Who knew a pandemic would be part of our lives? 2020 is now a thing of the past and, honestly, I’m happy we left that behind.
Yet, it’s by taking a look at what we’ve done in the past year that we gain a stronger perspective on things we can leverage to plan what’s coming next.
And that’s what we’ll do today.
Before diving in, we’d like to thank all of you customers for trusting us with hosting your businesses, blogs, and ecommerce sites.
Also, a big “thank you” goes to all of our readers, followers, and anyone who engages with us on our different channels. It’s a cliché – I know – but it’s the truth: we wouldn’t be here today without your support and feedback.
Now, it’s time to share some really cool stats about 2020.
Ready? Let’s jump in!
Customer and Revenue Growth
In 2020, Kinsta saw a sounding 75% increase in revenue. To put things into perspective, that’s like generating over 39x what we did in 2015.
Kinsta’s revenue growth in 2020
Revenue growth tells us only half the (great) story here. Our customer base, in fact, has grown by over 84%, when compared to the previous year!
Funny anecdote: October was by far our busiest month ever in 2020 in terms of new customer signups.
Customer base growth in 2020
Here are a few interesting facts about the amount of data we deliver every month:
- 22+ billion HTTP requests are served through Kinsta’s servers.
- 970+ terabytes egress data transfer travels through Kinsta’s servers.
- 10+ billion HTTP requests are served through the Kinsta CDN.
- 360+ terabytes data transfer travels through the Kinsta CDN.
If you compare these data with 2019, you’ll see how massively our data flow has grown.
PHP Version of Sites Hosted at Kinsta
Wondering which PHP version was the most common among Kinsta customers in 2020? Well, here’s the data:
- 72.1% of WordPress sites at Kinsta are running PHP 7.3.
- 27.8% of WordPress sites at Kinsta are running PHP 7.4.
- 0.1% of WordPress sites at Kinsta are running PHP 8.0.
Note: PHP 8.0 for live sites was enabled at the very end of December 2020 so that’s also one of the reasons it’s not widely adopted yet.
PHP benchmarks
If you have been following us, or you are an actual customer, you know that performance is our obsession.
That’s why we encourage everyone to upgrade to the latest PHP version available. We make this process super easy through MyKinsta.
Kinsta Keeps Providing Unmatched Support
Kinsta’s great customer support is one of the pillars on top of which the company was built. When customers need help, we’re there to actually fix their issues or, in complex scenarios, mitigate damage.
In 2020, Kinsta hired 15 people for new positions as Support Engineers (we are always on the lookout for more talented engineers to join our team).
This allowed us to expand our weekend shifts and provide our Support team with dedicated Malware/Abuse Engineers to handle more advanced and complicated issues. This is how customers have rated Kinsta support in 2020:
Support ratings
A little over 97% in conversation ratings. But that’s not just it, here are some more interesting stats about Kinsta support in 2020:
- Kinsta’s support team has solved 105,182 tickets. 21,547 of those tickets were just over the last 90 days of last year.
- The median time to solve and close issues was 43:55.
- Tuesdays at 4 pm UTC is the busiest time for Support.
- The median first-time response is 1:40 mins.
Median first response time
Our English support is available 24/7, but this year we are also excited to further extend our hosting support and hours in additional languages. That’s right, many of our support engineers are bilingual as well. The schedule is as follows:
- Spanish support is available weekdays between 2 p.m. and 12 a.m. UTC. 🇪🇸
- French support is available weekdays between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. UTC. 🇫🇷
- German support is available weekdays between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. UTC. 🇩🇪
- Italian support is available weekdays between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. UTC. 🇮🇹
- Portuguese support is available weekdays between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. UTC 🇵🇹 – New addition!
We’re lucky enough to have plenty of great customers sharing how and why they chose Kinsta, and I’d like to share just a couple of them to show how Kinsta support is the real deal greatly appreciated:
Jack Kitterhing on Kinsta hosting
and this one:
Suganthan Mohanadasan on Kinsta’s support
A big thank you and shout out to our phenomenal support and sysadmin teams for their incredible work!
Teams Expansion Doesn’t Stop (Up by 57%)
How many people worked at Kinsta in 2020? Before telling you the number, I’d l like to take a moment to give our Talent Acquisition, HR, and hiring teams a big shout-out for their work which allows all teams at Kinsta to work with some of the most talented pros out there.
So, we started 2020 with 96 and we closed the year with 151 team members (aka Kinstanians), which means a 57% increase in a single year. Our busiest month for new hires was March when we added 13 people to the team. Followed by August with 11 people, and December with 10 people.
On the Marketing front, we’ve grown our team to 15 amazing people that help craft and convey our content, campaigns, and brand message throughout all our acquisition channels.
