GoDaddy Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta

Introduction

GoDaddy lacks the advanced technologies and unique, innovative solutions that Kinsta provides. 

GoDaddy can also be somewhat confusing when it comes to its terms, features, and pricing. While it boasts about the free features included with its plans, there are also limitations and caveats that aren’t immediately obvious. 

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.

I came from GoDaddy and from development to production, the speed is extremely noticeable. The dashboard is great, the added tools like cache and CDN are great. I am very happy and the price is completely reasonable. Excited to have all projects hosted here.

Feature Comparison Overview

At this point, we want to take a moment to look at some of the biggest differences between Kinsta and GoDaddy:

GoDaddy also claims unlimited bandwidth. However, there are bandwidth overage fees for its VPS and dedicated plans. With other plans, you may be required to upgrade to VPS or dedicated hosting if you exceed disk space usage or data storage.

Kinsta vs GoDaddy

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

• 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. GoDaddy has 9 locations.
• Kinsta uses C3D and C2 VMs (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 is SOC2 compliant, which provides independent proof that we have established security procedures and adhered to those procedures over time. Godaddy is not SOC2 compliant. See Kinsta’s Trust Report for additional information.
• Kinsta plans include everything you need to maximize site performance and security, including premium DNS, uptime monitoring, and firewalls. GoDaddy comes with basic firewall protection but lacks advanced DDoS detection and mitigation capabilities.
• All of our plans include a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) with 260+ PoPs and free premium DNS. 
• We offer free Cloudflare SSL certificates on every plan. GoDaddy does as well but they mention nothing about the issuer.
• 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. GoDaddy does not have a built-in free APM tool, and they don’t support third-party tools like New Relic either.
• Kinsta offers free migrations from GoDaddy handled by an expert engineer. You can rest assured that your site will be migrated safely, securely, and following best practices. GoDaddy users can only use the auto-migrate feature or pay $99.99 for expert service. 
• Our custom MyKinsta dashboard includes a variety of useful site management tools that are not available on GoDaddy, such as database search and replace, APM tool, free IP Geolocation manager, PHP restart, and more.
• 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. GoDaddy offers daily backups starting at $2.99 per month.
• Kinsta performs continuous automatic MySQL optimization on all of your sites to optimize database performance. GoDaddy does not.
• You’ll get a free staging environment and SSH access on all plans.
• There’s reverse proxy support on all plans.
• Kinsta provides a site-healing feature, and we monitor all websites 480 times per day with a 99% uptime guarantee.
• Kinsta CDN takes advantage of our Cloudflare integration and its worldwide network that spans 260+ 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 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%!
• Kinsta is well-known for its world-class support, composed of WordPress experts and Linux engineers, available 24/7/365 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 offers a 100% Malware Security Pledge.
• Kinsta also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Read on to see the details of each Kinsta feature and how they compare to GoDaddy. 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.

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.

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.

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.

GoDaddy offers two standard ecommerce services, a basic one for non-WordPress users and a Premium Web Store for WordPress and WooCommerce users. However, the platform offers very little technical information and insight into these solutions, so it’s tough to be sure exactly what kind of experience you could expect.

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.

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.

GoDaddy has two partnership programs. The GoDaddy Affiliate Program is powered by Commission Junction Affiliate. However, there’s no specific information available upfront regarding commission rates.