Xserver Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta
If you’re looking for an alternative to Xserver’s wpXSpeed hosting plans, you’ve come to the right place. Powered exclusively by Google Cloud Platform, Kinsta offers a unique and powerful solution for managed WordPress hosting. With affordable plans and best-in-class technology, our speed-optimized platform is perfect for sites of all sizes. Let’s take a look at the benefits of choosing Kinsta as your hosting provider!
Introduction
Xserver is a Japan-based web hosting company that can be a budget-friendly option if you’re looking for basic web hosting. However, while WordPress hosting is included in its offerings, it is not a WordPress-specific host. Rather, it specializes in shared and dedicated servers that can be used for a variety of purposes.
This means that there are some fundamental differences between Xserver and Kinsta which is important to know if you’re looking for the best managed WordPress hosting provider.
To put it simply, Xserver isn’t backed by the same innovative technologies (Google Cloud Platform), support experience (24/7 premium support), and WordPress-optimized platform that Kinsta is. In this comparison article, we’ll discuss what sets Kinsta apart from Xserver’s wpXSpeed hosting plans.
How Kinsta Compares to Xserver in a Nutshell
Before we take a deep dive into the specifics of Kinsta versus Xserver, we want to give you a brief overview of the biggest differences between the two hosting platforms.
Kinsta is powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform and Google’s Premium Tier network, which enables us to maximize the speed, performance, and security of every website hosted with us.
Let’s take a look at some of the other major differences between Kinsta versus Xserver:
- Kinsta has a strong global presence with 37 high-performance data center locations around the world, with two locations (Tokyo and Osaka) in Japan. Xserver only offers a single hosting location in Japan.
- Kinsta uses the fastest C3D and C2 servers from Google Cloud Platform, as well as Google Cloud’s premium tier global network (the same network backbone that powers Google Search, Gmail, and other popular services) for all our customers and plans. In our tests, we found C2 VMs were up to 200% faster than Google Cloud’s standard servers for WordPress hosting, while C3D machines reduced response times by a further 20% to 50%.
- Kinsta has in-depth Japanese knowledgebase and blog articles covering every feature on our hosting platform. Xserver does not have a comprehensive knowledgebase.
- Kinsta includes a free high-performance CDN with 260+ POPs worldwide (including a location in Tokyo) on all plans. Xserver’s wpXSpeed plans do not include a free CDN.
- Kinsta offers six kinds of backups with every plan, including automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system generated, downloadable, and external backups to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. Xserver only provides daily backups, with no option to download or export backups to external cloud storage services.
- Kinsta supports the latest versions of PHP, including PHP 8.0 which is ~18% faster than PHP 7.4. Xserver does not support PHP 8.0.
- Our custom MyKinsta dashboard, which supports Japanese, includes a variety of useful site management tools like one-click SSL creation, URL redirects, database search and replace, HTTP auth password protection, ionCube Loader, and more. Xserver does not have a dashboard with a complete suite of site management tools tailored for WordPress.
- Kinsta is SOC2 compliant, which provides independent proof that we have established security procedures and adhered to those procedures over time. Xserver is not SOC2 compliant. See Kinsta’s Trust Report for additional information.
- All Kinsta plans come with unlimited free migrations performed by migrations experts who will assist you every step of the way. Xserver’s migrations are performed by a plugin, which means it may not be fully compatible with every site. Since Xserver’s migration process is automated, there is no manual confirmation to ensure your site was migrated correctly.
- Kinsta plans include everything you need to maximize the security and performance of your WordPress site. We provide premium Cloudflare DNS, automatic uptime monitoring 480 times per day, IP Geolocation blocking for sites that prefer to block non-Japanese traffic, DDoS protection, and a secure firewall powered by Cloudflare. Xserver does not provide active uptime monitoring or a firewall with DDoS protection.
- Kinsta’s support team made up of over 120 WordPress experts is available 24/7/365. Our average response time for support requests is under 2 minutes, and you never have to wait on hold with a call center. Xserver offers email support 24/7/365, but their response time is “within 24 hours”. Xserver also has phone support from 10:00 to 18:00 JST on weekdays, but they may ask you to contact them via email if you have a technical question.
