A2 Hosting Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta

Introduction

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 120,000+ clients all across the world, including some of the biggest companies in the world, rely on Kinsta.

There are some huge fundamental differences between how A2 Hosting and Kinsta’s infrastructures are built and operated. Every day, we hear from clients and growing businesses interested in an A2 alternative.

Feature Comparison Overview

At this point, let’s take a moment to review some of the key differences between Kinsta and A2 Hosting:

Kinsta vs A2 Hosting

Let’s take a look at some of the major differences between Kinsta and A2 Hosting:

• Kinsta is a leading managed WordPress hosting provider that offers all-in-one solutions for managing your website and supports 37 data centers across Google’s global network, while A2 Hosting has 4 locations.
• Kinsta uses C3D Compute Engine general-purpose VMs and C2 (GCP’s fastest servers) for all plans in supported locations. In our tests, we found that C2 VMs are up to 200% faster than GCP’s lower-tier machines, while C3D machines reduced response times by a further 20% to 50%.
• 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 has clear, easy-to-understand plan tiers and packages for WordPress hosting. A2 Hosting’s tiers and pricing packages can be difficult to understand and misleading in terms of add-on costs and features.
• Our custom MyKinsta dashboard includes a variety of useful site management tools that are not available on A2 Hosting, such as database search and replace, APM tool, free IP Geolocation manager, PHP restart, and more. A2 Hosting 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 offers six different types of backups (automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system generated, downloadable, and external) on every plan. A2 Hosting only offers automated backups through Jetpack on managed WordPress hosting plans.
• Kinsta doesn’t offer tiered support. Premium support is included with every plan. Unlike A2 Hosting, our support team consists of WordPress experts and engineers.
• Kinsta is SOC2 compliant, which provides independent proof that we have established security procedures and adhered to those procedures over time. A2 Hosting is not SOC2 compliant. See Kinsta’s Trust Report for additional information.
• 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.
• Kinsta performs weekly automatic MySQL optimization on all of your sites to optimize database performance.
• 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.
• There’s reverse proxy support on all plans.
• Kinsta supports multisite setups out of the box.
• The Kinsta infrastructure is highly optimized for WooCommerce stores.
• 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 A2 Hosting. Or try it out right now with our risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee.

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 (LXC), using LXD to orchestrate them so there’s no chance of 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.

A2 Hosting’s security features vary depending on which plan you have. A Jetpack Personal License is included on managed WordPress plans, which can help with basic tasks such as daily backups, brute-force protection, and spam filtering.

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 workers, 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.

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

• Toggle between different PHP versions. Kinsta supports PHP 8.0, 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3.
• 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.

When you use A2 Hosting for your WordPress hosting, you’ll either have to use cPanel (shared) or Plesk (managed).

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.

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).

We don’t rely on a tiered support system, which means we won’t waste your time with escalations and transfers. Whether you’re on our Starter or Enterprise 4 plan, you have access to the same team of WordPress experts.

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!

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 C3D and C2 VMs really shine with their industry-leading CPU performance. At Kinsta, we make C3D and C2 VMs available on all plans from Starter to Enterprise 4 and beyond.

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.

Static Sites for Free

Are you an agency creating static WordPress sites for your clients? Or do you create landing pages for high-traffic campaigns? We got you covered!

Static site hosting is 100% free at Kinsta. You can create a static or Jamstack site or use a static site generator. We can run the build process for you and deploy your site directly to the edge.

Benefits of hosting Static sites with Kinsta include:

• Your site is directly pushed to our edge network with 260+ locations globally, powered by the security and speed of Cloudflare
• Use a static site generator, and we handle the build process, which is also included free of charge
• Add custom domains, and we deliver the security (SSL certificates automatically issued and updated)

Sign up, connect your git account, and start deploying your static site from your repo.

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 260+ 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.

A2 Hosting also offers the CloudFlare CDN for its WordPress hosting plans. However, Cloudflare Basic is the default for Startup and Drive WordPress shared hosting plans, and Cloudflare Plus is only available on Turbo Boost and Turbo Max plans.

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 $50 and $500, 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.

For every referral of Application Hosting and/or Database Hosting, you earn a 5% recurring commission every month for the lifetime of the customer. The 5% is calculated out of the customer’s monthly invoice (discounts applied).

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.

With the A2 Hosting affiliate program, you’ll only earn up to $125 per sale for new customers, with a second-tier commission of $5 per new customer.

However, they don’t pay recurring commissions for the lifetime of a referred customer. This means the A2 Hosting affiliate program doesn’t allow you to build a passive income stream.