The article below is part of our SaaS Spotlight Series featuring companies from our 2020 SaaS 1000 List, click here to view the full list of winners.
In 2013, a group of friends with backgrounds in website design and internet marketing identified a roadblock in their line of business. They had long used WordPress as their CMS of choice for client work, but when it came time to hand off projects to clients, they weren’t particularly satisfied with the available hosting options.
They recognized this gap in the market and put their heads together to create the web hosting company that they all wished had existed: Kinsta. “Having a great idea and actually getting that idea off the ground are two different things entirely,” jokes Jon Penland, COO of Kinsta. After several months of planning and development, Kinsta officially launched in 2014.
Kinsta, a WordPress hosting solution, maximizes the utility of WordPress by not only powering websites but by equipping customers with features and tools they can use to manage their websites more effectively and ultimately spend less time thinking about their websites and more time focused on their business.
According to Penland, Kinsta was founded on three main principles: security, speed, and support. These founding principles paired with Google Cloud, make Kinsta a unique, and formidable, WordPress hosting solution. “Initially, Kinsta’s infrastructure was built on traditional VPS-style hosting architecture and Kinsta’s hosting control panel, MyKinsta, offered a limited feature set. In the years since our founding, we’ve rebuilt our infrastructure from the ground up using the latest technologies and now offer a modern container-based architecture,” Penland explains.
In addition to the technical metamorphoses over the years, Kinsta also offers a robust set of premium tools exclusive to the platform. With offerings like access to Google Cloud’s Premium Tier Network and C2 machines for all customers across all Kinsta plans, Kinsta holds a unique position against other WordPress hosting platforms. This is bolstered by multilingual support across Kinsta’s properties and technical assistance and a competitive affiliate program that offers lifetime commission.
“Our team includes a lot of exceptional people with a tremendous amount of talent and determination. . .”
At its founding, Kinsta’s team consisted of four co-founders working out of their apartments. Today, Kinsta’s team is made up of more than 130 professionals all around the world, with an impressive growth rate beyond just the team’s headcount. Kinsta has seen its customer base roughly double year over year for the past six years while remaining a completely bootstrapped company, which is “something we are particularly proud of,” Penland emphasizes.
“While we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished in terms of features and growth, we’re equally proud of the team we’ve built,” Penland continues. With a remote team spread across the globe, collaboration and communication are vital to the organization’s success. “Our team includes a lot of exceptional people with a tremendous amount of talent and determination,” Penland explains. “And we’re going to keep on investing in our people and trusting them to carry us into a bright future.”
As both the internet and WordPress hosting solutions press ever-forward, Kinsta hopes “to remain one of the most interesting and exciting managed hosting providers on the internet” in the future. This, as Penland admits, means Kinsta must keep moving forward too. Whether they are working on developing Kinsta’s internal culture or the next big technological advance, “our customers can expect us to remain committed to the ideas we’ve espoused from the beginning: that hosting should be secure, WordPress should be fast, and support should be exceptional,” says Penland.