- Adding a custom domain on Kinsta is quick and easy, and we’ll even run a search and replace to update the domain in your WordPress database. Adding a custom domain on Xserver requires a complicated domain authentication process, and there is no automatic search and replace functionality.
- Kinsta’s security guarantee includes free malware scanning and removal for all sites hosted on Kinsta. Xserver does not have a security guarantee with free malware scanning and removal.
- All Kinsta plans come with free access to our Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool for troubleshooting performance issues on your WordPress site. Xserver does not have a built-in APM solution.
- For new Kinsta customers, we offer a 30-day money back guarantee. Xserver only offers a 15-day trial period.
Enjoy a 20% Faster Website Simply by Moving From Xserver to Kinsta
We measured 3,200+ migrations over the course of a three-month span. On average, client sites experienced 20% faster load times just by moving to Kinsta.
How is this possible? Our customers enjoy:
- The latest generation of virtual machines from Google’s Compute Engine general-purpose machine family C3D VMs and The fastest Compute-Optimized C2 VMs, available across all plans in supported regions.
- A stack that’s been fine-tuned for WordPress over the past 8 years
- Google’s Premium Tier Network to deliver website data faster
- Free CDN powered by Cloudflare’s global network of 260+ locations
- Built-in Edge Caching that cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
Migrate from Xserver to Kinsta hassle free with our free expert migration service. With our 30-day money-back guarantee, you can test out the service and improved speeds completely risk-free. You only lose if you don’t give this a try!
Kinsta is Built for Performance and Scalability
If you’re looking for a performance-oriented and scalable host, Kinsta’s got you covered. Unlike WordPress hosting plans from other hosts like Xserver, giving customers access to the fastest cloud infrastructure is one of our top priorities.
Our custom-built hosting platform is optimized to deliver incredible speed, performance, and scalability whether you’re running a personal blog or an ecommerce store doing millions in revenue. At Kinsta, you can scale up and down between plans with just a few clicks. Best of all, there is no downtime when switching plans, and your hosting bill is automatically prorated!
At Kinsta, we only use the fastest virtual machines and network routing for our hosting stack. Kinsta uses C3D and C2 virtual machines – these are Google Cloud Platform’s fastest servers. To top it off, we make use of GCP’s Premium Tier network, which ensures traffic to and from our customers’ sites are routed around the world as quickly as possible. When it comes to page load times and site performance, every millisecond counts!
GCP’s fastest servers form the foundation of our hosting infrastructure. Beyond that, our high-performance hosting stack consists of orchestrated LXC containerized software containers and LXD managed hosts, and highly tuned configurations for Nginx, PHP, and MariaDB. Our unique containerized infrastructure allows sites hosted on Kinsta to automatically scale CPU and RAM usage (within the plan’s limits) in response to traffic surges.
As part of our Cloudflare integration, Edge Caching saves your Kinsta site/page cache to any of Cloudflare’s global network of 260+ data centers.
Edge Caching is included free with all Kinsta plans, doesn’t require a separate plugin, and cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!
Uncover your WordPress Site’s Performance Bottlenecks.
Our experts will run a free performance audit of your website and send you a detailed action plan.
MyKinsta: A Custom-Built Dashboard for Powerful Site Management
At Kinsta, we believe in empowering our customers with powerful features to make WordPress site management a breeze. Our MyKinsta dashboard was purpose-built with usability in mind.
With features like search and replace, SSL generation, force HTTPS, URL redirects, IP deny, free Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool, and more, you have a wide array of powerful tools for managing your WordPress site. MyKinsta even includes a comprehensive analytics dashboard that provides insights into key site metrics.
MyKinsta was designed with user experience in mind. In addition to being fully responsive, non-instant actions in MyKinsta (creating a site, generating an SSL certificate, etc.) always have status indicators so you are aware of the progress at all times.
Compared to MyKinsta, Xserver’s hosting dashboard is not responsive, which means it’s difficult to use on smartphones, tablets, and computers with smaller screens. Furthermore, site creation and other tasks in Xserver’s dashboard don’t always display status indicators, which makes it difficult to know when a particular task has finished.
