Few days before I got a task to suggest the best hosting for the WordPress website. The website will be for USA users, so we needed to host the website in USA datacenters. I always was using OVH VPS but this client did not have who will set up this VPS and take care of it.
Finally, after some hours exploring forums, I found two hosting companies which I thought will be perfect. The first one was Bluehost.
From the first point of view, the Bluehost hosting was what we needed. They suggest free SSL certificate, easy WordPress installation, and secured login to wp-admin.
Second hosting hosting was Kinsta.
They also suggest actually the same what Bluehost has, but the price is much bigger. So my client did not take more time to compare these hosting companies and took Bluehost hosting.
So I started WordPress website migration to the Bluehost. After I did half of my job I noticed that website response time is really slow. I was not happy with it! Started exploring removed all plugins and leave empty theme on my website. And guess what I had? 2s response from the server. Well… the first mind was that maybe response time is bigger because I am on another continent (Europe). I tested the website with https://tools.keycdn.com/performance and got the same results in other locations also. It was sad that a fresh website is slow. How it will be when the website will get traffic? I decided to write to support to ask for help. After the short discussions, I understood that this is normal and they do not see the issue when website response time is 2s. I did not like this and I asked to refund the money.
Finally, we took Kinsta. When I started working I fell in love. Everything went so easily. Easy to migrate, change PHP version to the latest, setup SSL. Moreover, the Kinsta suggests CDN for your website to speed up your content delivery and has an optimized cache. You do not need other cache plugins. Also, Kinsta suggests testing the environment for your website. This will help to test or develop a website in other environments. Also, I would like to mention that Kinsta is using Google Cloud Servers with Nginx. After migration to the Kinsta, the website response was about 0.200 ms!
Conclusion: Not always the first decision is the best. Investigate more time for research before doing something. The hours I spent working with Bluehost was worth nothing. Comparing Bluehost vs Kinsta hosting I strongly recommend Kinsta.