Rocket Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta
If you’re looking for a Rocket alternative for WordPress hosting, Kinsta has you covered. Powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform, our unique, powerful solution for managed WordPress hosting is optimized for speed and performance. It’s unlike anything else you’ll find. Let’s explore why!
Introduction
Kinsta has been in business for 10 years and is known for top website performance, world-class support, and the powerful MyKinsta dashboard that makes website management a breeze. More than 120,000+ clients all across the world, including some of the biggest enterprises and agencies, rely on Kinsta’s hosting services.
We know that everyday WordPress and website users are looking for an alternative hosting solution to Rocket that combines better infrastructure and performance, along with faster and better support. Kinsta provides all these and much more!
How Kinsta Compares to Rocket in a Nutshell
Kinsta’s infrastructure is fully containerized and powered exclusively by the Google Cloud Platform on Google’s Premium Tier network, enabling us to provide you with a large selection of the fastest data servers, incredible performance, server-level caching, dedicated resources, and enhanced security. Gone are the days of worrying about sharing resources with other sites, including your own!
All sites on Kinsta are protected by our enterprise-level premium Cloudflare integration, free for all customers. It includes a secure firewall, HTTP/3 support, DDoS protection, free CDN, and other benefits. You also experience transparent resource consumption, costs, and pricing.
While Rocket also uses Google Cloud Platform, they don’t make top-tier products like C2 and C3D virtual machines and Premium Tier network available for all plans. You get access to C2 machines only if you have Premium or Dedicated custom plans.
Rocket counts all staging into their disc space allowance, while Kinsta does not. We do, however, allow you to easily purchase a cost-effective disk space add-on while keeping your current plan.
We are also proud to be the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2, the world’s leading software review and comparison site.
Feature Comparison Overview
At this point, we want to take a moment to look at some of the biggest differences between Kinsta and Rocket:
Kinsta | Rocket | |
---|---|---|
Pricing | Plans start at $35/month | Plans start at $30/month |
Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days | 30 days |
Plan Tiers | 21 (not including custom) | 9 (not including custom) |
Premium 24×7 Support | All plans | All plans |
Free Cloudflare Integration | ✓ | ✓ |
Built-in Edge Caching | 260+ data centers | Not specified |
Core Infrastructure | Same across all plans (GCP) | Varies by plan |
Uptime Monitoring | All plans | X |
Global Data Centers | 37 locations | 10 locations |
Backup retention | Up to 30 days | 14 days |
Free Expert Migrations | All plans | ✓ |
Free DDoS Protection | ✓ | ✓ |
PHP Versions | PHP 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 | PHP 5.6, 7.4, 8.0, 8.1 |
Free Cloudflare Firewall | ✓ | X |
Free SSL Certificates | Yes (wildcard domains supported) | Yes (wildcard domains not supported) |
Free APM Tool | Kinsta APM | X |
Free Static site hosting | ✓ | X |
Early Hints Modern Web Standard | ✓ | X |
Multisite Support | Pro plans and higher ($70/month) | All plans except Starter |
IP Geolocation | ✓ | X |
Reverse Proxy Support | ✓ | X |
Performance Analytics | ✓ | Not specified |
Redis Add-on | ✓ | Free |
New Relic (license required) | ✓ | Not specified |
Multilingual Dashboard | English, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, French, Swedish, Danish, Japanese | X |
Enjoy a 20% Faster Website Simply by Moving From Rocket 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 10+ 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%!
- Containerized sites, meaning no more shared hosting/resources at any plan level.
- Early Hints feature, a modern web standard that can help immediately improve how quickly your pages load by providing additional information on what resources to preload, resulting in faster page rendering speed.
Migrate from Rocket 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 vs Rocket
Let’s take a look at some of the major differences between Kinsta and Rocket:
- At Kinsta, we are transparent and clear about what kind of resources you get in any given WordPress plan. Rocket markets that all their plans come with unlimited PHP workers, but the reality is that they have a fair usage policy in place, meaning your sites will have a predefined number of workers, but unfortunately, not unlimited. Servers have physical limits, so offering unlimited workers is not possible. You are required to buy/upgrade to an enterprise plan if you need a higher number of workers – if you don’t believe, ask them for 100 workers on the smallest plan – advertised as unlimited workers – and you’ll find out.
