Liquid Web Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta
If you’re looking for a Liquid Web alternative, look no further than Kinsta. We’re powered exclusively by Google Cloud Platform and offer a unique approach to managed WordPress hosting that we promise you’ve never seen before.
Introduction
Liquid Web is a managed web host that’s been around for some time. However, the service and support have been a cause for concern among some customers.
Unlike Kinsta, Liquid Web isn’t a WordPress-specific host. Their plans and pricing can be a bit fragmented and confusing, with the only options being mid-size and high-level solutions. Since Liquid Web took over from Rackspace several years ago, there have been complaints about slow performance and support. Part of this may be because they’re limited to five data centers. At Kinsta, we have 37 covering the entire globe.
We hear daily from clients seeking a Liquid Web alternative. Many customers are interested to learn more about what makes Kinsta so unique – that’s what we’ll be answering here. We’ll explore what distinguishes Kinsta from other hosting providers such as Liquid Web, and discuss the advantages of using Kinsta as your managed WordPress host!
How Kinsta Compares to Liquid Web in a Nutshell
We’re going to take a deep dive into the specifics of Kinsta vs Liquid Web. However, we want to first offer a brief run-down of the biggest differences.
We are the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2, the world’s leading software review and comparison site:
Enjoy a 32% Faster Website Simply by Moving From Liquid Web to Kinsta
We measured 3,200+ migrations over the course of a three-month span. On average, client sites that came from Liquid Web to Kinsta experienced 32% faster load times.
How is this possible? Our customers enjoy:
- The latest generation of virtual machines from Google’s Compute Engine general-purpose machine family C3D VMs and The fastest Compute-Optimized C2 VMs, available across all plans in supported regions.
- A stack that’s been fine-tuned for WordPress over the past 8 years.
- Google’s Premium Tier Network to deliver website data faster.
- Free CDN powered by Cloudflare’s global network of 260+ locations.
- Built-in Edge Caching that cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
Migrate from Liquid Web 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 is the first to be powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform and Google’s premium-tier network. This lets us maximize the speed, security, and performance of every site hosted with us.
Here are some additional key differences between Kinsta vs Liquid Web:
- Unlike Liquid Web, Kinsta is not a general host. We specialize strictly in WordPress, and our support engineers are WordPress experts (some are also active WordPress contributors).
- Kinsta has 37 data centers across the globe, while Liquid Web only has 5 locations. The bulk of Liquid Web’s presence is in Michigan, North America, with one exception being Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
- Unlike Liquid Web, all of Kinsta’s plans include a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) and free premium DNS. Liquid Web only offers Cloudflare CDN with cloud VPS and dedicated plans.
- Kinsta provides free, human-performed migrations on all of our plans. Liquid Web states that their data migrations are free “in most cases”. Also, you need to perform them yourself via a plugin, unless you have a high-performance or fully-managed support plan.
- We perform weekly automatic MySQL database optimization on all your sites to ensure better performance
- At Kinsta, multisite installations are welcome and professionally handled.
- All Kinsta’s plans come with our custom-built, WordPress-specific MyKinsta dashboard. Liquid Web uses the standard and somewhat-limiting cPanel, Plesk, and InterWorx for most of its plans.
- Kinsta supports reverse proxy setups, IP Geolocation, and New Relic integration (license required).
- Kinsta offers simple, straightforward hosting plans and packages. Navigating the different plans offered by Liquid Web, and trying to understand how they compare with each other, can be quite chaotic.
- Kinsta has a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Kinsta is the fastest WordPress host 5 years in a row (independent benchmark).
- Kinsta supports the latest PHP versions.
- Kinsta is SOC2 compliant, which provides independent proof that we have established security procedures and adhered to those procedures over time. Liquid Web is also SOC2 compliant. See Kinsta’s Trust Report for additional information.
- Kinsta provides a site-healing feature, and we monitor all websites 480 times per day.
- All of our plans come with a free Cloudflare integration.
- Kinsta offers six types of backups: free automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system generated, downloadable, and external backups that integrate with Amazon S3 or Google Cloud storage.
- Kinsta offers free one-click SSL with our Let’s Encrypt integration on every plan.
- Kinsta offers premium 24/7 multilingual support for all clients.
- Kinsta provides a free hack-fix guarantee.
- Kinsta has a very attractive affiliate program with recurring commission.
Kinsta is Built for Performance and Scalability
If your website is suddenly hit with a spike in traffic, the last thing you want is to deal with unexpected downtime. Fortunately, with Kinsta as your managed WordPress host, this is a non-issue.
