Pagely Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta

Introduction

Acquired by GoDaddy in November 2021, Pagely is a managed WordPress hosting provider that’s been in business for a while now. However, it doesn’t make use of the same innovative, advanced technologies that we have here at Kinsta, nor does it provide the flexible features and control that we offer our customers.

While you may find Pagely’s services somewhat comparable with Kinsta’s, they come at very different price points. The high cost of Pagely’s plans is enough to turn many customers away, especially when you consider that Kinsta plans offer more value for your money, better support, and greater ease of use.

At Kinsta, we hear from customers every day who are looking for a better Pagely alternative. They want a reliable hosting service that’s able to provide advanced features and robust tools for WordPress users, without spending a fortune.

If this sounds like you, we have you covered. Below, we’ll explore what makes Kinsta so unique, and discuss the biggest advantages of using us as your managed WordPress host!

Kinsta is Built for Performance and Scalability

From day one, Kinsta was built with performance and scalability in mind. That means our platform is well-equipped to handle sudden spikes in traffic. You never have to worry about experiencing downtime or sharing resources on an overloaded server.

Kinsta doesn’t fall into traditional hosting categories, such as shared or VPS. Our unique infrastructure is built on the Google Cloud Platform, and we use LXD-managed hosts and orchestrated LXC software containers. Each site hosted on Kinsta has its own isolated container with all the resources it needs to run, including MySQL, Linux, Nginx, and PHP. 

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, doesn’t require a separate plugin, and cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!

At Kinsta, your MySQL databases are hosted at localhost for quicker loading times and faster queries. Our scalable cloud infrastructure also makes it easy to upgrade or downgrade your resources with ease.

With Pagely, private database instances such as MySQL and MariaDB are only available for an additional cost. Also, to ensure that sites are able to handle traffic surges, Pagely recommends that its users upgrade to one of its High Availability plans, which start at $1,249 per month.

Kinsta makes C2 and C3D machines available on every plan, not just the highest tiers. This means that, depending on the type of site you run, you could see a speed improvement between 20% and 200% simply by switching to Kinsta! 

Kinsta is the best WordPress host I’ve had so far. They are quick to help, easy to deal with, and really know their stuff. Plus their servers are super fast!

In terms of the basic features and functionality one might expect from a managed WordPress host, Pagely and Kinsta are comparable. However, as you can see in the below chart by SoftwareFindr, Kinsta outperforms Pagely in many key areas, including customer support, ease of use, and value for your money:

Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads

If you’re an ecommerce business, your site has unique challenges that not every traditional web host is capable of meeting. At Kinsta, our platform is optimized for ecommerce sites.

We employ a variety of tools and technology that can help increase the speed of your WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads stores. Some of the ways we do this include:

• Implementing rules to ensure proper WooCommerce and EDD functionality, and fast server-level page caching
• Excluding certain pages that shouldn’t be cached by default, such as cart, ‘my account’, and checkout pages
• Automatically bypassing the cache for users when “woocommerce_items_in_cart cookie” or “edd_items_in_cart” is detected, which ensures a smoother checkout process

Kinsta delivers unmatched performance and speed. Each year, Review Signal publishes a review in which it conducts rigorous performance testing of the top hosts in the industry. For five consecutive years, Kinsta has scored “top tier” status.

While Pagely has not participated every year, there have been a few years where it has. Let’s take a look at the web performance test results of the most recent review where both Kinsta and Pagely participated, to see how they stack up.

Kinsta is Developer-Friendly

Kinsta understands how important it is to have developer-friendly tools and features. In fact, many of our team members are developers, which is why we built our products and our MyKinsta dashboard with that type of user in mind.

