt. However, you don’t get any of the WordPress-specific security measures we offer.

Expert Support

At Kinsta, we pride ourselves on delivering a premium level of support to all our customers. You don’t need to pass a million-dollar threshold of expenditure before you get attention from our support team.

Our support team is available 24 hours a day year-round, including holidays, weekends, and late nights. Therefore, you don’t need to worry about being left hanging if you’re faced with an urgent issue. Kinsta WordPress experts and Linux engineers are always ready to provide quick answers to your questions.

We treat every customer and site as a mission-critical priority, whether you’re a solopreneur, agency, or global enterprise. In addition to multilingual support and resources that are available in over 10 languages, we also maintain an initial ticket response time average of under two minutes.

Just ask our clients! For the past two years, over 97 percent of our customers closed a chat support session happy or satisfied with the support they received:

With AWS, you need to pay extra if you want access to any sort of technical support, starting at $29 per month.

Free Performance Monitoring Tool

WordPress is a dynamic CMS, which means it’s constantly executing PHP code in the background. Depending on your theme and plugin configuration, it’s possible for your site to get bogged down with bloated and inefficient code.

That’s where APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tools can help. An APM monitors requests to your site, and tracks various metrics like external API requests, database queries, PHP execution time, and more. This information allows you to quickly debug and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks.

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

With Kinsta APM, you can debug the following and more:

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

Amazon Web Services is a fully unmanaged service, so it doesn’t come with any built-in APM tools. You have the option of installing New Relic and other APM tools on AWS servers, but the setup process is fully manual and often very complex.

Furthermore, after installing server-side APM packages, most services will require an expensive monthly subscription (New Relic is $99/month) to read and analyze the data. With Kinsta APM, you get a custom-built performance monitoring tool specifically built for WordPress – for free.

Kinsta is Developer-Friendly

The core team at Kinsta is mostly made up of developers, which has made it easy for us to develop a WordPress hosting solution tailored to the needs of those users. Everything from our custom dashboard to our products and tools is built to help improve your productivity.

Plus, there are no restrictions in place to interfere with your workflow or unique WordPress settings. Some of the developer-friendly features you’ll have access to at Kinsta, which you won’t necessarily get with AWS, include:

• Full phpMyAdmin access to your 100% private MySQL database (hosted on localhost in your isolated container).
• One-click staging environments for all plans.
• The option to work with custom setups like Bedrock or Trellis.
• Git, WP-CLI, and SSH access included, regardless of your plan. You can control SSH access by adding your keys through the MyKinsta dashboard.
• Six different types of backups: automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system generated, downloadable, and external backups to Google Cloud Storage or Amazon S3. You can also restore backups to staging as well as production.
• A Redis add-on for quicker database performance.
• The option to load your site over reverse proxy. 
• Unrestricted access to your site’s critical files. 
• The ability to run a different version of PHP on the staging and live versions of your site, to easily test for potential bugs post-switch.
• Default enabled post and page revisions.

With Kinsta, nothing stands in the way of the custom workflow you’ve likely developed for your public cloud setup. If you’re used to AWS’s high-performance Route 53 DNS, don’t worry: that’s what Kinsta uses as well. 

AWS offers no restrictions in terms of access to your features. However, spending the time to manually set up a virtual machine and optimize it for WordPress on that platform is time-consuming, even for experienced users. At Kinsta, we make everything quick, simple, and effective.

Feature Comparison Overview

It can be difficult to compare the functionality of a cloud provider like AWS vs Azure, or Google Cloud, and a managed WordPress host such as Kinsta. However, we’ve highlighted the most important features and distinctions below.

	Kinsta	AWS
Pricing	Plans start at $30/month	Plans start at $3.50/month for an Amazon Lightsail VM
Money-Back Guarantee	30 days on all plans	X
Global Data Centers	29	13 (Lightsail)
Performance Analytics	Included on all plans	X
Hosting Dashboard	MyKinsta	AWS Console
Storage	SSD	SSD
PHP Versions	PHP 7.3, 7.4, 8.0	PHP 7.0 (can upgrade manually)
Free APM Tool	Kinsta APM	Not specified
Backups	✓ (14-30 days)	✓ (7 days)
Firewall Powered by Cloudflare	✓	X
Free DDoS Protection	✓	X
One-Click WordPress Installs	✓	✓
CDN	200+ PoPs (All regions)	Amazon CloudFront (separate pricing)
Uptime Monitoring	✓	✓ (Manually via CloudWatch)

Amazon Lightsail is a basic virtual machine or instance on a cloud server, which covers most of the necessities for a basic WordPress site. However, to even come close to creating a WordPress hosting environment like the one we’ve built from scratch at Kinsta, you would need a combination of AWS services like cloud storage, databases, a CDN, and several open-source solutions.

If you want the same performance and scalability you’d get from a cloud hosting provider, but with better user experience and less required ‘extras’, Kinsta is the obvious choice.

Join Others Making the Switch to Kinsta

At Kinsta, we offer the fastest, latest technology possible and are constantly evolving and adapting to leverage the most innovative solutions available. You can see for yourself by checking out our feature updates! 

If you don’t want to deal with the tedious, time-consuming daily tasks of managing your own servers, the GCP-powered Kinsta platform is the perfect alternative to your AWS setup.

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. If you’re ready to make the move away from AWS and switch to a managed WordPress hosting provider, try out Kinsta risk-free for 30 days!