Let’s take a look at some of the features that make MyKinsta so powerful, many of which are not available in Xserver’s wpXSpeed dashboard:
- One-click staging environments, and an option to restore backups to production or staging.
- Quick phpMyAdmin access for making changes to your WordPress database.
- Premium DNS powered by Amazon Web Services Route53, with easy DNS management right in MyKinsta.
- Detailed analytics and insights such as bandwidth and visitor data, CDN usage and insights, performance analysis data, and cache HIT and MISS ratio.
- A free high-performance CDN powered by Cloudflare to ensure images and other media files load quickly, at no additional cost.
- A built-in Cloudflare integration with optimized settings to secure and boost the performance of your site without the need for a separate Cloudflare subscription.
- A search and replace tool to perform bulk database updates with ease.
- One-click PHP version switching (with PHP 8.0 support), as well as a built-in PHP restart tool.
- Automatic MySQL database optimizations in the background.
- A dashboard tool to purge the site cache.
- A one-click ionCube enabler.
- Free, Cloudflare SSL certificates (X.509 industry-standard encryption), and the option to import your own custom SSL.
- Simple HTTP auth password protection for your WordPress sites.
- Support for SSH keys to strengthen security for SSH and SFTP sessions.
- A powerful built-in APM tool for troubleshooting WordPress performance issues.
- Collaborative multi-user support with different levels of permissions.
- A Japanese dashboard, with support for nine other languages.
- One-click access to our 24/7 expert support team.
We value our clients’ feedback and are always striving to be better. This is why we regularly seek out opportunities to improve, and consider the requests and feedback we get from clients to enhance our offerings. If something can make your site or hosting experience even better, we want to hear about it!
Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
Kinsta’s platform is optimized for ecommerce sites, which we know can be particularly demanding and generate a lot of cache-bypassing dynamic page loads. Fortunately, our hosting plans and platform can help you increase the performance of your WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads stores.
Some of the methods we use to deliver lightning-fast speed for your online stores include:
- Excluding pages that shouldn’t be cached by default, including ‘my account’, checkout, and cart pages.
- Automatically bypassing the cache for users when “edit_items_in_cart” or “woocommerce_items_in_cart cookie” are detected, ultimately ensuring a quick, smooth, and seamless checkout process.
- Implementing server-level page caching with specific rules to enable EDD and WooCommerce functionality.
To demonstrate just how fast and impressive our platform is, it helps to look at some concrete data. Every year, Review Signal performs an annual performance testing review with some of the most popular hosts. For five consecutive years, Kinsta has earned “top tier” performance!
Web Performance Benchmarks
The performance of your WordPress site directly impacts SEO, user experience, bounce rate, and more. Therefore, it’s extremely important to choose a high-performance WordPress host to ensure your site loads as fast as possible!
Here are the results of a benchmark test conducted with KeyCDN’s web Time-to-First-Byte (TTFB) performance tool that shows the performance differences between Kinsta and Xserver from 9 locations around the world – including Tokyo, Japan.
| Kinsta | Xserver | |
|---|---|---|
| Tokyo | 20.78 ms | 22.11 ms |
| Amsterdam | 458.99 ms | 455.47 ms |
| New York | 326.23 ms | 329.07 ms |
| Singapore | 158.67 ms | 188.17 ms |
| Bangalore | 229.85 ms | 242.41 ms |
| Dallas | 287.08 ms | 325.37 ms |
| London | 445.94 ms | 496.38 ms |
| San Francisco | 259.53 ms | 232.80 ms |
| Sydney | 245.96 ms | 312.81 ms |
As you can see, Kinsta beat Xserver in seven out of nine locations. Don’t just take our word for it though! After benchmarking twelve WordPress hosts, the popular Japanese hosting comparison blog JEPISTA found that Kinsta offers the fastest WordPress hosting in Japan. Compared to Xserver’s wpXSpeed hosting, JEPISTA measured over 2x faster performance on Kinsta in real-world testing!