- Kinsta provides 14 or 30 days of backup retention on WordPress plans. Rocket provides 14 days.
- At Kinsta, all your sites, both live and staging, can run on the latest available PHP version, in this case, PHP 8.2. It provides better performance and is more secure against vulnerabilities. The latest PHP 8.2 version is not available for Rocket customers. However, the outdated PHP 5.6 version is and putting sites at risk.
- Kinsta provides for free an application performance monitoring tool (APM) for all sites for free. It is developed by us and helps you identify plugins, themes, and other WordPress-related issues in minutes. Rocket doesn’t provide an APM tool for its clients.
- Kinsta offers 37 data center options for your sites. You can pick any location depending on which serves your visitors best. On the other hand, Rocket has only 10 data center locations.
- Kinsta is SOC2 compliant. SOC2 indicates that an organization maintains a high level of information security. Strict compliance requirements (tested through on-site audits) can help ensure sensitive information is handled responsibly. Rocket is not SOC2 compliant.
- On top of WordPress, Kinsta also provides application and database hosting services. Many modern WP site enterprises extend the capabilities of their website with additional databases or connect their web applications to their website. On the other hand, Rocket is hosting only WordPress sites, so you don’t have the flexibility to extend your online presence on the same platform.
- Kinsta provides extra staging environments for your sites. You can have up to 5 extra environments to test and develop any functionality on your website. Rocket doesn’t offer extra environments.
- Kinsta offers a disc space add-on if you need more disc space for your sites. For $20, you can easily add 20GB SSD to your account. At Rocket, you either pay the disc overage or upgrade to a higher plan.
- At Kinsta, we don’t upgrade WP core as we know the latest updates can break sites, especially when a lot of customizations are in place. Rocket automatically upgrades your WordPress core unless you opt out.
- Kinsta performs continuous automatic MySQL database optimization on all of your sites to ensure better performance. Rocket does not.
- Kinsta offers an out-of-the-box Static Site hosting solution for completely free. You can host up to 100 static sites – including WordPress – for free. Rocket doesn’t offer a free out-of-the-box static hosting solution.
- Our free Cloudflare integration will work great for most customers. If you want a little more fine-grained control or need to implement something at Cloudflare not offered by our integration, you can switch your site to use your own Cloudflare account along with Kinsta’s Cloudflare integration. Rocket also has a Cloudflare integration, but they don’t allow you to switch to your own Cloudflare account.
- Kinsta has an extensive and public blog, knowledge base and documentation in Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish languages with almost 2000 tutorials and guides available for everyone. Rocket’s help articles are hidden and available only for logged-in users.
- Kinsta’s refund policy is transparent, generous, and easy to do. In the first month, you get a no-questions-asked full refund if you decide to go that route. If you cancel any add-on after the first 30 days, you will receive a prorated credit for the add-on fees to your Account Balance for the remaining days of the current billing period. More information on our WordPress money-back guarantee and refunds can be found in our documentation. Rocket also provides refunds; however, not on all plans. The 30-day money-back guarantee doesn’t apply to Enterprise plans. For annual plans, you can request a refund and get your money back only in the first 90 days after the signup. On top of that, you have to submit a notice of cancellation seven days prior to your next billing date. If notice of cancellation is not submitted at least seven days prior to the next billing date, you are responsible for payment of the next billing period. Also, at Rocket, you can not cancel your subscription on your own. Requests must and may only be submitted via their ticketing system. At Kinsta, you can cancel your subscription anytime with just a few clicks on the dashboard.
- Kinsta has its own custom-developed local WordPress development tool called DevKinsta. With this free tool, you can build WordPress sites locally and, if you want, push them to your Kinsta account. Rocket doesn’t offer a local development tool.