Our unique, powerful solution doesn’t fit into the confines of traditional hosting, such as shared, VPS, or dedicated solutions. The Kinsta infrastructure was built to deliver unparalleled performance and support.
In fact, Kinsta is the first managed WordPress host to be exclusively powered by the Google Cloud Platform. For each of the sites we host on your platform, we use LXD-managed hosts and LXC software containers.
In simpler terms, this means each website has its own isolated container that includes all pertinent resources, such as MySQL, PHP, Linux, and Nginx. Our scalable infrastructure makes it upgrading or downgrading as needed quick and easy.
Another advantage of Kinsta that helps fuel our speed and performance is our unique caching system. We eliminate the need for any caching plugins or add-ons.
As part of our Cloudflare integration, Edge Caching saves your Kinsta site/page cache to any of Cloudflare’s global network of 260+ data centers.
Edge Caching is included free with all Kinsta plans and cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
We understand that uptime is of the utmost importance. Thanks to our C3D and C2 Google Cloud machines, all Kinsta customers see major improvements in average response times. Depending on the type of site, just moving to Kinsta could result in an immediate 20% to 200% speed improvement!
Although it offers managed WordPress hosting, Liquid Web isn’t a WordPress-specific host. They offer cloud, VPS, and dedicated servers. However, they only have five data centers in three locations, restricting them to North America and Europe. This could be an issue if you serve users internationally.
With Liquid Web, many speed optimization features such as a premium CDN are only included on some plans, and as an add-on feature. Also, information about the infrastructure and technology used for Liquid Web hosting is somewhat scarce. Tools can vary widely depending on the type of hosting plan, with a lot of discrepancy in the technical information available for each plan.
Uncover your WordPress Site’s Performance Bottlenecks.
Our experts will run a free performance audit of your website and share the results within 24 hours.
MyKinsta: A Dashboard That’s Better Than cPanel
At Kinsta, we didn’t want to be like other hosting providers. This is why we built our own user portal. The MyKinsta dashboard is designed specifically for WordPress site management:
Below are some of the powerful features that make our MyKinsta dashboard so helpful:
- Quick phpMyAdmin access.
- Premium Amazon Route 53 DNS, so you can manage your DNS records directly in the dashboard.
- 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.
- Detailed analytics and insights, including bandwidth and visitor data, performance analysis data, CDN usage and insights, and cache HIT and MISS ratios. Most performance analysis is only available for high-performance Liquid Web plans or as a premium add-on.
- One-click CDN setup.
- Search and replace tool for performing bulk updates.
- One-click PHP version switching, and the option to restart PHP when needed.
- Dashboard tool to purge site cache.
- Easy redirect management.
- One-click staging environments.
- Features to push staging sites live and restore backups to staging or production. Liquid Web doesn’t let you restore to staging, only production.
- Option to add your SSH keys to the dashboard to strengthen login security.
- IP Deny tool for quickly blocking IP addresses.
- Integration with New Relic (license required).
- Free SSL certificates via one-click Let’s Encrypt, and the ability to import your own.
- WordPress debugging tool.
- Simple password protection to your environment.
- Multilingual dashboard that’s available in 10 languages: English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch.
We care about our clients’ feedback, which is why we are always looking for ways to improve. We regularly take requests and feedback to incorporate into and enhance our offerings. We’re constantly innovating and finding new methods of making your website and hosting experience better!
The control panel Liquid Web uses varies by plan. As with many hosting providers, Liquid Web uses cPanel for its Linux hosting plans and Plesk for its Windows-based plans. For VPS and dedicated plans, InterWorx is also an option.
Kinsta is Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
If ecommerce is a large part of your business, you need a reliable host capable of handling the sometimes challenging and complicated needs of these sites. At Kinsta, this is never a concern.
Our optimized ecommerce platform can help increase the speed and performance of your WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads store.
We do this by:
- Excluding pages that shouldn’t be cached, including ‘My Account’, checkout, and cart pages.
- Automatically bypassing the cache for users when “woocommerce_items_in_cart” cookie or “edit_items_in_cart” is detected, which helps ensure a smooth checkout process.
- Putting specific rules in place to allow EDD and WooCommerce functionality during server-level page caching.
Liquid Web offers a managed WooCommerce service, with plans starting at $19 per month. However, the beginner package is limited to 15 products with unlimited transactions or 150 orders per month. Kinsta doesn’t have product and order limits in place.
