Blog / What is Kinsta? Does Kinsta work in China?

What is Kinsta? Does Kinsta work in China?

Posted on 2023-08-01 10:07:58.0

Emmanuel Cuyugan

Marketing & Growth

What is Kinsta?

Kinsta is a cloud-based host that offers managed WordPress Plans, helping companies and developers ship and manage projects faster and more efficiently. The platform was founded in 2007 and acquired by Salesforce in 2010.

Kinsta’s official website (Source: Kinsta)

Touting Speed, Security, and a Fair Pricing Model, Kinsta runs projects on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and is backed by Cloudflare’s enterprise-grade security measures.

Features include using top CPU machines, automated security via Cloudflare, concurrent builds, manual scalability launching pods, their own Rest API, a web terminal, Cron Jobs, the ability to add unlimited users, & free HTTPS/SSL certificates,

Kinsta also has over 25 data centers and offers a CDN with their Cloudflare integration at no additional cost to their hosting plans with over 260 points of presence (PoP) globally.

Dedicated databases including support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariadDB, and redis among others.

Dedicated support, with 24/7/365 technical support available in under 2 minutes.

A powerful dashboard to manage all apps, databases, and sites

Does Kinsta work in China?

Yes, Kinsta websites work in China, however provide no guarantee nor solutions that address issues that cause the Kinsta website to load slowly, look broken, or render them unusable for users in China.

In fact, the Kinsta blog directly raises the question of China web performance.

The article highlights that while their technical stack - including Kinsta CDN (powered by Cloudflare CDN) - does not cause inaccessibility issues (see Scenario 2 below), it does not touch upon performance issues (see Scenario 1) below.

In more common terms, this means that while using Kinsta usage does not cause website to be blocked…it does not necessarily mean that it would work well.

In order to better understand how to fix performance issues in China, we need to first understand why don’t websites - including Kinsta websites - work in China?

Why don’t websites work in China?

When it comes to poor website performance in China, the source behind these issues can be largely categorized into these two scenarios.

Scenario 1: The website’s code (including plugins, resources, libraries etc.) and or infrastructure are incompatible with the Chinese internet framework

OR Scenario 2: The website and or platform is entirely inaccessible.

Most websites, again, including Kinsta websites, fall into Scenario 1.

Most websites that appear inaccessible in China are actually suffering from technical challenges when loading resources in China.

More about why websites don’t work in China

What is Chinafy and how does the platform work to optimize Kinsta websites?

Chinafy is a China website optimization and compatibility platform helping address performance and deliverability issues for websites in China.

Based on several key technologies and strategies, Chinafy optimizes website performance in China by -

1. Resolving Code-Based Incompatibilities. As many developers know first-hand, addressing website performance issues for China is not so simple as moving the hosting server closer to the end user and bolting on a content delivery network.

Moving the website closer to China, would simply marginally help with the static primary resources on the website. Third party resources - such as plugins, libraries, Video embeds, API calls and more - which formulate the rest of the website, would still cause and be impacted by how they function in the China internet framework. CDNs and hosting providers inherently don’t address that portion.

Kinsta, nor hosting providers or CDNs do not address issues stemming from third-party resources on a website. Chinafy identifies and resolves these for China users based on best practices which could include removing, replacing and more. Chinafy is the only provider that has a China web resource compatibility suite designed specifically to resolve issues caused by third party resources on a website.

2. Bolting on a fully-managed Content Delivery Network (CDNs) that works well in China. Chinafy leverages both onshore* or fast near-China CDNs for additional acceleration of website content delivery, ensuring faster load times and better website performance for Chinese users.

Users may use their own CDNs, their partner’s or host’s such as Kinsta’s CDN (powered by Cloudflare CDN), or have Chinafy entirely manage the process which allows users to either leave it entirely to Chinafy’s choice of high-performing CDN at that time or elect for the Enterprise option of bringing their own CDN Learn more about Chinafy vs. CDNs.

3. Implementing additional web performance optimization practice (WPO): To cover the more standard best optimization practices, Chinafy also employs a range of baseline techniques and tools to optimize website performance, including compressing images and other files, minifying code, and improving caching.

4. Technical SEO: Chinafy also helps to auto-push your URLs to search engines like Baidu. Learn more about optimizing for Baidu SEO here.

5. Connecting users to localization & marketing experts: Chinafy offers localization and marketing services to help businesses translate and adapt their website content to better resonate with Chinese audiences via their growing ecosystem of verified expert partners whose services include Baidu Paid Ads, WeChat development, and more.

*Onshore CDNs are only available to companies that fulfill the local requirements, including an ICP license.

Chinafy for Kinsta Websites

Kinsta users can immediately experience the benefits of Chinafy across -

Functionality:

Chinafy bolts onto a website to optimize both primary and third party resources. This translates into an improvement in how the website is experienced by the user across images, videos, and interactive elements like forms. The broader impact on this is in most cases, a higher engagement rate and lower bounce rates.

Faster loading speeds:

Most websites experience an improvement of 6-8x acceleration across their resources. Besides a faster loading speed, other improved metrics include resource deliverability rate and consistency of that loading experience.

For example, the Banyan Tree Hotel Group used Chinafy to achieve a much more stable and consistent loading time in China.

The above chart is a 4-hour time series analysis that compares the Banyan Tree Hotel website (in gray) alongside its Chinay version in Beijing (in blue). (Source: Chinafy)

Improved reliability & deliverability:

Inaccessible resources not only “break” the website but inhibit other resources from loading properly. By combining Chinafy’s web compatibility suite and a fully managed content delivery network (CDN), Chinafy can ensure that the website as a whole is delivered quickly and reliably to users in China. This can reduce the risk of website downtime and increase website reliability.