- For Agencies, Kinsta offers free hosting for their agency website. Also, they are eligible for getting listed in our Agency Directory, which is available for our entire client base, meaning this is a potential new source of new customers for them. Rocket doesn’t offer these perks for agencies.
Try it out for yourself with our risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee.
Kinsta Is Built for Performance and Scalability
If you’re looking for a performance-oriented and scalable host, Kinsta’s got you covered. Our custom-built hosting platform is optimized to deliver incredible speed, performance, and scalability, whether you’re running a personal blog or an e-commerce store doing millions in revenue. At Kinsta, you can scale up and down between plans with just a few clicks and transparent resource consumption. Best of all, there is no downtime when switching plans, and your hosting bill is automatically prorated with a transparent and controlled cost!
With GCP’s Premium Tier network (which Rocket does not offer), we ensure that the traffic to and from our customers’ sites is routed around the world as quickly as possible. When it comes to page load times and site performance, every millisecond counts!
High-performance virtual machines powered by the Google Cloud Platform 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 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%!
Kinsta Is Safe and Secure
At Kinsta, we know that the security of your data is of the utmost importance, which is why we’re dedicated to providing the most secure hosting service by taking a variety of active and passive measures to safeguard your site.
All sites on Kinsta are protected by our free Cloudflare integration, which includes an enterprise-level firewall with a custom ruleset and DDoS protection. With our Cloudflare integration, you’ll get the benefits of enhanced security and performance without having to manage your own Cloudflare account.
Some of Kinsta’s key security measures include:
- Monitoring sites every three minutes for uptime, 480 times a day.
- Rigid software-based restrictions to stop malicious code from entering your website.
- Real-time DDoS attack detection and mitigation.
- Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) support and automatic bans for IPs that have more than six failed login attempts in a minute.
- A dedicated Security Team to address malicious attackers, hacks, and exploits.
- Free Cloudflare integration with a secure firewall and built-in DDoS protection.
- Only support for encrypted SFTP and SSH connections (no FTP).
- Completely isolated containers (LXC), using LXD to orchestrate them so there’s no chance of cross-infection from other clients.
- Free Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard domain support.
- 100% Malware Security Pledge if your site is infected with malware while hosted on Kinsta.
- Automatic security checks for every plugin installed to discover vulnerabilities and/or security issues.
- We allow you to use only supported and secure PHP versions.
In the rare event that something were to happen to your site, our Malware Security Pledge means you will get hands-on assistance from our engineers free of charge. We’ll restore your site and make sure it’s free of backdoors that hackers can take advantage of.
Kinsta Is Developer-Friendly
We create a WordPress hosting solution tailored for developers without sacrificing ease of use. Everything from our custom dashboard to our products and tools is built to help improve your productivity.
Some developer-friendly features and tools you’ll have access to as a Kinsta customer include:
- SSH, Git, and WP-CLI access on all plans.
- Custom setups like Bedrock and Trellis, as well as starter themes such as Sage.
- One-click WordPress staging environments that allow you to easily push changes from staging to production as well as conveniently clone your site.
- Run a different version of PHP for each live site and staging site, and switch between PHP engines takes just one click. We currently support 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3.
- Post and page revisions enabled by default. While we recommend limiting or disabling these, we believe this should be your choice.
- Load your site over a reverse proxy.
- Built-in free APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tool for troubleshooting WordPress performance issues.
- DevKinsta, a free local development tool.
- Restore backups to staging as well as production.
With Kinsta as your hosting provider, you’ll have all the tools needed to manage your WordPress site, regardless of your technical knowledge.
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.
Agency Partner Program
Kinsta has an Agency Partner Program specifically designed for agencies looking for a powerful and secure hosting platform with minimal overhead. After joining our Agency Partner Program, your agency will be able to focus on developing client projects and expanding your business while we handle the hosting side of things.
We talk to new agency owners every day and know how frustrating it can be when you are overpaying for dedicated servers, while your sites are still sharing resources with each other. This leads to performance issues. We hear you and we have the solution!
