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Rocket.net vs Kinsta: why Rocket.net works out much cheaper

Disclosure: This post may contain links to affiliate partners and products, that I have selected manually and would or have bought myself. I will get a commission if you decide to purchase anything after clicking on these links – at no cost to you.

This isn’t a typical speed comparison of Rocket.net and Kinsta – you’ll find plenty of those with a quick search and you’ll also find out that they are both very fast.

This is a comparison from a financial point of view – why Rocket.net works out much cheaper compared to Kinsta, yet still as fast as Kinsta.

TLDR;

Kinsta‘s admin UI is better than Rocket’s (more options, settings and control – but that might be too much for someone else), their customer service is great in both cases, and their speed is comparable. The only huge difference is how each service calculates your plan usage:

Kinsta calculates your plan usage by the number of visits. And they count any visit against it – which unfortunately for most websites, especially authority sites with many SEO-optimised posts, are going to be bad actors – bad crawlers, suspicious AWS traffic and random bots that don’t do your website any good. Yet they will make up a lot of your total visits (60%+ in my case). Instead of using a 30 EUR / month plan (that only gives you 25K visits per month), you will have to triple that to fit in all the bad traffic. And believe me, I spent countless hours trying to reduce bad traffic, talking to Kinsta’s support, but no luck – here’s everything I tried.

Rocket.net is as good in all the areas I mentioned above plus they give you 250K visits per month and a 50GB/month bandwidth limit (but if you go over your limit, you are only charged a tiny 0.08USD per 1GB).

Therefore I am getting the same result from Rocket.net as I would with Kinsta.com, but at 25USD/month instead of 95USD/month.

Here’s more background and my hosting history for nimblecamper.com (a 35K monthly visits affiliate / authority site) – I have tested 4 different hosting companies with various options to end up very happy with Rocket.net:

Fast hosting update November 2022:
I have moved my biggest website – nimblecamper.com to Rocket.net, here’s why:

TLDR; – WPX was great to get my blog off the ground, I am happy I chose them. They helped me with some setup issues, their support was always great. But, I guess, my website outgrew their hardware setup possibilities and it’s time to move on. I tested Cloudways, but it wasn’t good enough for my 25K visits/month, Woocommerce + WPML + Adinserter + Ezoic website, Kinsta let me down with their monthly visits counting in bad traffic (bots, crawlers) which made it too expensive. I chose Rocket.net in the end and couldn’t be happier – super fast backend and frontend, their support is very good and much more knowledgeable in WordPress ways than Cloudways, and monthly limits are generous.

  • backend slowness with heavier traffic – as my traffic (0 to 30K per month in 2 years) and website complexity grew (I’ve added Woocommerce + WPML + Adinserter + Ezoic ads), the backend was becoming slower and slower – until it was costing me valuable time in waiting for each admin page (dashboard, product or post editing page etc) to load + it was a pain in the ass to watch the screen load for 20s each time on WPX.net hosting. This hosting is better for sites with traffic below 25K or lower complexity plugins.
    • note that the frontend was running fine as it was on Ezoic’s CDN and cached
  • too strict limits on concurrent operations – when I edit products in bulk, I open up to 10 WP product (or post) editor tabs. I kept being banned by WPX security system for too many operations (queries). Had to wait for 10 minutes, then start again. This was too annoying. I spoke to WPX support several times and there’s nothing they could do – that’s how their security is set up.
  • future scalability – if I’m experiencing slowness with 30K monthly visitors and my site is growing steadily each month, this was a necessary step in the evolution of nimblecamper.com. More traffic requires better hardware. First, I moved to Cloudways, where I can quickly scale up the hardware should my traffic spike faster – plenty of room to grow. But… my site was too much for an AWS 2cpu 2GB plan at 36 per month (when I worked on admin, say a product or a post update, the server went down with the entire site). And one level higher (2cpu, 4GB plan) was 86 USD per month – too much for what it was (I tested it, admin was still taxing it too much). So I tested Kinsta and it was good at the start – at 30 USD per month (25K visits limit though…) the website and admin is the fastest ever, their support is AMAZING and everything runs very smoothly. Plus, their hosting is geared towards WordPress websites, so their support knows everything you need for WordPress – all the tricks can be easily implemented and they offer incredible tools to monitor your usage, block countries you are not targetting (so that traffic doesn’t eat up your plan + blocks brute force attacks from those countries).
  • BUT – Kinsta’s 25K visits per month also count in all bad traffic – bots, crawlers etc. So my 30K website visits per month turned out to be 90K visits per month and I would have to pay triple for bad bot traffic. I tried all possible ways to limit bad bot traffic, but it’s impossible. Hence, I moved over to Rocket.net and couldn’t be happier.
  • price – at 26 USD per month I got 5 domains with WPX, which is great, but the hardware was shared with others, hence, I’m presuming, the admin slowness. At Cloudways, I tried starting with the 2GB DigitalOcean package, also at 26 USD per month, but that didn’t cut it. At Kinsta’s 30 USD / month, I get one website, but that’s for a very low-traffic website if you count in bad traffic and crawlers, so not for me. With Rocket.net, I pay 25 USD per month, my website is the fastest ever – including the admin (I still can’t believe how fast the admin is, considering it took 15-20s to load on WPX servers). And I don’t have to worry about the bad bot traffic like with Kinsta.

If your website is approaching higher traffic and a more complex setup – go for Rocket.net too.

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