Does Kinsta Offer High-Availability Hosting and Guaranteed Uptime?

Kinsta does not offer high availability (HA) hosting, but we do offer an SLA-backed uptime guarantee. At Kinsta, every site on our platform runs in a single Linux container and the site database runs as a service within the site container. We do not run multiple load-balanced instances of each site. Learn more about Kinsta’s architecture.

Thanks to the flexibility afforded by the use of a container-based infrastructure, proactive load management by our Engineering team, and the use of a best-in-class cloud provider in Google Cloud Platform, we are able to offer an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Circumstances That Block Uptime Monitoring

In order to ensure we meet our uptime guarantee, we monitor every site on our platform for uptime. When one of our uptime monitors fails our Engineers respond immediately and work to restore service to the site. However, there are a few scenarios where our ability to monitor uptime may be limited:

• If you have basic authentication enabled, this will serve a 401 error to all unauthorized requests.
• Cloudflare’s I’m under attack mode has a 5 second wait time to prevent DDoS attacks. This doesn’t apply to HEAD requests as those will respond with a 503 error.
• Reverse proxy sites where the primary domain isn’t redirecting to the target URL.
• Non-WordPress sites: We cannot monitor these.
• Certain instances of custom caching can cause issues. For example, if you cache Kinsta’s query string HEAD request. Proxy services such as Sucuri and Cloudflare can also sometimes cause issues with caching depending on the configuration.
• Bot blocking service: Our uptime monitor uses the kinsta-bot as a user-agent, so if you block it with a plugin or service (user-agent deny) this can cause our uptime monitoring to fail (this typically results in a 406 response code).
• Blocking either our uptime monitor’s IP address(es) or origin country (Geo-block) will impact our monitoring. If you configure these features on Kinsta’s servers it’s not an issue since we add exceptions.
• If the primary domain doesn’t resolve to the install where it’s added or it has a redirect to an another domain (listed in the same site’s domain list).
• When a site is in maintenance mode it might return a 503 response.