As of 2 Nov 2026, the panel rates Kinsta 3.5/5 and Raidboxes 3/5 in Web Hosting. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 5 of the 6 judges pick Kinsta and 1 picks Raidboxes. Kinsta scores higher on 6 of 7 criteria (Scaling, migration & exit, Performance, uptime & infrastructure, Support, domains & email, plus 3 more). Raidboxes scores higher on 1 of 7 criteria (European sovereignty). Provenance — Kinsta: Rest of world; Raidboxes: EU-Made. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
Kinsta leads six of seven criteria. Performance and reliability reads 7.2 vs 6.2, 6 judges lean Kinsta, 0 lean Raidboxes; management and developer tools (7.8 vs 7.0), security and backups (7.0 vs 6.2), scaling and portability (7.3 vs 6.2) and support and service (7.0 vs 6.0) each lean Kinsta 5 judges to 0 with 1 tie. Pricing transparency splits 3 for Kinsta, 1 for Raidboxes, 2 ties, on means 7.3 vs 6.7. The genuine split is sovereignty: 5 judges lean Raidboxes, 0 lean Kinsta, 1 tie, mean 6.7 vs 4.8; the verdicts name Raidboxes GmbH of Münster against Kinsta Inc. of West Hollywood under Delaware law, with Kinsta's DNS, support tools, log storage and analytics cluster in the United States. Of the weighted totals shown, Kinsta leads four; the data protection officer puts Raidboxes ahead, 6.7 to 6.4; the table gives no total for the small business owner. No overall winner follows.
Choose Kinsta if
You need one-click staging with selective push, cloning, and automatic plugin and theme updates with visual regression checks and rollback — management and developer tools, where Kinsta's mean is 7.8 vs 7.0 and 5 judges lean Kinsta with 1 tie.
You want an uptime guarantee with tiered credits and a 90-day public status page — performance and reliability, where 6 judges lean Kinsta, 0 lean Raidboxes, on means 7.2 vs 6.2.
Your team relies on SSH, Git, WP-CLI, Composer and a REST API in public beta — support and service leans Kinsta 5 judges to 0 with 1 tie, and security and backups leans the same way, 7.0 vs 6.2.
You expect to grow or move workloads — scaling and portability leans Kinsta 5 judges to 0 with 1 tie, on means 7.3 vs 6.2.
Your role matches the agency lead, shop operator, app developer or skeptic judge — each weighted total puts Kinsta ahead: 7.2 vs 6.6, 6.8 vs 6.1, 7.1 vs 6.7, 6.8 vs 6.4.
Choose Raidboxes if
You need a German contracting entity — the verdict names Raidboxes GmbH of Münster, and sovereignty leans Raidboxes 5 judges to 0 with 1 tie, on means 6.7 vs 4.8.
Your data protection review flags US-located DNS, support tools, log storage or analytics — Kinsta's verdict places these in the United States, and sovereignty leans Raidboxes 5 judges to 0 with 1 tie.
You sit in the data protection officer role — that judge's weighted total puts Raidboxes ahead, 6.7 to 6.4.
Your tender requires EU-made provenance — Raidboxes is recorded as EU-made provenance against Kinsta's rest-of-world provenance, alongside the sovereignty lean of 5 judges to 0 with 1 tie.
Your buying panel weighs jurisdiction against price together — sovereignty leans Raidboxes 5 judges to 0 with 1 tie, while pricing transparency splits 3 judges for Kinsta, 1 for Raidboxes, 2 ties.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Agency Lead
Runs a fifteen-person web agency that hosts sixty client sites, most on WordPress, some on TYPO3 and two WooCommerce shops. Every site is one more login, one more update window and one more call when it breaks. Wants one panel with client projects, staging and push to live, backups they can restore without opening a ticket, roles for freelancers, a way to hand a project and its invoice to the client, and a price per site that does not double after the first year.
Kinsta
This judge's pick
Raidboxes
Criterion by criterion
Performance, uptime & infrastructure
Kinsta
The infrastructure is documented in real detail: managed WordPress on Google Cloud with regions the customer chooses, thirty data centers, a CDN with 300+ edge locations, HTTP/3, full-page caching, Nginx and MariaDB, PHP 7.4 through 8.5 selectable and patched at platform level, and container isolation with dedicated resources per site. The service level agreement guarantees 99.9 % uptime with credit tiers (options up to 99.99 % are advertised), the public status page shows ninety-day uptime history with incidents, and redundancy with automated failover is described. We found no public information on published performance measurements with a method or a PHP end-of-life policy, which is what keeps this from the very top of the criterion.
