2016 Year in Review – Kinsta Insights

2016 has been an extremely busy and exciting year for us here at Kinsta. We first want to thank all of you for supporting us thus far and trusting us with hosting your businesses, blogs, and e-commerce WordPress sites. As the WordPress community continues to grow, 29.3% of the web as of January 2018, so will we. Check out more below of what we accomplished in 2016, and some awesome features we already have planned for early 2017.

Customer and Revenue Growth Rate

Kinsta has seen continuous customer and revenue growth throughout 2016. Over the past 12 months our client base has grown by over 346.2%. We try to stay as open and transparent as possible, so here is our MRR (monthly recurring revenue) graph below, pulled directly from Baremetrics. We are now generating 4x what we did in 2015.

If you aren’t familiar with Baremetrics, we highly recommend checking out our blog post on 40+ SaaS products we use to grow Kinsta. We also grew our blog’s newsletter subscribers by 64.78% over the course of the year.

The Move to Google Cloud Platform

2016 marked the year of migrating to Google Cloud! At Kinsta we have always believed that speed and stability are the hallmarks of a great website. Our mission is and always will be to bring you top-of-the-line managed WordPress hosting without compromises. As some of you know, in 2015 our major providers started experiencing malfunctions and other outages that caused problems not just for us, but for other hosting companies as well. This was simply not acceptable and so we began looking at other solutions that would meet our quality of standards.

We decided to partner up with Google Cloud, which we knew would ensure a high-level of redundancy and have granular control over our servers. And in early 2016 we started migrating customers over; making us the first managed WordPress host to exclusively use Google Cloud Platform. Some additional advantages of Google Cloud include:

• Google has one of the biggest networks in the world. Will Shulman, co-founder of MongoLab, talked about the network in a panel at Google I/O saying: “It is blazing fast. The other thing – it has a private distributed backbone between all the data centers. You are talking over Google’s backbone, not over the Internet.”
• Google Cloud allows for live migration of virtual machines, which means we are basically always up with our VMs, with no noticeable degradation in performance when they are live migrating VMs between host machines.
• Some of our customers saw a 50% decrease in load times simply by moving to Google Cloud. We have seen the Google Cloud machines easily handle 60k+ concurrent visitors without any hiccups. Kinsta also uses Linux containers (LXC), and LXD to orchestrate them, on top of Google Cloud Platform which enables us to completely isolate not just each account, but each separate WordPress site.

Make sure to check out our article on additional advantages of using Google Cloud. We have been very satisfied with the performance we have seen with this infrastructure move and it will ensure your sites remain fast, redundant, and secure as we grow.

Team Expansion

Kinsta also has a lot of new faces! The team is 3x bigger than what it was at this same time last year. One of our biggest goals was to hire more support team members to ensure you get responses around the clock, and we have done that. We also hired more engineers which are currently working on developing new features for you. 2017 will be the year of features at Kinsta, and we can’t wait to release them.

On the marketing front, Kinsta brought me onto the team as the Director of Inbound Marketing. Ironically, I was actually one of Kinsta’s first customers when they first launched and am now happy to help contribute to the growth. I have been working in the web performance industry for a while now, having previously worked at KeyCDN. WordPress has been a passion of mine for over 10 years. Read more about my move to Kinsta. I am most active on Twitter, you can connect with me @brianleejackson.

Dora also joined the team as Director of Client Relations. She takes on the creative task of managing communication between the clients and product development. She works hard on researching new solutions that lead to an amazing client experience. She has a strong international background and great interpersonal skills coming from 5+ years traveling, studying, working, and volunteering in 10 different countries. Her passion is dance and she loves learning languages. You can connect with her on Twitter @dorakinsta.

We also launched our new Spanish initiative in 2016 thanks to Peter Kovacs, who is now the Executive Director of our Spain and Latin America regions, as well as Daniel Harfouch, Director of Operations. They have been in charge of launching and translating the new Kinsta website into Spanish (kinsta.com/es/), and as well as establishing a new social presence online @kinsta_es and facebook.com/kinsta.es.

