Kinsta vs Bluehost
Kinsta and Bluehost compared on measured uptime, response time, pricing and features from our own tests. Kinsta scores higher overall.
By Jennifer T. · Updated
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Verdict
KinstaWins overall
Managed WordPress hosting from $30 a month with flat renewals, 30 data centers, edge caching and 14-day backups
Newfold's WordPress-recommended host: three shared tiers on 36-month terms, weekly backups, a 5 percent SLA coupon
Kinsta wins 4 of the six sub-scores and comes out ahead overall (7.9 vs 7.6).
How do the scores compare?
Kinsta leads on 4 sub-scores, Bluehost on 1. Higher is better.
Which one is faster and more reliable?
Which one costs less?
On renewal, Bluehost is cheaper ($9.99/mo vs $30.00/mo). Intro prices need the listed term.
What does each include?
| Kinsta | Bluehost | |
|---|---|---|
| Free domain | No | First year, with a 12-month or 36-month term |
| Free SSL | Wildcard certificates through Cloudflare on every plan | Let's Encrypt |
| Backups | Daily automatic backups kept 14 days on the entry plans (20 or 30 days higher up), plus manual, downloadable and hourly add-on backups | Weekly website backups on every shared plan |
| Free migration | Unlimited migrations by Kinsta's team | Site migration tool |
| Free CDN | Cloudflare CDN with edge caching, 260+ points of presence per the pricing page; 125 GB of CDN bandwidth a month on the entry plans | Not stated |
| Caching | Server-level caching and edge caching through Cloudflare | Advanced static content caching and object caching |
| Staging | Free one-click staging environments on every plan | WordPress staging site on every plan |
| No | Not stated | |
| Resource limits | Each site runs in its own container; plans are sized by server bandwidth or visits, storage and CDN bandwidth, with PHP worker counts in the compare table | Not stated |
| Data center choice | 30 locations chosen per site at creation | Not stated |
| Uptime guarantee | 99.9% per month in the SLA updated 25 September 2025, with credits as a percentage of the monthly value once downtime passes 43 minutes; up to 99.99% on custom plans | 99.99% SLA; at most one coupon per month for 5% of the monthly hosting fee |
| Security | Fully managed WAF with DDoS protection, bot protection, free malware removal, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 | Malware scanning on Starter; AI malware removal, web application firewall and DDoS protection from Business |
| Developer tools | SSH, WP-CLI, Git, DevKinsta local environment, Kinsta API, built-in APM | Not stated |
| Phone support | No | Business and above; Starter has chat only |
| Windows hosting | No | No |
| CDN | Not stated | Yes |
| SSH and WP-CLI | Not stated | Yes |
| Choice of data center | Not stated | Region selected at checkout (North America, South America, Europe, Asia) |