Kinsta is one of the most respected companies in the managed WordPress hosting niche. Few other hosts have the same level of professionalism, expertise and reliability when it comes to hosting mission-critical WordPress sites.

But there is one major problem you can potentially run into with Kinsta: Their plans are limited by the number of PHP workers (or threads) available to each site.

PHP workers are needed to execute PHP code. Each time a visitor requests a page of your site that is not a static cached page, a PHP worker fires up to process and generate the requested page. Each PHP worker can handle one page request at a time, and if all available PHP workers are in use, any further requests will have to wait in line, which may lead to slow website loading.

Now, if your site mainly consists of static pages (e.g. blog posts), that’s not gonna be an issue with Kinsta’s WP hosting because those pages will be served from a static cache (Cloudflare in this case), and won’t require PHP workers to process.

It’s the uncached (dynamically generated) pages that can suffer from slow loading during traffic peaks due to limited availability of PHP workers. Examples include e-commerce sites and online community sites.

The WordPress admin dashboard may also suffer from slow loading because of the limitation on PHP workers.

You can increase that limit for an additional fee, or you can migrate to another host with less strict limits (below are some suggestions).

3 Solid Kinsta Alternatives to Consider

These three hosts offer more PHP workers than Kinsta:

1. Pressable

Pressable runs their own cloud infrastructure which was built by parent company Automattic (the owner and developer of WordPress). They are more generous with server resources than Kinsta. They allow a default 10 PHP workers per site, which can auto-scale to 110 PHP workers during traffic spikes (at no extra charge).

In terms of technical support, I’d say it’s a tie. Both providers have knowledgeable agents who respond quickly in case you need assistance any time of the day.

Pressable’s starting price is a bit lower than Kinsta’s, and you don’t have to pay hundreds just to get a few more PHP workers.

2. Cloudways

Cloudways is another solid alternative if you want to break free from the dreaded PHP worker limit.

They offer two types of hosting plans: Flexible and Autonomous.

With Cloudways Flexible, you get your own cloud server from one of five providers: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, or Google Cloud. Most people choose DigitalOcean because it’s the most affordable option.

The main performance limitations will be the amount of RAM and CPU your plan includes, and both of these can be scaled up when needed. There is no limit on monthly visits and you can host multiple websites on each server.

The catch is that this isn’t a fully managed service. Support only covers server and platform issues, but other than that you need the technical knowledge to fix website issues on your own.

With Cloudways Autonomous, you get a fully managed service with autoscaling resources. The trade-off is that these plans have a limit on monthly visits and the number of sites you can host.

3. ChemiCloud

ChemiCloud offers both regular shared WordPress hosting (low performance) and managed WordPress hosting (high performance). Let’s talk about the latter.

They don’t have a hard limit on PHP workers or monthly visits like Kinsta, but watch out for the bandwidth limit.

Support agents are less experienced than Kinsta’s and Pressable’s, but more helpful than Cloudways’. They are very responsive and friendly. Overall, it’s one of the best hosts I’ve tested so far.

What Do Redditors Recommend?

Both Pressable and Cloudways are among the recommended Kinsta alternatives on Reddit. Pressable is usually the choice of small businesses while Cloudways is more geared towards tech-savvy users.

Some Redditors prefer to take matters into their own hands, so they opt for a self-managed VPS server from DigitalOcean, Vultr, Hetzner, etc. This is a much cheaper option but requires a lot more experience, manual work, and time.

Is WP Engine a Good Alternative to Kinsta?

WP Engine is one of the closest competitors of Kinsta in the managed WordPress hosting field. Both companies have a powerful platform and first-rate technical support.

But WP Engine also has the same major issue that high-traffic dynamic sites face with Kinsta, namely the limited number of PHP workers.

So, if the main reason you’re looking for an alternative to Kinsta is the PHP worker limit or slow loading, WP Engine may not be the best choice because you will likely end up facing the same problem.