Our container-based hosting stack is a game changer for your agency and for your clients. Each website gets dedicated resources and we deliver better performance and uptime in a cost-efficient way. No upsell, just upgrades: transparent plans for Your Growing Agency. 115,000+ WordPress sites already enjoy the Kinsta difference. Contact us and get your first month free today!
Our Agency Partner Program also comes with a number of perks:
- Free hosting for your agency site on a Kinsta Pro plan (a $70/month value).
- Unlimited free migrations for your client sites.
- White-label our cache-clearing plugin with your agency’s logo and branding.
- One month of free hosting, so you don’t have to worry about paying for two hosting plans while migrating your client sites to Kinsta.
As a member of our Agency Partner Program, all your client sites will receive the same level of support, features, and tooling offered on our normal plan tiers!
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. MyKinsta dashboard is built with usability in mind.
With features like search and replace, force HTTPS, URL redirects with IP geolocation support, IP deny, Application Performance Monitoring, Edge Caching, Early Hints, Cron Jobs, PHP workers, 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.
Let’s take a look at some of the features that make our MyKinsta dashboard so powerful:
- Toggle between different PHP versions. Unlike Rocket, which only supports older versions of PHP (like PHP 5.6), Kinsta supports PHP 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3.
- Application Performance Monitoring tool that gives you all the necessary PHP and MySQL data to debug WordPress performance issues.
- High-performance object caching with our Redis add-on.
- Get detailed analytics on bandwidth and visitors, CDN usage, cache HIT & MISS rates, and more.
- Access to one-click staging environments and the option to restore backups to production or staging.
- Quick phpMyAdmin access.
- Automatic MySQL database optimizations.
- One-click ionCube enabler.
- Free Kinsta DNS (powered by Amazon Route53) to manage your DNS records directly in the dashboard.
- One-click CDN setup with Kinsta CDN.
- Purge the site cache directly from the dashboard.
- Redirect management with IP geolocation support.
- IP Deny tool that lets you quickly block IP addresses before they reach your site.
- Free automatic Cloudflare SSL certificates with wildcard domain support and the option to import your own.
- A toggle for enabling WP_DEBUG mode.
- Password protection for your environment and the ability to strengthen login security by adding your SSH keys to the dashboard.
- The dashboard is available in 10 languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Swedish, Danish.
There’s no need to simply take our word for it, though. Schedule a live demo today and explore the user-friendly interface and plethora of tools to see firsthand what makes MyKinsta different from the competition.
Kinsta API
Say goodbye to the limitations of the past and enjoy a revolutionary era where machines can seamlessly interact with our services. Kinsta API (Application Programming Interface) allows you to perform tasks on your Kinsta site without logging in to the MyKinsta dashboard.
What’s possible with Kinsta API?
- Reporting: seamlessly integrate Kinsta Services into your internal tracking systems and retrieve Kinsta analytics data effortlessly.
- Scheduled Tasks: create applications to schedule tasks, ensuring minimal disruption to your visitors.
- WordPress Site Creation: create a new WordPress site installation automatically and take control of your site’s functionality. You can also create WordPress Multisite installations.
Enjoy more automation than ever before on the Kinsta platform by taking advantage of Kinsta API.
Expert Support for WordPress
At Kinsta, we treat every customer as a mission-critical priority, whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, agency, or global enterprise. Our support team of WordPress experts is available 24 hours a day year-round, including holidays, weekends, and late nights (wherever you are).
We don’t rely on a tiered support system, which means we won’t waste your time with escalations and transfers. Whether you’re on our Starter or Enterprise 4 plan, you’ll have access to the same team of WordPress experts.
In addition to multilingual support and resources available in over 10 languages, we’re also proud to maintain an initial ticket response time average of under two minutes!
Free Performance Monitoring Tool
All Kinsta plans come with a free custom-built APM tool that can be easily accessed in the MyKinsta dashboard. Kinsta APM provides you with key WordPress performance insights and metrics without the need to pay for third-party subscriptions to 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.