When it comes to speed and performance, Kinsta is unmatched. Review Signal releases an annual performance testing review of some of the biggest hosts in the industry. For five consecutive years, Kinsta has scored “top tier” performance!
In the latest round, Liquid Web participated and its Professional VPS plan ($99/month) was tested. Below, we’ll be comparing this with the Kinsta Pro plan ($70/month).
Web Performance Benchmarks (Pro Plans)
To run and perform these benchmark tests, Review Signal created identical WordPress dummy websites with the same plugins installed (except for any tools needed for the provider’s specific caching mechanisms).
WebPageTest.org was used to measure, in seconds, the overall loading time of the web hosts in 11 geographical locations. Let’s see the results:
Kinsta | Liquid Web | |
---|---|---|
Dulles | 0.522 | 0.545 |
Denver | 1.019 | 0.999 |
Los Angeles | 0.789 | 0.929 |
London | 0.983 | 0.895 |
Frankfurt | 1.049 | 1.103 |
Mauritius | 2.257 | 2.275 |
Singapore | 1.696 | 1.836 |
Mumbai | 2.034 | 1.743 |
Tokyo | 1.228 | 1.203 |
Sydney | 1.632 | 1.781 |
São Paulo | 1.334 | 1.229 |
As you can see, Kinsta beat Liquid Web in 8 out of the 11 tests.
For the uptime monitoring testing, UptimeRobot and StatusCake were used. On both, Kinsta had a perfect uptime:
Kinsta | Liquid Web | |
---|---|---|
Uptime Robot | 100% | 99.989% |
StatusCake | 100% | 99.99% |
The Load Impact test scaled from 1 to 1,000 users over 15 minutes, with the error count capped at 5,000. This testing is used to detect whether a site is caching from the front page, and helps assess the performance of the caching system:
Kinsta | Liquid Web | |
---|---|---|
Requests | 602,521 | 322,836 |
Errors | 0 | 1 |
Data Transferred (GB) | 33.49 | 18.13 |
Peak Average Load Time (seconds) | 608 | 3,660 |
Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps) | 571 | 198 |
Peak Average Requests/Sec | 1,220 | 431 |
Even with more requests and data transferred, Kinsta had no issues. On the other hand, Liquid Web saw an increase in response times.
The Load Storm tests were used to simulate real users visiting the site:
Kinsta | Liquid Web | |
---|---|---|
Total Requests | 535,858 | 502,825 |
Total Errors | 105 | 0 |
Peak RPS | 408.67 | 385.33 |
Average RPS | 297.70 | 279.35 |
Peak Response Time (ms) | 2,372 | 6,397 |
Average Response Time (ms) | 440 | 738 |
Kinsta handled the Load Storm test without issue. However, as the test scaled, Liquid Web showed increased response times.
As the Review Signal tester explained: “Liquid Web’s servers couldn’t quite keep up the fast response times expected during the load tests. They never failed, but they did start to slow down, and that kept them from earning any recognition.”
On the other hand, in regards to Kinsta, they said: “Perfect 100% uptime on both monitors and excellent load testing results put Kinsta in the Top Tier yet again. Just a model of consistent high performance.”
Kinsta is Developer-Friendly
At Kinsta, we build our products with developers in mind. This is largely because many of our team members are developers and engineers themselves. We understand what it means to create a ‘developer-friendly’ product, which is exactly what we did with our MyKinsta dashboard.
As your managed WordPress host, Kinsta provides you with a healthy offering of tools and features that can help streamline your workflow. Let’s take a look at some of the developer-friendly features you’ll have access to at Kinsta, some of which you won’t necessarily get with Liquid Web:
- Unrestricted access to your site’s critical files.
- Git, WP-CLI, and SSH access included, regardless of your plan.
- A quick-to-deploy staging environment on all plans.
- Five different types of backups available: automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system generated, and downloadable. Liquid Web offers basic, scheduled and account-level backups. For daily, on-demand backups, and other advanced cloud backups, you need to pay a fee.
- Quicker database performance through the Redis add-on.
- The ability to load your site over reverse proxy.
- The option to use custom setups such as Bedrock and Trellis.
- The option to run a different version of PHP for every live and staging site, as well as switch your PHP version with one click.
- Post and page revisions enabled by default.
- The ability to restore backups to staging as well as production. However, Liquid Web only lets you restore backups to production, not staging.
