All three hosting platforms have built great reputations in the WordPress community, for their high-quality services and customer support.
Kinsta, WP Engine and SiteGround are all great hosting options but we’re going to take a closer look at each so that you know which one is best for your WordPress website.
This comparison will be focused on the cheapest entry-level plan that each hosting provider offers to its customers in 2024.
Entry-Level Plan Details
Kinsta Pricing
$35 USD per month or $350 USD annually for one WordPress website with 10 GB of storage, 25,000 visits per month and 100 GB of CDN usage.
See the Kinsta plans page for details.
WP Engine Pricing
$34 AUD per month ro $336 AUD annually for one WordPress website, 10 GB of storage, 25,000 visits per month and 50 GB of bandwidth.
See the WP Engine plans page for details.
SiteGround Pricing
$4.99 AUD per month for the first year (renews at $26.99 per month) for one WordPress website, 10 GB of storage, 10,000 visits per month and unmetered traffic.
See the SiteGround plans page for details.
Both Kinsta and WP Engine offer discounts if you pay annually but SiteGround’s discount is for your first payment only, so you pay for up to three years upfront at $6.99 per month but when it comes time to renew it will increase to $19.99 per month.
Pros and Cons
Kinsta
Pros: Google Cloud Platform hosting (fast), great technical support and a simple set-up and migration.
Cons: Steep price point, no email hosting and no phone support.
WP Engine
Pros: Google Cloud Platform hosting (fast), great technical support and free StudioPress themes.
Cons: More expensive.
SiteGround
Pros: Affordable, WordPress migration plugin and phone support.
Cons: Shared hosting, limited resources and a higher renewal price.
Ease of Use
As of 2024, all three hosting providers have custom account dashboards that provide a great user experience over the default cPanel.
Creating a new WordPress website is also very straight-forward with any of these providers, simply provide a few setup details and it’ll handle the rest for you.
However, Kinsta allows you to select a new data location while creating your website while WP Engine and SiteGround only allow you to set one location for your entire hosting account.
Migrating your WordPress website to one of these hosts is also quite a simple experience.
Kinsta offers a truly hands-off migration service to all their customers while WP Engine only offer it on their top plans.
SiteGround also offers a hands-off migration service but if you don’t want to wait you can install their SG Migrator WordPress plugin and complete the automated migration yourself in a few minutes.
Overall, all three hosting providers offer a great user experience to their customers but we’d say Kinsta comes out on top with it’s excellent custom dashboard and website creation process.
Tools and Features
All three providers offer a WordPress installer, custom hosting dashboard and automatic WordPress updates and backups.
Unlike the others, SiteGround however does not offer on-demand backups or staging sites on its cheapest plan.
SiteGround is the only one to offer email hosting however, which means if you go with Kinsta or WP Engine you’ll need to use a third-party provider like Google Workplace.
Kinsta provides access to a premium CDN with any plan while SiteGround includes free access to a basic CDN and WP Engine provide access for an additional $19.95 per month.
They all offer the latest versions of PHP and security measures to protect your website but Kinsta and WP Engine do have a list of disallowed plugins that interfere with their systems.
Speed and Uptime
While SiteGround and Kinsta offer 99.9% guaranteed uptime, WP Engine guarantees 99.95% which equals an extra four hours per year.
But during our tests, all three providers had 100% uptime over 10 days.
Kinsta and WP Engine both offer very fast loading times, which is the main reason you’d choose one of these providers in the first place.
SiteGround is by no means slow but with their shared hosting and fewer data centres you can expect any website to take an extra second or two to load.
Help and Support
Kinsta Support
24/7 live chat and tickets on all plans, but no phone support.
WP Engine Support
24/7 live chat on all plans, 24/7 phone support on all plans except the entry-level plan and support tickets are only available on top-tier custom dedicated plans.
SiteGround Support
24/7 support via phone, live chat or ticket on any plan.
All three providers have great support, they’ll be happy to help you with anything from adding a domain name to fixing an offline website.
The only difference is the communication methods.
The Verdict
Kinsta, WP Engine and SiteGround are all great hosting providers.
If you’re budget conscious and would simply like to get your website online with some great additional features and multiple support channels then SiteGround is definitely the way to go.
Kinsta and WP Engine are a far closer match, both have similarly priced entry-level plans and are hosted on the powerful Google Cloud Platform.
If you’re looking for a fast hosting provider with a great custom dashboard and built-in live chat support then you should use Kinsta.
If budget is the least of your concerns and you’re simply looking for a fast and versatile hosting provider that comes with access to 39 premium StudioPress themes then you should choose WP Engine.
If you have any other questions please feel free to reach out to us anytime, you can find links to our social media below.
To your success,
Jackson