Raidboxes
Per-tariff resources are published — vCores up to six with dedicated cores on the top plans, 2–12 GB RAM, SSD storage, even the Varnish cache size — plus a Redis object cache add-on, an integrated CDN with HTTP/2, free SSL, a 99.99 % uptime figure, a status page, and measured results published across 500+ demo migrations. I found no public information on an uptime SLA with service credits, status-page incident history, HTTP/3, or how long old PHP versions are kept, so for sixty client sites it sits a tier below auditable.
Control panel, WordPress & developer tooling
Kinsta
This is nearly my whole wish list for running sixty client sites: one dashboard for everything, one-click staging with push to live (files only, database only, or both), one-click cloning, automatic plugin and theme updates with visual regression checks and rollback, SSH, Git, WP-CLI and Composer, per-site PHP settings, real server cron jobs in each site's own container, unlimited users with company- and site-level roles, and SAML single sign-on. A REST API in public beta with a downloadable OpenAPI specification covers sites, staging, backups, domains, DNS and log files. We found no public information on a command-line tool for that API, on infrastructure-as-code support, or on handing a project to the client with its billing transferred.
Raidboxes
This is close to what my shop needs: one dashboard with single sign-on into every WordPress backend, one-click install, one-click staging with push to live, deployment in either direction between dev, staging and live with selective database or file transfer, cloning and templates, bulk updates across boxes, plus SFTP, SSH with WP-CLI and Git, phpMyAdmin and Adminer. The handover story fits agency work — the client becomes the hosting contract partner while I stay admin — but I found no public information on roles or restricted access for freelancers, a public API, or Composer, and automatic updates are documented without a rollback.
Security, backups & recovery
Kinsta
Every plan gets daily automatic backups, manual backups on demand and system-generated restore points before risky actions such as a staging push, kept at least two weeks, and my team can restore a site with one click in the dashboard without opening a ticket; free wildcard SSL renews automatically, each site runs in its own isolated container, a Cloudflare enterprise firewall with DDoS protection stands in front, malware is monitored around the clock with free cleanup if a site is hacked, and ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II are published. The backups are stored on the same host machine as the site, though, and a second location comes only through paid add-ons such as external backups to AWS or Google Cloud Storage, hourly backups, or disaster recovery that is limited to dedicated servers. We found no public information on restoring single files or tables, or on published recovery objectives.
Raidboxes
Nightly automatic backups run on a dedicated, specially secured server with retention stated per tariff (7, 14 or 30 days) plus manual backups, and the stack is described in real terms: container isolation per project, DDoS protection, an exploit detector, one-click IP blocking, two-factor login and free SSL, with ISO 27001 among the listed certifications. I found no public information on point-in-time restore of single files or tables, malware scanning or cleanup, or a second backup location — and the terms put backup responsibility on the customer and exclude handing backups over as media.
Scaling, migration & exit
Kinsta
Moving in is documented better than almost anything I have read: free migrations handled by a specialist team with no downtime, weekdays only, most taking one to three hours plus review, bulk migrations available, malware scanned during the move, and a $49 per site expedited option with an eight-hour target and a refund if missed — and the scope limits are stated plainly, with DNS pointing, email setup and third-party services left to the customer. Plan limits are published (visits defined as a unique IP per 24 hours, disk, CDN and server bandwidth) with an overage policy that keeps the site online, per-site resources can be added without moving (the PHP performance add-on, + 20GB / $20 USD / month extra disk), dedicated servers from 300 $ / month are the in-house upgrade path, full site backups are downloadable, and cancellation is self-service in the panel with data deleted or returned on termination. We found no public information on domain transfer out, on a deadline for that deletion, or on monthly terms.
Raidboxes
Migration in is genuinely good for an agency: a free demo migration builds a copy within two business days with no downtime at the old host, the domain only moves when I decide, and there's a 14-day free trial without payment data. Scaling up is covered with real-time resource adjustment, a burst mode beyond the booked quota and stated per-tariff limits, but I found no public information on downgrades, domain transfer-out terms, full export including mail, or how data is deleted after the contract ends.
