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 Data Protection Officer
External data protection officer for a group of medical practices and two law firms whose sites take appointment requests and contact forms. Reads the DPA, the subprocessor list and the certifications before anything else: where the servers and the backups are, which group company outside the EU can reach them, how customers are isolated from each other, and when data is deleted after the contract ends.
Kinsta
Raidboxes
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Performance, uptime & infrastructure
Kinsta
The platform runs on customer-selected Google Cloud regions among 30 data centres with a CDN of more than 300 edge locations, HTTP/3, full-page caching, PHP 7.4 through 8.5 patched automatically at platform level, monitoring every three minutes, and an uptime guarantee of 99.9% (up to 99.99%) backed by tiered service credits in a published SLA, with a status page showing ninety days of component-level uptime. Disk, CDN and server bandwidth are stated per tariff, but no CPU or RAM figures are given, no end-of-life policy for PHP versions is published, and replication to a second data centre exists only as a disaster-recovery add-on restricted to dedicated servers.
Raidboxes
Resources per tariff are stated down to vCores with shared or dedicated CPU type, RAM, SSD storage and PHP memory limit, plus Varnish server cache per plan, a 99.99 % uptime figure, a public status page, and performance figures measured across more than 500 demo migrations. We found no public information on an uptime guarantee with a service credit, HTTP/3, platform redundancy or a PHP end-of-life policy, and the CDN and Redis object cache come as paid add-ons rather than included.
Control panel, WordPress & developer tooling
Kinsta
MyKinsta covers the daily workflow end to end: one-click staging with selective push of files, database or both, site cloning, automatic plugin and theme updates with visual regression checks and rollback, SSH, Git, WP-CLI and Composer, real server cron jobs per site container, and role-based company and site-level access with SAML SSO and unlimited users. A public REST API in open beta with a downloadable OpenAPI specification manages sites, backups, domains, DNS, SFTP accounts and PHP settings, and the agency offer adds white-labelling, hosting credits and a partner programme. I found no public information on a command-line client or infrastructure-as-code support.
Raidboxes
Managed WordPress tooling is well documented: one-click installation, automatic WordPress, plugin and theme updates, one-click staging with deployment in either direction between staging and live, cloning and templates, single sign-on into all WordPress backends, bulk actions across boxes, box transfer to the client while staying admin, and direct access via SFTP, phpMyAdmin, Adminer and SSH with WP-CLI and Git. We found no public information on a vendor REST API or command-line interface of its own, granular project roles, audit logs or Composer support.
Security, backups & recovery
Kinsta
Isolation is clearly documented — each website in its own container — alongside free auto-renewing wildcard SSL, Cloudflare Enterprise firewall and DDoS protection, a web application firewall, continuous 24/7 malware scanning with free hack-fix cleanup, two-factor login, and published SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 badges. Daily backups with fourteen to twenty days' retention are restorable with one click in the panel, but each backup is stored on the same host machine as the site, with a second location only through paid external-backup or disaster-recovery add-ons, and no recovery objectives are published. Under the data processing agreement, customer audits require a non-disclosure agreement, at least thirty days' notice, pre-approval, run at most once every twelve months and at the customer's own cost.
Raidboxes
Container isolation of each project, DDoS protection, an exploit detector, IP blocking, protected WP-Config, two-factor login via app, email or SMS and a vulnerability disclosure programme are documented, free SSL is standard, and daily overnight backups carry a stated retention per plan (7, 14 or 30 days) alongside manual backups. We found no public information on backups in a second location, point-in-time restore of individual files or databases, or malware cleanup, and the terms place backup responsibility on the customer with no right to backups on media — a point buyers holding patient or client contact data should weigh.
Scaling, migration & exit
Kinsta
Migration in is exemplary: free and handled by a specialist team that scans for malware, from any standard WordPress host or from Duplicator, ManageWP or cPanel backups, with expedited migration at $49 per site under an eight-hour target and the exclusions (DNS, email, third-party services) stated openly. Plan limits for disk, CDN and server bandwidth, visits with a defined visit, are published with priced add-on resources including a dedicated server from $300 per month, and termination is self-service in the panel, effective at the end of the subscription period. Deletion or return of data on termination happens only at the customer's written direction with no deadline stated, and I found no public information on domain transfer out or supported migration to another host.