Our blog is also in the midst of being translated, more of which will be coming in 2017. Check out some of our in-depth tutorials and articles in Spanish:

Kinsta is excited to be able to now assist you in Spanish moving forward!

Feature Updates in 2016

With our migration to Google Cloud, this meant we supported PHP 7 as default for all WordPress sites. We also launched a lot of new features over the course of 2016. Here is a quick rundown of some of them:

• April 21, 2016: One-Click SFTP Password Changes
• April 26, 2016: Multiple Payment Methods
• April 29, 2016: Latest Ubuntu16.04 Update
• April 29, 2016: Full Page Cache Deletion
• April 29, 2016: Add HTTPS Credentials From My.Kinsta Dashboard
• May 20, 2016: New One-Click WordPress Install Options
• May 31, 2016: PHP Environment Control (Change PHP version and Restart PHP)
• June 01, 2016: New Backup Features
• June 02, 2016: Plugin List Added to My.Kinsta Dashboard
• June 03, 2016: Force Secure Password for New WordPress Installs
• June 08, 2016: Separation of Staging and Live Environments
• July 06, 2016: Staging Push to Live
• July 15, 2016: Added Companies to My.Kinsta Dashboard
• August 01, 2016: HHVM Environment Switching
• August 26, 2016: Account Activity Log
• September 15, 2016: Two-Factor Authentication
• November 30, 2016: Free SSL Support via Let’s Encrypt
• December 14, 2016: Custom New Relic Tracking

We Take Support Very Seriously

And of course, support is one thing we take very seriously here at Kinsta. The support team here at Kinsta are all WordPress developers, contribute to WordPress Core and other open source projects, and use WordPress on a daily basis. This includes all of our new hires. As a result, the expertise of our support department is second to none. In the last 90 days our customers started 2,154 new tickets, of which our support team replied with a median first response time of 7 minutes. And throughout the course of the year, we have solved 10,000+ tickets.

According to our data from Intercom, the busiest days for our support teams are Monday/Tuesday and Thursday/Friday. The weekends are then less busy.

Independent Reviews

ReviewSignal, an independent web hosting review site, released their annual WordPress hosting performance benchmarks back in September. We were excited that Kinsta once again proved to be one of the best companies across all tiers! This is our third consecutive year in which we were awarded top tier.

I’m at a loss for words to praise their performance. – Kevin, Owner of ReviewSignal

We also scored the highest ratings by codeinwp.com and were named the most reliable hosting company.

Connecting With the WordPress Community

Kinsta also had a goal to connect with the WordPress community more this year and we were happy to sponsor 15 WordCamps as well as personally attend WordCamp Barcelona.

Here is a list of WordCamps we sponsored this year:

• WordCamp Orange County
• WordCamp Tokyo
• WordCamp Sydney
• WordCamp DFW
• WordCamp Rio de Janeiro
• WordCamp Nashville
• WordCamp Phoenix
• WordCamp Seattle
• WordCamp Stockholm
• WordCamp Geneva
• WordCamp Udaipur
• WordCamp US Scholarship
• WordCamp São Paulo
• WordCamp Barcelona
• WordCamp Miami

We also had the pleasure of interviewing 15+ top minds in the WordPress community and agency/consulting space. Our COO, Sean O’Brien, does a great job at organizing these. Below are just a few, you can check out all of them that we published here.

What to Expect in 2017

We are excited for 2017 and are positive you will like some of the features we have coming out.

Early next year we will be officially launching our affiliate program. This has been in the works for some time now. The reason for that is, we have developed it completely from scratch! There will be no messy ShareASale or other 3rd affiliate logins to deal with. It will contain the same UI as the My.Kinsta dashboard. Building it ourselves has allowed us to make sure our affiliate program will be the best in the WordPress hosting industry.

We will also be adding more data centers. Google Cloud is rapidly expanding its reach across this globe, and so are we. This includes locations in London, Mumbai, Sydney, and São Paulo. You can also expect a lot more tools, detailed analytics and more features available in the My.Kinsta dashboard.

We thank you for your continued support and wish you all a Happy Holidays! We’ll see you in 2017.