Support, domains & email
Kinsta
Support runs around the clock, 365 days a year, through chat in the dashboard in eight languages, with an average first response under two minutes, a stated 47-minute average resolution time, and a single team of WordPress developers and Linux engineers rather than level-one screeners — and the hack-fix guarantee means a compromised client site is cleaned at no extra cost. Every customer can reach an account manager by chat or email, meetings become schedulable from the WP 10 plan and above, and the agency partner programme names its benefits: lifetime commissions, lead referrals, co-marketing, hosting credits up to 10,000 dollars and free hosting for the agency's own site. Free premium DNS via Route 53 and SSL certificates are included and satisfaction figures between 96 and 98 % are published; we found no public information on mailboxes or email features, and the migration documentation leaves email setup to the customer.
Raidboxes
Live chat in German and English, every day from 8 to 22 including weekends and holidays, answered in under ten minutes by real WordPress and WooCommerce people with no ticket queue, and it's included in the hosting; there's a help centre, a status page, bookable domains and mailboxes, and a genuine agency programme with personal partner support. I found no public information on customer phone hours, mailbox sizes or DNS detail, and the captured pages give different figures for support availability (daily 8 to 22 versus "around the clock" on one add-on page).
European sovereignty
Kinsta
The contracting entity is Kinsta Inc. of West Hollywood, California, under Delaware law with arbitration in Wilmington, Delaware; the subprocessor list is published with locations, and while hosting runs on Google Cloud with data center regions chosen by the customer, EU regions included, the DNS via AWS Route 53, the support tools HubSpot and Intercom, and a Kinsta analytics cluster that processes IP addresses and access log information all sit in the United States. A data processing agreement with standard contractual clauses and Data Privacy Framework certification exists, which is more than a bare privacy policy, but we found no public information on an EU contracting entity or an EU representative. That places it above a vendor that publishes nothing about its chain, and clearly short of a European-owned chain end to end.
Raidboxes
The chain is visible: Raidboxes GmbH in Münster with a commercial register number, websites hosted at Equinix in Düsseldorf, mailboxes from Mailbox.org in Germany, and a published subprocessor list naming every provider and country, with EU standard contractual clauses and Data Privacy Framework participation stated for the US ones. US companies do sit in the chain — DigitalOcean for hosting, plus Sentry, DocuSign, Calendly and Intercom — under those safeguards, and I found no public information on a published data processing agreement.
Pricing transparency
Kinsta
Add-on pricing is published to an unusual depth, which is what I need to keep sixty sites predictable: 30 $ per additional website per month, + 20GB / $20 USD / month extra disk, premium staging at 20 $ per website per month, Redis at 100 $ per website per month, external backups at 10 $ / 500 MB / month plus 1 $ / GB bandwidth, disaster recovery at $300 per month plus a one-time $300 setup fee, expedited migration at $49 per site, and the Single plan at $30 USD with a $0 first month; prices are in USD with taxes excluded. Overage handling (the site stays online, notice at 80 % and 100 %) and the list of what all plans include are published. We found no public information on the minimum term, on a renewal price shown next to the first-term price, or on the per-unit cost of an overage, so the three-year total for anything above the Single plan is not computable from these pages alone.
Raidboxes
All six tariffs are published with the regular price shown beside the promo price — "statt 35,00 €" and "17,50 € pro Monat" — with the 50 % new-customer discount capped at twelve months, ten percent extra for annual payment, net prices plus 19 % VAT, and a long priced add-on list covering "Domain ab 1,50 €", mailboxes, Redis, SSD extensions and staging per plan. What stops me computing a three-year cost per client site: I found no public information on setup fees, the minimum term or notice period of the main contract, restore fees, or overage handling.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Kinsta
Raidboxes
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting location
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting options
Not determined
Not determined
Open source
Not determined
Not determined
Data processing agreement
Not determined
Not determined
Transfer impact assessment
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 2 Nov 2026, the panel rates Kinsta higher: 3.5/5 against 3/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 5 of the 6 judges pick Kinsta and 1 picks Raidboxes. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Kinsta or Raidboxes European?
Kinsta is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Raidboxes is European (EU-Made). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Where do Kinsta and Raidboxes store customer data?
Per the vendors’ own pages as captured — Kinsta: its pages as captured do not say. Raidboxes: Default not stated; pages mention Germany.