Interview - Kinsta hosting on Google's Cloud with Brian Jackson
Today we have a chat with Brian Jackson from Kinsta. Kinsta are a managed WordPress hosting company who have grow rapidly since their inception in 2013.
When they started managed WordPress hosting was not the giant business that it was today. In those days we were still opting for shared hosting and VPS hosting. But with the advent of cloud platforms such as Amazon's AWS and Google Cloud, there came an opportunity for people with the skills to leverage those platforms and repurpose them as WordPress specific hosting solutions.
There are clear benefits to using a WordPress host; staff dedicated to running just one platform and optimising it for that purpose alone, support staff who understand WordPress and are able to answer your questions without seeking the 'WordPress guy' in the company and resources to host your website which are global, always up and almost infinitely scalable.
All those years ago when Kinsta was founded, they chose to go down the route of using Google Cloud as their partner of choice. It's a good story too. When they started it was not using Google Cloud, it was using a bunch of services such as Digital Ocean and Linode. For a variety of reasons, these did not work out, so they started to look around for a new company with which to work.
This is now 2015, Kinsta was growing and Google Cloud was starting to be 'a thing'. So they did a bunch of tests to see if they would be a good fit, and long-story-short, they were!
With 18 data centres around the world, and more coming online all the time, Google Cloud was a choice that Kinsta is very happy they made. As Kinsta grows, so too does Google Cloud, so it's a happy symbiosis.
The whole point of a company like Kinsta is therefore that you get to use a great platform like Google Cloud, but without all of the technical difficulties that come should you try to deploy a site on Google Cloud by yourself. Now, let's be clear, I'm not suggesting that you're not up to the job because I know that many of your are. You could configure it with your eyes closed, but many couldn't and would feel quite out of their depth if they were tasked to do so. There are so many options, so many things that you could do wrong, and so Kinsta does all of that for you. So if words like this...
put you off... Kinsta might be a good fit!
Kinsta sets up your WordPress website so that it's using the correct, scalable resources. This means that it's got the power that it needs at the point at which it needs it. Which is a good things right?
Brian makes the point that no matter if you are a Fortune 500 company or just starting out with a simple website, you get the same infrastructure behind your website, different allocation of resources, but it's all on the same hardware ready to scale at the click of a button should you suddenly get featured on T.V.!
In the past, Kinsta used to work on a pay-for-bandwidth model, but like other providers, they've now moved onto a pay-for-resources model and you can hear Brian talk about why they did that too.
In terms of security the might and size of Google Cloud is able to handle much of the DDoS that we hear so much about, but Kinsta also has options in their dashboard for you to manage aspects of this yourself. You can blacklist IPs, block xml-rpc connections and should your site get past their security measures in the time that it's hosted on their platform they will fix it up, free of charge!
A few of the other items that we cover:
So, if you're in the market for a new host or just want to try them out, why not hook up with Kinsta and see how it works out.
* Full disclosure - Kinsta are a sponsor of this podcast, but I hope that you can hear that this did not alter the way in which the interview was conducted. They did not request an interview, I reached out to them.
Mentioned in this episode:
0.75x 1x 1.25x 1.5x 2x 0:00... This Week in WordPress #154 “Full steam ahead with Full Site Editing” This week’s WordPress news – Covering...
It’s the last episode of our “Thinking the Unthinkable” series… and also David's last as a regular on WP Builds. We’ve saved the most...
On the podcast today we have Roman Axelrod, a web developer from Israel. Roman joins us to share his experience running a web development...