On the Sales side of the house, we’re now available 24/5 with sellers in North America, EMEA, and APAC. This means we’re available in 6 languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Japanese). Last but not least, in 2020 we introduced the possibility to live chat directly with sales to being able to answer all your questions.
We also have improved our dedicated migration team, which is working Monday through Friday, to help make your transition to Kinsta as smooth as possible.
Generally speaking, 2020 was a challenging year because Covid disrupted the workflows, habits, and routines we’ve been embracing for years before. Although we weren’t new to remote work, the pandemic urged us to re-think our working schedule and logistics and sped up a process we had already planned to take: going remote-first and being a completely distributed company.
If you’re on the lookout for your next professional path, we are always looking for new talent to join the team. Check our job openings out on our careers page.
Connecting and Supporting WordPress Communities Around the World
All events have been strongly affected by COVID-19 in 2020. Despite this, some WordPress communities tried to stay active by holding online events. In those not-so-easy days, in recognition of their efforts, we tried to help and sponsor as many of them as we could.
Here is the list of all events Kinsta sponsored in 2020:
WordCamps
Meetups
Kinsta supported several local meetups as well in 2020, such as:
Webinars at Kinsta
On top of these, in 2020, we held a total of 17 webinars in 3 different languages:
We can’t wait for being able to meet you all in person as soon as things settle in and in-person events get back on track.
Feature Updates and Changes in 2020
Now for the exciting part, the feature updates and changes our team was able to ship this past year. We obviously can’t go into detail on all of them, so here are the important highlights (make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to never lose our updates).
PHP 8 Available for All Environments
PHP 8 is available
Released at the end of December 2020, PHP 8 is the latest version of the language that introduces a bunch of optimizations and powerful features to PHP like JIT compilation, Union Types 2.0, negative index arrays, and more. Following the release cycle, we made PHP 8 available to all our customers, both on their staging and live environments.
Kinsta’s APM Tool
It’s no news that speed and unmatched performance are what we focus on with our hosting services. In 2020, we wanted to make our part in providing a professional tool for our customers to help them debug and pinpoint what’s slowing down their site. That’s why we released Kinsta APM, our tool for application performance monitoring.
Thanks to Kinsta APM you can easily identify and fix performance issues for all your WordPress sites including WooCommerce stores and membership sites.
External Backup Options
Enable external backups in MyKinsta
You can’t successfully manage a site without a backup system in place. In 2020, we enriched the backup options available for customers by adding external backups as well. The external backup feature can be configured to automatically create a backup copy of your site on a regular basis (once per week or once per month) to either Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
More Data Centers
Kinsta’s hosting is powered by GCP
Picking the closest data center to your users ensures low latency and really fast load times. In 2020, we added 4 additional Google Cloud data center locations to choose from:
- Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA (us-central1)
- St. Ghislain, Belgium (europe-west1)
- Changhua County, Taiwan (asia-east1)
- Sydney, Australia (australia-southeast1)
- The Dalles, Oregon, USA (us-west1)
- Salt Lake City, USA (us-west3) – New
- Ashburn, Virginia, USA (us-east4)
- Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA (us-east1)
- São Paulo, Brazil (southamerica-east1)
- London, UK (europe-west2)
- Frankfurt, Germany (europe-west3)
- Jurong West, Singapore (asia-southeast1)
- Tokyo, Japan (asia-northeast1)
- Mumbai, India (asia-south1)
- Montréal, Canada (northamerica-northeast1)
- Eemshaven, Netherlands (europe-west4)
- Hamina, Finland (europe-north1)
- Los Angeles, California (us-west2)
- Hong Kong (asia-east2)
- Zürich, Switzerland (europe-west6)
- Osaka, Japan (asia-northeast2)
- Seoul, South Korea (asia-northeast3) – New
- Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (us-west4) – New
- Jakarta, Indonesia (asia-southeast2) – New
More Visits for Starter and Pro Plans, Same Price
We’re always all ears when it comes to listening to your feedback. That’s why we increased our Starter and Pro plans by 25% in monthly visits at no additional cost!
Notification Center
Notification Center in MyKinsta
Kinsta customers can cut through the noise of emails, notifications, updates, thanks to the Notification Center we released at beginning of 2020.
Additional Updates
Besides all of the major features updates and changes mentioned above, here’s a quick rundown on a few additional ones. As you can see, our MyKinsta development team has been busy!
The Kinsta Reviews Are In
Month after month, we received stellar feedback about our hosting and support, not just in customer chats, but also on public review sites. Once again, WPShout named us the best managed WordPress host and we earned awards in categories like Easiest to Use and Market Leader on G2.
A review about Kinsta on G2
Kinsta is also consistently ranked among the best options for WordPress hosting on popular review sites, such as:
More Content, More Formats
At Kinsta, we believe so much in content, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that in 2020 we pushed our goals even further and went beyond written content by launching our YouTube channel.