- PHP execution time.
On the other hand, Rocket plans do not come with a free custom-built APM tool. This means if you’re on a Rocket plan, you won’t be able to collect insights about your site’s performance.
Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
As a managed WordPress hosting company, we understand the importance of a platform capable of supporting high-traffic, resource-intensive e-commerce sites. We also recognize the unique and demanding challenges that come with powering online stores. This is why we optimized our platform for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
WooCommerce and other WordPress e-commerce plugins rely heavily on CPU performance because they cannot be efficiently cached. This is where our C2 and C3D VMs really shine with their industry-leading CPU performance. At Kinsta, we make C2 and C3D VMs available on all plans from Starter to Enterprise 4 and beyond.
Our expert engineers are very familiar with WooCommerce and have developed a custom workflow that optimizes performance. Some of the ways we enhance the WordPress ecommerce experience include:
- Excluding ‘My Account,’ checkout, cart, and other pages that shouldn’t be cached.
- Ensuring a smooth checkout process by automatically bypassing the cache for users when
woocommerce_items_in_cart
oredit_items_in_cart
are detected. - Implementing specific rules to allow EDD and WooCommerce functionality during server-level page caching.
While Rocket has special caching rules for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, they do not offer C2 compute-optimized VMs to all customers.
Develop Locally With DevKinsta
With DevKinsta, you can launch WordPress sites with a full hosting stack and SSL support on your local computer (macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu) with just a few clicks.
DevKinsta is fully integrated with MyKinsta and Kinsta’s hosting platform, so you can join the 60,000+ community members using DevKinsta to develop locally and push updates directly to a staging environment on Kinsta!
If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features (including multisite support) and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver.
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 Migrations From Real People
Whether you want to move one site or 100, Kinsta provides hassle-free migrations that are handled by our skilled WordPress experts. You won’t have to deal with complex technology or risk losing critical data.
If you’re interested in moving your site to managed WordPress hosting, we offer unlimited free migrations from Rocket! Our migrations are performed by an expert migrations engineer.
To get started, simply complete our site migration request form, and our experts will reach out to schedule a time. Then you can track the migration’s status directly from your MyKinsta dashboard.
Turbocharging Your Content Delivery With Kinsta CDN
In addition to free bandwidth, all Kinsta plans include a free Content Delivery Network (CDN). 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 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 the CDN directly from your MyKinsta dashboard.
Affiliate Program With Recurring Commissions
Kinsta is constantly exceeding our client’s expectations. Our satisfied customers are eager to spread the word about our products and services, which has helped us become one of the fastest-growing hosts in the industry.
For every referral of Managed WordPress Hosting, you earn both:
- An initial one-time bonus, between $50 and $500, is calculated based on the plan of the customer.
- A 10% monthly recurring commission is paid every month for the lifetime of the customer. The 10% is calculated out of the plan’s monthly fee (discounts applied). Add-ons are not included.
For every referral of Application Hosting and/or Database Hosting, you earn a 5% recurring commission every month for the lifetime of the customer. The 5% is calculated out of the customer’s monthly invoice (discounts applied).
This is a powerful opportunity to earn a passive income!
To make the Kinsta affiliate experience even more enjoyable, we custom-built our own easy-to-use affiliate dashboard. Therefore, you won’t have to deal with complicated or confusing third-party platforms.
Rocket offers $150 per new customer. Since Rocket doesn’t pay recurring commissions for the lifetime of a referred customer, their affiliate program doesn’t allow you to build a passive income stream.
Join Others Making the Switch to Kinsta
At Kinsta, we offer the fastest, latest technology possible. We’re constantly evolving and adapting to leverage the most innovative solutions available. You can see for yourself simply by checking out our Changelog!
We are confident in our solutions and want you to be 100% satisfied with your hosting, which is why we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee and free migrations from Rocket. It’s time to move away from Rocket and switch to our managed WordPress hosting platform.