Rocket.net and Kinsta are two popular Managed WordPress hosting services providers. I bought a hosting account, installed a test site and put them for 24/7, 365 days a year of testing to measure the performance.
Based on the last 12 months data, Rocket hosting offers the fastest TTFB (279 ms) compared to Kinsta (378 ms).
In load testing, Rocket and Kinsta perform equally faster at 19 ms and 27 ms, respectively. Kinsta also beats Rocket hosting in the WPBenchmark test, where Kinsta scored 8.6, whereas Rocket got 8.0 out of 10.
In terms of pricing, Rocket is more affordable than Kinsta, which has enormous traffic limits. Support-wise, both Kinsta and Rocket are good, but Kinsta’s support team is more professional based on my interactions.
There are two scenarios to choose between Rocket and Kinsta:
Scenario 1: If your site traffic falls within Kinsta’s plan limit (Ex. Starter plan comes with 25k visits), then choose Kinsta. You will get a powerful control panel with quality customer support and impressive performance.
Scenario 2: If your site gets more traffic than Kinsta’s plan limit, then choose Rocket. You will get better traffic limits, good customer support and similar performance.
Rocket.net vs Kinsta – Overview
Rocket.net
Rocket Hosting was founded in 2020 and established as a super fast-managed WordPress hosting. Powered by Cloudflare Enterprise with full-page caching, Rocket offers one of the fastest hosting experiences to users all over the globe. It allows you to host from its global data centers with plans starting at $30/month.
Kinsta
Kinsta was a renowed managed WordPress hosting provider founded in 2013. Kinsta runs on Google Cloud Platform and allows you to host from 37 global data center locations. Kinsta comes with powerful control panel and offers excellent speed and uptime.
Rocket.net vs Kinsta: Performance
TTFB:
TTFB is the most crucial test for measuring the performance of any hosting provider. We use Pingdom to measure TTFB from 20 North American regions.
Our data shows Rocket Hosting recorded an average TTFB of 279 ms. In the same period, Kinsta got an average TTFB of 378 ms.
Both Rocket and Kinsta come with Cloudflare CDN edge caching, but Rocket did a better job offering faster TTFB than Kinsta.
Winner: Rocket.net
Uptime
Uptime is a crucial factor for any hosting service. Our uptime obtained from Pingdom indicates that Rocket secured 100% uptime last year, similar to the previous year (2022).
Kinsta, on the other hand, recorded 99.99% uptime, with 1 outage due to scheduled maintenance. Kinsta, too, has a great track record of offering 100% uptime in the past few years.
Both Rocket and Kinsta are equally good.
Winner: Both
Load Testing
The next crucial performance test is Load Testing. In this test, a 500 constant client load (concurrent visitors) is sent to the site, and the average response time is calculated. Whichever hosting service records the lowest time is the winner.
Our test says both Rocket and Kinsta handle load much faster with 19 ms and 27 ms average response time, respectively.
Winner: Both Rocket and Kinsta.
WP Benchmark
Global TTFB
Global TTFB is our bounty test, in which the test sites of Rocket and Kinsta are measured from 40 international locations to calculate the average Global TTFB. These results are useful for businesses that receive global traffic.
Rocket offers an excellent global TTFB of 158.28 ms wheras Kinsta is much slower with a global TTFB of 654 ms.
Based on both the TTFB tests, Rocket is evidently much ahead of Kinsta in offering a better TTFB score.
Winner: Rocket.net
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals is a part of the ranking factor, so we are testing it using the GTmetrix tool. The results show that my Rocket site reflected a ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ of 550 ms, a ‘Total Blocking Time’ of 7 ms, and a ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ of 0.05.
My Kinsta site reflected a ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ of 462 ms, a ‘Total Blocking Time’ of 0 ms, and a ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ of 0.07.
Winner: Kinsta
Rocket.net vs Kinsta: Features
Data Center Locations
Moving ahead, we look into the data center locations. Knowing this is important since hosting a site on the closest server to the target audience is always considered the best practice for faster speeds.
Rocket has as many as 20 data center locations across the globe, while Kinsta has 37 Google Cloud data center locations worldwide. Hence, both Rocket and Kinsta offer customers many data center locations. Kinsta provides a comparatively larger number of data center locations.
Control Panel
The Control Panel is an important feature and needs to be simple to operate. Rocket comes with its custom control panel, which is exceptionally simple to use and gives access to all the essential tools in one place.
Kinsta is no different from Rocket in terms of control panel and somewhat follows the same perception. Kinsta has a custom dashboard called MyKinsta. The dashboard is pretty easy to use, and one can find all the useful hosting tools in one place. Users can connect to Kinsta support right from their MyKinsta Dashboard.
Rocket.net Vs Kinsta – Which is Best?
As discussed in the quick summary area, both Kinsta and Rocket are equally good in terms of performance, pricing, and support. However, Kinsta looks a bit more professional with customer support and offers a powerful and advanced control panel compared to Rocket.
Let’s take the scenario: Go to Kinsta and Rocket pricing pages. Choose a plan which suits your need. Now, check the traffic limits of the Kinsta plan. If the traffic limit fits well with your site traffic, then Kinsta is good choice to choose.
However, if you have a higher traffic with global visitors, then Rocket should be your ultimate choice.