Kinsta Has a Global Presence
Another advantage of hosting on Kinsta is access to a global network of data centers. Kinsta customers are able to launch WordPress sites in 37 locations around the world. For customers that are focused on the domestic market in Japan, we offer hosting locations in both Tokyo and Osaka, with the ability to block non-Japanese traffic if needed. For those looking to expand their online presence outside Japan, Kinsta has a variety of data center locations in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Our current hosting locations include:
- Test, PH
- Johannesburg, Africa
- Changhua County, Taiwan
- Hong Kong
- Tokyo, Japan
- Osaka, Japan
- Seoul, South Korea
- Mumbai, India
- Delhi, India
- Jurong West, Singapore
- Jakarta, Indonesia
- Sydney, Australia
- Melbourne, Australia
- Warsaw, Poland
- Hamina, Finland
- Madrid, Spain
- St. Ghislain, Belgium
- London, United Kingdom
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Eemshaven, Netherlands
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Milan, Italy
- Paris, France
- Dammam, Saudi Arabia
- Tel Aviv, Israel
- Montréal, Canada
- Toronto, Canada
- São Paulo, Brazil
- Santiago, Chile
- Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA
- Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA
- Ashburn, Virginia, USA
- Columbus, Ohio, USA
- Dallas, Texas, USA
- The Dalles, Oregon, USA
- Los Angeles, California, USA
- Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
- Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
This is a much different experience than what you can expect to find with Xserver, who only provides customers with a single hosting location in Japan.
Kinsta is Developer-Friendly
At Kinsta, many of our team members are developers and webmasters too. This is why everything we create, from the MyKinsta dashboard to our products and tools, is built with development workflows in mind. Our platform can help you enhance your productivity and workflow efficiency.
When you use Kinsta as your managed WordPress host, you’ll have access to a wide variety of developer-friendly features and tools that you wouldn’t necessarily get with a host like Xserver. To make our developer-oriented features even more user-friendly, we maintain a comprehensive set of knowledgebase articles in Japanese. This means you can quickly get up to speed with Kinsta’s advanced features for developers.
Some of them include:
- Six types of backups: free automatic/daily, optional hourly, manual, system generated, downloadable, and automatic offsite backups to your Amazon S3 or Google Cloud storage. Xserver only provides a daily WordPress backup with no other options.
- Quicker database performance through the Redis add-on. Xserver’s wpXSpeed plans do not offer Redis add-ons.
- The ability to load your site over reverse proxy on all plans. This isn’t available on Xserver’s wpXSpeed plans.
- Kinsta lets you run a different version of PHP, including PHP 8.0, for every live and staging site, as well as switch your PHP version with the one-click feature directly from your MyKinsta dashboard.
- For sites that prefer to cater to the Japanese market only, our support team can quickly block non-Japanese traffic with a custom Nginx rule.
- All Kinsta plans come with a free Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool to help you diagnose performance bottlenecks on your WordPress sites.
- You can use DevKinsta (our local WordPress development tool) to push site updates directly to a Kinsta staging environment. Xserver does not have an integrated local WordPress development tool.
- Kinsta provides SSH and WP-CLI access on all plans. Xserver does not offer these two very important features for WordPress developers.
Develop Locally with DevKinsta
For developers and agencies, Kinsta offers a simple to use (but powerful) local development tool called DevKinsta. With DevKinsta, you can launch WordPress sites with a full hosting stack and SSL support on your local computer with just a few clicks.
DevKinsta is fully integrated with MyKinsta and Kinsta’s hosting platform, which means you can develop locally and push updates directly to a staging environment on Kinsta! Xserver doesn’t have an integration with a local WordPress development tool, which means there is no way to clone and push WordPress sites for Xserver customers. If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver.
Expert Support for WordPress
At Kinsta, our customers are our top priority. No problem is too big or too small for our team of WordPress experts. We don’t have a tiered support system, which means you’ll always receive prompt and efficient help from a qualified engineer.
We’re always here to help with 24/7 premium support, regardless of your plan. No matter what time of day it is or where you are in the world, you’ll be able to chat with our knowledgeable support team via Intercom, a unified customer messaging platform. Since our support team is available 24/7, you can chat and communicate with us at a pace that’s comfortable for you. Best of all, you’ll never have to deal with waiting on hold to speak with a call center.