We offer features and accessibility to enhance efficiency and streamline your workflow. Some of the ways we do this include: 

• Unrestricted access to your site’s critical files, with SFTP and PHPMyAdmin access. 
• Git, WP-CLI, and SSH access included with all plans. Pagely provides partial SSH access, and Git and WP-CLI access on upper-tier plans only.
• One-click staging environments on all plans. At Kinsta, we also let users turn on caching in their staging environments. Pagely limits its staging environments. You would need to download its Pagely Sync Tool (to create a one-time copy or one-off test) or the Git Integration Tool.
• Kinsta has five types of backups: free automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system generated, and downloadable. Pagely offers automated daily backups stored with Amazon S3 that includes a 14-day retention policy. For Kinsta Business and Enterprise plans, we offer 20 and 30 days retention.
• Quicker database performance through the Redis add-on.
• The ability to load your site over reverse proxy. Pagely only offers reverse proxy for VPS and Enterprise-level plans for an additional $200 fee (as compared to our $50 subscription).
• Kinsta lets you run a different version of PHP for every live and staging site, as well as switch your PHP version with just one click. 
• Post and page revisions are enabled by default. 

At Kinsta, we include free Cloudflare SSL certificates with on every plan. You can also install your own certificate if required, as well as enable HTTPS directly from the dashboard.

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! Pagely doesn’t have an integration with a local WordPress development tool, which means there is no way to clone and push WordPress sites for their customers. If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver.

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.

24/7 Expert Support

At Kinsta, we put our customers first, regardless of which plan they have. We don’t have support tiers,and treat each and every customer as a priority. It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogger or a Fortune 500 company, our team of engineers and WordPress experts are available for you 24/7. 

We operate on the Intercom customer messaging platform to make support as quick and convenient as possible. Kinsta’s average initial ticket response time is under two minutes! On its website, Pagely states that its median ticket response time is 12 minutes.

What’s more, our clients can vouch for us. For the past two years, after tens of thousands of conversations over 97% of our customers closed a chat support session happy or satisfied:

No problem is too big or too small for our experts to handle. We also offer multilingual customer support, and our knowledge base has resources available in 10 languages.

I am pleasantly surprised at the ease and speed of setting up WordPress with Kinsta. I love the staging environment and the deployment to production!

Pagely uses a ticket-based system as its primary method of communication. So when it says the service offers 24/7 support for all plans, it’s referring mostly to being able to open a ticket.

Live chat support is only available during business hours. As you might imagine, this can be particularly frustrating for clients in different timezones.

Also worth mentioning is Pagely’s holiday schedule. At Kinsta, we provide support 365 days a year. However, Pagely scales back its support during some of the busiest times of the year, particularly for e-commerce sites.

This means that if something were to happen to your site aside from your server going down, it could take days for them to get back to you. Considering that Pagely is one of the most expensive providers, most clients would find this limited support unacceptable.  

Zach Mettra, Founder and Creative Director of Brightoak Agency, has first-hand experience on the differences between Kinsta and Pagely support:

Kinsta Has a Global Presence

Powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform, Kinsta has 37 data centers (and counting) around the world. Our global presence spans five continents, and you can choose a different data center for each of your websites.

Unlike Pagely, we offer this perk with absolutely no extra fees or hidden charges. Kinsta locations include:

Pagely operates much differently. It has a total of 14 data centers, within regions split into two tiers. Tier 1 consists of only three locations, all of which are in the U.S. The rest of the locations, including the ones in Europe, Asia Pacific, Canada, and South America, require you to pay an additional fee to use.

Best Affiliate Program in the Industry

We make it our mission to consistently exceed our clients’ expectations. Our happy customers are often excited and eager to spread the word about our Kinsta products and services, which has helped us become one of the fastest-growing WordPress hosts!

This is why we’re proud to offer one of the highest-paying affiliate programs in the hosting industry. Our affiliate program allows for true profit sharing, regardless of whether you’re a blogger or an enterprise agency.

You can earn between $50 and $500 (depending on the plan) for every signup you refer. You’ll also receive a 10% monthly recurring commission for the lifetime of the customers you refer. Thanks to our customers’ low churn rate, our affiliate program provides you with a powerful opportunity to earn a passive income.
You also won’t ever have to worry about dealing with confusing third-party platforms. We created a custom affiliate dashboard for you to use. Pagely, on the other hand, does not offer an affiliate program.