Let’s start with the latest addition to the content family, then!
Kinsta’s YouTube Channel
YouTube is the second biggest search engine out there. And for a reason. In it, you can find (almost) anything that you’re looking for and enjoy it “in motion” (who wants to read in 2021?! 😅).
We had plans to get started testing with videos for a long time and, finally, in mid-November, we kicked off our publishing schedule and started producing videos that cover topics our readers (and us) love.
Here’s one with tips on how to drive more traffic to your site leveraging content promotion:
[embedded content]
Here’s another one that shows you how to customize your WordPress theme:
[embedded content]
Besides these types of video, we’re continuously releasing video tutorials on how to use and get the best from our tools and features.
Check out this one about how to install DevKinsta:
[embedded content]
Or this one also, about how to password-protect your WordPress site using MyKinsta:
[embedded content]
If you love videos and like the idea of enjoying new ones every week, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and give a thumbs up when you see something you like!
I know what some of you might think now: “Matteo, videos are great but… we came here for the data.”
I know, you’re interested in numbers, so let me share them with you:
How Much We Published in 2020
- New Blog Posts: 151
- New Knowledgebase Articles: 61
- New Landing Pages: 30
- Webinar Pages: 8
- Affiliate Academy Content: 3
- New Case Studies: 9
- New Partner pages: 7
- New Feature Updates: 14
- New Ebooks: 4
- Client Quotes: 107
- Weekly newsletters sent: 50
This list doesn’t take into account all the updated versions of our written content we’ve pushed live throughout 2020.
Most Read Articles of 2020
Now that you know the quantity, let me share which content pieces performed better:
10 Best Blog Posts
- How to Fix Your Connection is Not Private Error in Chrome (18 Tips)
- How to Fix ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS on Your WordPress Site
- How to Increase the WordPress Maximum Upload File Size
- 22 Alternative Search Engines to Use in 2020
- How to Fix the ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED Error in Chrome (9 Tips)
- 15 Best Google Fonts by the Numbers (Tips on Usage)
- 21 Best AdSense Alternatives to Consider for Your Website in 2020
- 13 Best Text Editors to Speed up Your Workflow
- 16 Best WordPress Photo Gallery Plugins (Compared With Examples)
- How to Fix the 405 Method Not Allowed Error on Your WordPress Site
10 Best Knowledgebase Articles
- How to Fix DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN in Chrome (7 Options)
- How to Fix the SSH “Connection Refused” Error
- What Is WordPress? Explained for Beginners
- How to Fix a 400 Bad Request Error [Causes and Fixes]
- How to Fix ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH
- How to the Fix ‘DNS Server Not Responding’ Error on Windows and Mac
- How to Fix the NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID Error
- How to Use a Free SMTP Server for WordPress Emails (Including Gmail SMTP Server)
- How to Clear Cache for All Major Browsers
- How to Add Code to WordPress Header and Footer
As Kinsta serves audiences with different language preferences, we can’t forget to mention the incredible work our Global Expansion team and translators have made to help deliver content in other languages that aren’t English.
Translated assets
Specifically, 2294 translations were published in 2020 in 9 different languages. Wow!
What to Expect in 2021
“If a Man Knows Not Which Port He Sails, No Wind Is Favorable.” — Seneca
Phew, that was a lot to share! But that’s about the past, so where’s Kinsta headed and what should you expect in 2021?
I can’t share too much now but some gems have already popped up:
Better tools for developers: at the beginning of 2021 we released DevKinsta, our free suite of tools for local WordPress development. The team has been working on bug fixes and improvements, based also on the feedback we’ve received from the community. More to come on that, for sure!
Improved performance and security: Kinsta’s Cloudflare integration makes WordPress sites hosted on our platform faster and more secure. Read about how we plan on using Cloudflare.
More content, more formats: we only scratched the surface when it comes to video production, and we’re having a lot of fun in this journey. We’ll increase the number of content we create on a weekly basis to make sure we’re providing tips and reaching even more people.
Improved MyKinsta dashboard: our team working on our custom-built MyKinsta dashboard never stops and has some really “juicy” new features and enhancements that will be gradually rolled out in 2021.
This list is far from being exhaustive and 2021 will be a kickass year, I promise.
We appreciate your continued support and we’re always looking forward to hearing from you. Here’s to a great start!
If you enjoyed this article, then you’ll love Kinsta’s WordPress hosting platform. Turbocharge your website and get 24/7 support from our veteran WordPress team. Our Google Cloud powered infrastructure focuses on auto-scaling, performance, and security. Let us show you the Kinsta difference! Check out our plans
Source: Kinsta