We use chat support exclusively because it is the most efficient way to resolve technical issues. With our chat support, we can quickly share data, screenshots, and more without having to resort to slow phone and email communication like Xserver. It also allows our support team to access your previous support requests to help us diagnose and solve issues faster.
In addition to being knowledgeable and convenient, our support is also incredibly quick. We have an average initial ticket response time of under two minutes! For users who prefer a more DIY approach, our knowledgebase articles and documentation are available in Japanese.
We also monitor websites every three minutes for uptime. So if there’s ever an issue with your site, we’ll get in touch with you as soon as possible. Unlike Kinsta, Xserver has limited support hours – their phone support is only available during business hours, while their email support promises a response within 24 hours.
This means if you experience an issue with your site on Xserver, you may have to wait an entire day for a response. On Kinsta, you can always expect a response from our expert support team within a few minutes at any time of the day or night, every day of the year!
Feature Comparison Overview
At this point, we want to take a moment to look at some of the biggest feature differences between Kinsta and Xserver’s wpXSpeed plans:
| Kinsta | Xserver | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Plans start at $35/month (~3,165円) | Plans start at 1,200円/month (~$11.50) |
| Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days on all plans | 15 day trial period |
| Plan Tiers | 10 (not including custom) | 7 |
| Premium 24×7 Support | All plans | X |
| Core Infrastructure | Same across all plans (GCP) | Not specified |
| SSH Access | All plans | X |
| Global Data Centers | 37 locations | 1 location |
| Bandwidth Limits | No limits (within AUP) | Varies by plan |
| Container Technology | 100% resource isolation on all plans | Not specified |
| Free Migrations | All plans | All plans (via plugin) |
| Staging Environment | All plans | All plans |
| PHP Versions | PHP 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 | PHP 4.4, 5.x, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 |
| Free CDN | 260+ PoPs (All regions) | X |
| Built-in Edge Caching | All plans | Not specified |
| Free Premium DNS | Amazon R53 | X |
| Free SSL Certificates | All plans | All plans |
| Free DDoS Protection | ✓ | X |
| Uptime Monitoring | All plans | X |
| Multisite Support | Pro plans and higher | X |
| Free APM Tool | Kinsta APM | X |
| IP Geolocation | ✓ | X |
| Reverse Proxy Support | ✓ | X |
| Redis Add-on | ✓ | X |
| Multilingual Dashboard | Japanese, English, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, French, Swedish, Danish | X |
Safe and Secure
At Kinsta, we make server and site security a mission-critical priority, regardless of your hosting plan. In addition to free malware scanning and removals, we take a number of active and passive measures to safeguard your site from malicious actors.
Some of Kinsta’s security features, most of which are not included with Xserver plans, include:
- Monitoring your sites every three minutes for uptime, 480x every day.
- Real-time DDoS attack detection and mitigation.
- Isolated LXC containers to prevent malware from leaking across sites.
- Strict web server configuration designed with WordPress security in mind.
- Two-Factor Authentication (2FA).
- Intelligent firewall and free DDoS protection by Cloudflare.
- Automated backups.
- IP deny tool in MyKinsta.
- Self-healing PHP.
- Premium 24/7 Support.
- A security guarantee with free malware scanning and removal.
We include premium uptime monitoring for all of your WordPress sites via our custom monitoring system. Kinsta plans also include a 100% hack-fix guarantee that covers malware removals. This means that in the rare event something happens to your site while it’s hosted on Kinsta, we’ll fix it free of charge.
Xserver’s wpXSpeed plans do not not include free malware scanning and removals. This means you’ll have to pay for a WordPress expert to clean your site if it gets infected with malware!
All sites on Kinsta are automatically protected by Cloudflare’s firewall, which includes free DDoS protection. With our Cloudflare integration, you’ll get the benefits of enhanced security and performance without having to configure your own Cloudflare account. Xserver plans do not include a free Cloudflare integration.
Turbocharging Your Content Delivery with Kinsta CDN
All Kinsta plans include a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) via our Cloudflare integration. This is a premium HTTP/3-enabled CDN, to deliver your content lightning-fast across the globe.