Kinsta offers free one-click SSL certifications with Let’s Encrypt integration on every plan, as well as the option to install your own. In the MyKinsta dashboard, you can also quickly enable HTTPS and import your SSL certificate directly.
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 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.
Liquid Web plans do not come with a free APM tool, which makes it very difficult to quickly troubleshoot performance issues on your WordPress site.
Develop Locally with DevKinsta
For developers and agencies, Kinsta offers a simple to use (but powerful) local development tool called DevKinsta. With DevKinsta, you can launch WordPress sites with a full hosting stack and SSL support on your local computer with just a few clicks.
DevKinsta is fully integrated with MyKinsta and Kinsta’s hosting platform, which means you can develop locally and push updates directly to a staging environment on Kinsta! Liquid Web doesn’t have an integration with a local WordPress development tool, which means there is no way to clone and push WordPress sites for Liquid Web customers. If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver.
Feature Comparison Overview
At this point, we want to take a moment to break down some of the key differences between Kinsta vs Liquid Web:
Kinsta | Liquid Web | |
---|---|---|
Pricing | Plans start at $35/month | Plans start at $19/month |
Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days on all plans | X |
Plan Tiers | 10 (not including custom) | 13 |
Premium 24×7 Support | All plans | All plans |
Core Infrastructure (GCP) | Same across all plans | Varies by plan |
SSH Access | All plans | All plans |
Global Data Centers | 37 locations | 5 locations |
Continent Locations | 5 | Not disclosed |
Bandwidth Limits | No limits (within AUP) | 2 TB (Managed WP starter plan), 5 TB (Dedicated), 10 TB (VPS) |
Container Technology | 100% resource isolation on all plans | Not specified |
Free Migrations | All plans | DIY on all plans via a plugin. Supported migrations vary by plan |
Staging Environment | All plans | All plans |
PHP Versions | PHP 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 | PHP 5.4-5.6, 7, 7.1, 7.2 |
Switch PHP Engine | One-click change in dashboard | Users can switch PHP in cPanel |
Cloudflare Firewall | ✓ | X |
Free CDN | 200+ PoPs (All regions) | Varies by plan (Cloudflare for Cloud/Dedicated) |
Built-in Edge Caching | ✓ | Not specified |
Free Premium DNS | Amazon Route 53 | Private |
Free DDoS Protection | ✓ | X |
Free SSL Certificates | All plans | All plans |
Free APM Tool | Kinsta APM | Not specified |
Multisite Support | Pro plans and higher | X |
IP Geolocation | ✓ | Not specified |
Reverse Proxy Support | ✓ | Not specified |
Redis Add-on | ✓ | Varies by plan |
New Relic (license required) | ✓ | Not specified |
Multilingual Dashboard | English, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, French, Swedish, Danish, Japanese | Not specified |
At Kinsta, we only permit direct WordPress access from encrypted SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) and SSH connections. However, Liquid Web allows less secure FTP connections.
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.
Expert Support
At Kinsta, nothing comes before our customers. We don’t have support tiers, because we treat every customer and site as a mission-critical priority.
Our skilled, friendly team of engineers and WordPress experts are available 24/7. We have an average ticket response time of under three minutes! We also offer multilingual support, with resources available in over 10 languages.
Unlike Liquid Web, Kinsta specializes in managed WordPress hosting. Our support team members are deeply knowledgeable, experienced, and trained in all things WordPress. You’ll never have to worry about receiving subpar, uninformed, or inadequate support.
Perhaps this is why for the past two years more than 97 percent of our customers closed a chat support session happy or satisfied with the support they received:
To make customer support as convenient as possible, we operate on the Intercom customer messaging platform so we can make customer support as convenient and quick as possible. Additionally, all communications are logged. Therefore, you won’t ever end up repeating yourself to multiple support agents.
Liquid Web also offers 24/7 support, which is available through phone, email, or chat. Unfortunately, though, the kind of rapid responsiveness you can expect from Kinsta isn’t necessarily the same with Liquid Web:
Liquid Web has three levels of support: self-managed, core, and fully-managed. The type of support you get varies by tier.
Safe and Secure
A powerful hosting provider is one capable of protecting your site at all times. This is why Kinsta makes security a top-level priority. Our secure WordPress hosting solution takes both active and passive measures to keep your site safe from malicious activity and security attacks.
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.
In addition to monitoring your site every three minutes for uptime, we implement tight software-based restrictions. We can detect DDoS attacks as they happen and stop malicious code from entering our network.