Raidboxes
Real-time resource adjustment with a burst mode beyond the booked quota, a free migration with its scope stated (a copy within two business days, live site untouched, 14-day trial deleted afterwards), export with standard tools, and self-service termination with a 14-day consumer withdrawal and refunds within 14 days are documented, with all plan limits published. We found no public information on tariff downgrades, domain transfer out, a full export including mail, or the deadline by which data is deleted after the contract ends — the last point matters for appointment and contact-form data.
Support, domains & email
Kinsta
Support runs around the clock every day through chat in MyKinsta with an average response under two minutes and average resolution of 47 minutes, staffed entirely by WordPress developers and Linux engineers with no tiered queues, in eight languages, with free hack-fix help, an account manager for larger plans and an agency partner programme. There is no telephone support, and the billing, malware and migration desks keep stated weekday hours in UTC. This is hosting without email: mailboxes are not offered, the migration guide tells customers to set up email themselves, and while premium DNS via Route 53 is included, I found no public information on domain registration.
Raidboxes
Live chat staffed by WordPress and WooCommerce experts is available daily from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., 365 days a year, in German and English, with a stated response under 10 minutes, a help centre, a status page, and an agency programme with stated benefits. Domains ("ab 1,50 €"), mailboxes ("ab 3,00 €") and Microsoft 365 ("ab 4,67 €") are bookable in the same account, with mailboxes operated through Mailbox.org (Heinlein Hosting GmbH, Germany); we found no public information on mailbox sizes, aliases, spam filtering or DNS management details.
European sovereignty
Kinsta
The contracting entity is Kinsta Inc. of West Hollywood under Delaware law, with the US Federal Trade Commission holding jurisdiction over its Data Privacy Framework commitments and only a UK contact as a second entity — no EU company or EU representative — although customer sites can be hosted in a customer-chosen Google Cloud region including Europe, with a published data processing agreement using the SCCs and a subprocessor list naming each processor with its location. The chain nonetheless runs largely through the United States: DNS via Amazon Web Services, support via Hubspot and Intercom, analytics and log storage via Clickhouse, AI tooling via OpenAI and Anthropic, transactional mail via Canada and the United States — and the vendor's own analytics cluster, which processes IP addresses and access-log information from customer sites, is hosted in the United States. Certifications are stated as SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, but the DPA may be changed at any time in Kinsta's sole discretion and audits are restricted as described above.
Raidboxes
The contracting entity is Raidboxes GmbH in Münster registered at the local court (HRB 16184), the data centre is named by location — Equinix in Düsseldorf — with ISO 27001, SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II and PCI DSS published, and the privacy policy lists subprocessors with their countries and safeguards (EU standard contractual clauses, EU-US Data Privacy Framework). The chain nonetheless includes US providers (Calendly, Sentry, DocuSign, Intercom, Google reCAPTCHA, and DigitalOcean LLC listed for hosting), the captured pages give different pictures of the hosting chain — marketing pages name Equinix in Düsseldorf while the privacy policy lists Amazon Web Services EMEA in Luxembourg and DigitalOcean LLC in the USA as hosting subprocessors — and we found no public information on a published data processing agreement or on ownership beyond the GmbH itself.
Pricing transparency
Kinsta
Add-on pricing is unusually complete: $30 per additional site per month, $20 per 20 GB, Redis at $100 per site and month, hourly backups at $100 and six-hour backups at $20 per site and month, external backups at $10 per 500 MB per month plus $1 per GB bandwidth, disaster recovery at $300 per month plus a one-time $300 setup fee, expedited migration at $49 per site — with the first month free on the Single 35k and WP 2 tariffs, a 30-day money-back guarantee, VAT treatment stated (USD, taxes excluded) and self-service cancellation at period end. The overage policy promises the site stays online with notices at 80% and 100% of usage but states no unit price for the overage charged, and beyond the Single plan at $0 first month and $30 per month I found no public renewal prices quoted for the larger tariffs on the captured pages.
Raidboxes
Plan prices show the introductory and regular price side by side (for example "statt 18,00 € 50% Rabatt 9,00 € pro Monat"), discount terms are stated precisely (50 % for at most 12 months on the first hosting contract, valid until 30.12.2026, plus 10 % for annual payment), add-ons are individually priced, cancellation with a 14-day withdrawal and refunds within 14 days is documented, and VAT treatment is stated as net prices excluding 19 % VAT for business customers. We found no public information on setup fees, restore fees or a stated minimum term, and the captured pages give different figures for the same plan names, which makes a multi-year cost computation harder.
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.