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Kinsta offers fast and reliable hosting, exceptional support, and a very user-friendly dashboard with easy staging. Wordpress.com is useful for very simple sites, but it's quite limited, and if you have aspirations of a high-traffic or money-earning website, then a self-hosted Wordpress installation is often a better option.
Wordpress.com is useful for very simple websites or those just getting started online. Kinsta is for people that want very fast, reliable sites with great uptime and support.
Wordpress.com and Kinsta are on almost opposite ends of the spectrum of Wordpress hosting. Wordpress.com has free or cheap plans for very basic hosting, whereas Kinsta offers premium hosting for self-hosted Wordpress sites.
Kinsta vs WordPress.com (2024) – WordPress Hosting Comparison
Verdict - At a Glance
Kinsta is definitely not the most affordable host out there but their pricing scales pretty well based on your website growth. Kinsta uses Cloudflare Enterprise as their CDN. Kinsta supports multisite very well. They are also one of the only Wordpress hosts that will configure GEO-IP rules and caching for your site, which can be great when you need to create complex and localized websites using server-side geo-location.
Wordpress.com has a free plan, which can suit to purposes of very simple websites but it's severely limited, doesn't allow you to use a custom domain, doesn't include installation of {separate |]plugins, and it also includes ads on the site.
Monthly Pricing Based on Number of Visitors
We always try to quote the monthly fee for each host not including discounts that might apply if you pay yearly. Kinsta plan pricing is easy to follow and renews at the same rate. Wordpress.com's plans renew at the same rate (No introductory discounts).
Prices listed below is the price of our recommended PLAN based on number of visitors for Kinsta and Wordpress.com. Any time we have included figures in brackets accounts for overages. Sometimes it's cheaper to use a lower plan with overage fees if your host includes this in their pricing structure, but the performance of the lower plan might not be as strong.
($35 + 75 visitors at $1 per 1k visitors)
($35 + 175 visitors at $1 per 1k visitors)
Monthly Pricing Based on Number of Websites
The pricing below shows the closest PLAN based on the amount of websites at both Kinsta and Wordpress.com. These plans will also include an allowance of disk space and visitors. Some hosting companies allow additional wordpress installs for an additional fee. This can sometimes work out as more affordable than using a higher plan, if it works out as more affordable then we will list these in brackets below
Remember, hosts often include discounts when you pay on a longer basis such as yearly or over multiple years, so make sure to check these offers out if applicable.
Monthly Pricing Based on Disk Space
This is pricing per gigabyte of disk space for both Kinsta and Wordpress.com. As previously mentioned, if it works out as more affordable to use a cheaper plan and pay overages then we'll list that below in brackets.
Keep in mind that if you have a large amount of disk space usage for your site then you could alternatively host these externally using another service
($35 + 10GBs at $2/GB)
($35 + 30GBs at $2/GB)
($35 + 90GBs at $2/GB)
($35 + 190GBs at $2/GB)
Comparison Between Main Features
Other Features Compared
Hosting Speed
Some managed wordpress hosting companies have an SLA (service level agreement) where they commit to a certain percentage of uptime on a monthly basis. The uptime listed below is a general figure for Kinsta and Wordpress.com. but it's not necessarily an SLA, see the host's T&Cs for more info. SLAs often include conditions where you get a refund of a portion of monthly fees if the service drops below a certain amount of uptime for that month
Content Delivery Networks are widely distributed networks of servers that can serve your visitors important files such as images and CSS files from a server close to their location, which can significantly increase your site speed.
Security
Website security is extremely important and all websites should be considered to be at risk. It's important to pick a host that takes security seriously. Below are some of the key security features that are offered by Kinsta and Wordpress.com.
Conclusion
To find out more about the specs, pricing, and service limitations each of these hosts, then you can use the following links to check out Kinsta and Wordpress.com.
That's our head to head comparison between Kinsta and Wordpress.com Thank you for reading, we hope this will help you to choose between them!