As part of our Cloudflare integration, our built-in Edge Caching saves your Kinsta site/page cache to any of Cloudflare’s global network of 260+ data centers.
When site visitors load your website in their browser, cached responses will be delivered from the location closest to them. Edge Caching is included free with all Kinsta plans and doesn’t require a separate plugin.
Our content delivery architecture was tailor-made for high throughput and low latency. You can enable Kinsta CDN directly from your MyKinsta dashboard.
Free Performance Monitoring Tool
WordPress is a dynamic CMS, which means it’s constantly executing PHP code in the background. Depending on your theme and plugin configuration, it’s possible for your site to get bogged down with bloated and inefficient code.
That’s where APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tools can help. An APM monitors requests to your site, and tracks various metrics like external API requests, database queries, PHP execution time, and more. This information allows you to quickly debug and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks.
All Kinsta plans come with a free custom-built APM tool that can be easily accessed right in the MyKinsta dashboard. Kinsta APM provides you with key WordPress performance insights without the need for expensive third-party subscriptions to New Relic and other APM services.
With Kinsta APM, you can debug the following and more:
- Slow WordPress plugins and themes.
- Long calls to external APIs and domains.
- Unoptimized MySQL database queries.
Xserver’s hosting plans do not come with a free APM tool, which makes it very difficult to quickly troubleshoot performance issues on your WordPress site.
Static Sites for Free
Are you an agency creating static WordPress sites for your clients? Or do you create landing pages for high-traffic campaigns? We got you covered!
Static site hosting is 100% free at Kinsta. You can create a static or Jamstack site or use a static site generator. We can run the build process for you and deploy your site directly to the edge.
Benefits of hosting Static sites with Kinsta include:
- Your site is directly pushed to our edge network with 260+ locations globally, powered by the security and speed of Cloudflare
- Use a static site generator, and we handle the build process, which is also included free of charge
- Add custom domains, and we deliver the security (SSL certificates automatically issued and updated)
Sign up, connect your git account, and start deploying your static site from your repo.
Free WordPress Migrations
Instead of you having to install and configure complicated migration plugins, our skilled team of WordPress experts handle the entire migration process for you! This eliminates the need for you to deal with complex technology or risk losing critical data. All of our plans include unlimited free migrations that can be used to move your site from Xserver to Kinsta! On Xserver, migrations are performed via an automated process using a WordPress plugin. This means your site migration won’t be subject to a manual review and quality assurance process to ensure it was performed correctly.
To get started, simply complete our site migration request form, and a member from our team will reach out to let you know the migration is starting, depending on your chosen scheduling option. You can also track the migration status in the MyKinsta dashboard.
Best Affiliate Program in the Industry
Kinsta always strives to exceed our clients’ expectations. Our satisfied customers are eager to spread the word about Kinsta managed WordPress hosting, and this has helped propel us to become one of the fastest-growing hosts in the industry.
It’s also one of the reasons we provide one of the highest-paying affiliate programs you can find. As a Kinsta affiliate partner, you can earn as much as 500 USD (~52,000円) for every signup, depending on the plan. Plus, you’ll receive a 10% monthly recurring commission for the lifetime of the referred customer. Kinsta customers have an extremely low churn rate, so telling your audience about Kinsta is a great way to develop a passive income stream.
Xserver has an affiliate program through A8. However, their initial payouts only range from 2,858円 to 10,000円 (27 USD to 95 USD). Furthermore, Xserver does not offer monthly recurring commissions.
Join Others Making the Switch to Kinsta
We take innovation seriously, and are proud to offer the fastest and latest hosting technologies for WordPress users around the world. This is why we’re always evolving and leveraging the best solutions available. If you check out our many feature updates, you’ll see that no other hosting provider releases new tools, features, and integrations at the rate we do.
We are confident in our managed WordPress hosting solutions, and want you to be completely satisfied with your hosting. This is why we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you’re ready to make the move from Xserver and switch to a global WordPress hosting platform powered by GCP’s fastest servers, try out Kinsta risk-free for 30 days!