Some of our additional security features include:
- Two-Factor Authentication support
- Cloudflare firewall with DDoS protection included
- Automated backups included with all plans
- Isolated LXC containers
- Self-healing PHP
- Only support for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP)
If we are notified of a plugin or theme vulnerability on one of your sites, we will email you immediately and keep you informed about the next steps. We’re constantly prepared and strive to make sure both communication and action are quick, efficient, and effective.
At Kinsta, one of the other things that make us unique and distinguishes us from Liquid Web and many other hosting providers is our ‘hack-fix’ guarantee. Therefore, in the rare case that your site is compromised, we’ll fix it for free.
Conversely, some basic security features are only available for fully-managed Liquid Web support plans. This includes virus and spam and protection, control panel updates and patches, and other security enhancements.
Kinsta Has a Global Presence
Kinsta has 37 data centers around the globe, spanning five continents. This makes it easy for you to select the data centers that make the most sense for your sites, with no extra fees or hidden charges!
Our massive global footprint lets you pick a different data center for each of your websites. Kinsta data center locations include:
- Test, PH
- Johannesburg, Africa
- Changhua County, Taiwan
- Hong Kong
- Tokyo, Japan
- Osaka, Japan
- Seoul, South Korea
- Mumbai, India
- Delhi, India
- Jurong West, Singapore
- Jakarta, Indonesia
- Sydney, Australia
- Melbourne, Australia
- Warsaw, Poland
- Hamina, Finland
- Madrid, Spain
- St. Ghislain, Belgium
- London, United Kingdom
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Eemshaven, Netherlands
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Milan, Italy
- Paris, France
- Dammam, Saudi Arabia
- Tel Aviv, Israel
- Montréal, Canada
- Toronto, Canada
- São Paulo, Brazil
- Santiago, Chile
- Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA
- Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA
- Ashburn, Virginia, USA
- Columbus, Ohio, USA
- Dallas, Texas, USA
- The Dalles, Oregon, USA
- Los Angeles, California, USA
- Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
- Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
Liquid Web has a fraction of those options, which severely limits their reach. They have a total of five data centers, mostly based in North America, with one in the Netherlands. Obviously, this isn’t ideal for clients who are looking for data centers in other regions across the globe, in particular Asia-Pacific.
Turbocharging Your Content Delivery with Kinsta CDN
All Kinsta plans include a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) via our Cloudflare integration. 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 included 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 Kinsta CDN directly from your MyKinsta dashboard.
Liquid Web only has an US/Europe presence. Unlike Kinsta, Liquid Web doesn’t include a premium CDN with all of its plans. Cloudflare CDN is included for free only with cloud and dedicated plans.
Best Affiliate Program in the Industry
We are passionate about exceeding our clients’ expectations. This level of dedication and commitment leads to many of our customers helping to spread the word about our managed WordPress hosting, products, and services. It’s helped position us as one of the fastest-growing hosts in the industry.
This is why we’re proud to provide our satisfied clients, from bloggers to agencies, with an affiliate program that presents the opportunity for true profit sharing. Among the highest-paying affiliate programs in the hosting industry, our program makes it easy for you to partner with us and share in our earnings!
As a Kinsta affiliate partner, you can earn as much as $500 (depending on the plan) for every signup you refer to us. More, for the lifetime of the customers who you refer, you will also receive a 10% monthly recurring commission. Kinsta customers have an incredibly low 4% churn rate, so suffice it to say that this is a great opportunity to earn a passive income.
Thanks to our unique WordPress hosting affiliate dashboard, you won’t have to worry about dealing with confusing third-party platforms. We make everything simple and straightforward.
Liquid Web has an affiliate and referral program where you can earn either cash or hosting credit for referring new customers. Affiliates can make up to $150 per sale or $50 in credit per referral. Although they offer commissions, it’s a one-time commission with a $150 minimum.
Join Others Making the Switch to Kinsta
At Kinsta, we pride ourselves on delivering the fastest, latest technology possible. Therefore, we’re constantly evolving and adapting to provide the most innovative solutions on the market. To see for yourself, simply check out our many feature updates! No other hosting provider out there releases as many new features, tools, and integrations with the speed and frequency we do.
We are confident in our service and want you to be at least 100% satisfied with your hosting. This is why we always offer a 30-day money-back guarantee and no long-term contracts. If you’re ready to make the move away from Liquid Web and switch to a new hosting provider, try out Kinsta risk-free for 30 days!