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 Shop Operator
Runs a Shopware shop for coffee equipment with 4,000 orders a month and a Black Friday that brings ten times the usual traffic in one weekend. Every minute offline is lost revenue and a lost ad budget. Reads the resources per tariff, the caching and the SLA before the price, wants to scale for one weekend without moving the shop, and wants yesterday's database back within the hour if an update goes wrong.
Kinsta
This judge's pick
Raidboxes
Criterion by criterion
Performance, uptime & infrastructure
Kinsta
An SLA of 99.9% standard, up to 99.99%, with credit tiers tied to downtime minutes and a maintenance exclusion, plus a status page with 90-day history (the control panel itself shows 99.97% over that window) is exactly the reliability paperwork I want for a Black Friday weekend. HTTP/3, a CDN with 300+ edge locations, PHP 7.4 through 8.5 with platform-level patching, per-site isolated containers and automated failover round it out. But the tariff pages sell visits, disk and bandwidth — we found no CPU or RAM figures per tariff — Redis only comes as a paid add-on at 100 $ per website per month, and we found no published PHP end-of-life policy.
Raidboxes
Resources per tariff are published down to vCores, RAM, SSD, PHP memory limit and even Varnish cache size, with dedicated cores on the two top plans — though the performance page promises exclusive resources while the pricing page lists shared cores on four plans, so the captured pages give different figures for the resource guarantee. There is a stated 99.99 % uptime figure, a status page, Redis as an add-on and an integrated CDN with HTTP/2, plus measured results from over 500 demo migrations. I found no public information on an uptime SLA with a service credit, HTTP/3, a PHP end-of-life policy or platform redundancy — the things I would want in writing before trusting a host with Black Friday.
Control panel, WordPress & developer tooling
Kinsta
Day-to-day operation is well covered: free one-click staging with selective push (files, database or both), automatic plugin and theme updates with visual regression checks and rollback, one-click cloning, SSH, Git, WP-CLI, Composer, real cron jobs per site container, per-site PHP version, memory limit and thread count, role-based users with SAML SSO, and an agency programme with a white-label plugin. The REST API with a downloadable OpenAPI specification covers sites, staging, backups, DNS and plugin updates, but it is in public beta. We found no documented command-line tool, infrastructure-as-code support or per-branch preview environments.
Raidboxes
The dashboard tooling is genuinely deep: one-click WordPress installation, configurable automatic updates, one-click staging with bidirectional deploys and selective database or file transfers, cloning with templates, and SSH with WP-CLI and Git plus SFTP, Adminer and phpMyAdmin. The agency side is real too — boxes can be transferred to the client while I stay admin, bulk actions run across boxes, and dev boxes are free for a period. I found no public information on a public API or command-line tool for the panel itself, per-project roles, or audit logs.
Security, backups & recovery
Kinsta
Free wildcard SSL with automatic renewal, a Cloudflare enterprise firewall with DDoS protection, a web application firewall, 24/7 malware monitoring, bot protection, two-factor login, per-site container isolation, a free hack-fix guarantee and published SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 give me a solid base. For my worst case — an update gone wrong — there are daily, manual and system-generated backups kept 14 to 20 days with one-click restore and downloadable copies. But the standard backups sit on the same host machine as the site, hourly or external backups are premium add-ons, and the disaster recovery add-on with standby replication in a second data centre requires a dedicated server at 300 $ per month plus a one-time 300 $ setup fee, with downtime still expected.
Raidboxes
Isolation per project, a security shield with DDoS protection and an exploit detector, two-factor login by app, email or SMS, nightly automatic backups with 7, 14 or 30 days of retention depending on plan, manual backups, and backups kept apart from the live website are all documented, and ISO 27001 with SOC 2 Type II is published for the data centre. For my database-back-within-the-hour requirement, nightly backups with a restore path are the floor, and the terms place responsibility for independent backup copies on me with no claim to backup media. I found no public information on point-in-time restore of single files or tables, backup storage in a second location, or malware cleanup.
Scaling, migration & exit
Kinsta
Growing in place is genuinely covered: PHP threads per site without a plan upgrade, add-on disk, storage and PHP performance, Redis, and a dedicated virtual server from 300 $ a month, plus an overage policy where the site stays online and warnings arrive at 80 % and 100 % of the limits — what I need for one ten-times-traffic weekend. Migration in is free and unlimited with zero downtime and a clearly documented scope, though it is WordPress-only, so my Shopware shop would not qualify. On the way out, termination is self-service at the end of the subscription period with deletion or return of data under the DPA, but we found no documented domain transfer-out terms, deletion deadline or monthly contract terms.
Raidboxes
Scaling for one weekend without moving the shop is at least claimed: a burst mode grants resources beyond the booked quota during load spikes, resources can be adjusted in real time, SSD extensions are priced, and plan upgrades run through the dashboard or support. Migration in is free and well scoped — a copy within two business days, fourteen days to test with no payment data, no downtime, and the domain only moves on my decision — while export runs through standard tools like SFTP and phpMyAdmin. I found no public information on downgrade terms, fair-use or traffic limits, or what happens to my data after termination.
Support, domains & email
Kinsta
Around-the-clock chat support in eight languages from a team made up entirely of WordPress developers and Linux engineers, an average response under two minutes, published satisfaction around 97 %, a 47-minute average resolution time, a free hack-fix guarantee, documentation and an agency partner programme — that is the depth of help I want when a shop update breaks. Chat is the only channel, with email as a fallback if the panel is unreachable, and scheduled account-manager meetings come only on larger plans. We found no mailboxes in the captured pages; email setup is explicitly excluded from the migration service, so mail has to come from elsewhere.
Raidboxes
Live chat staffed by WordPress and WooCommerce experts, daily from 8 to 22 including weekends and holidays, response under ten minutes, in German and English, included in the managed hosting — and one page in the performance add-on context says support around the clock, so the captured pages give different figures for support hours. The partner programme benefits are stated, and domains and mailboxes are bookable in the same account, with email provided through Mailbox.org in Germany. I found no public information on mail features such as mailbox size, aliases or spam filtering, and a premium support option is raised in the FAQ but its answer is not shown.
European sovereignty
Kinsta
The contracting entity is Kinsta Inc. of West Hollywood, California, with a UK contact as Kinsta Ltd., and the terms run under Delaware law with arbitration in Wilmington — customers can select Google Cloud regions including European ones, but ownership is not European. Transparency is real: a published DPA with SCCs plus UK and Swiss annexes, DPF certification, and a subprocessor list with locations. The chain still runs through US providers — AWS Route 53 for DNS, Hubspot and Intercom for support communication, Clickhouse for logs — and the analytics cluster processing IP addresses and access log data is hosted in the United States.
Raidboxes
The contracting entity is a German GmbH with commercial register entry and VAT number in Münster, the marketing pages place the servers at Equinix in Düsseldorf, and the privacy policy lists the subprocessors with their locations and stated safeguards (EU standard contractual clauses, EU-US Data Privacy Framework) — though that same policy names AWS Luxembourg and DigitalOcean in the USA for hosting, so the captured pages give different figures for where the servers sit. US providers appear in parts of the chain such as error tracking, live chat and e-signature, each with a stated safeguard. I found no public information on a published data processing agreement or on a parent company.
Pricing transparency
Kinsta
I can largely compute my real costs from public pages: the Single plan at 30 $ with the first month free, per-plan disk, bandwidth, visit limits and backup retention stated, an overage policy that keeps the site online and bills actual overage, prices explicitly in USD without taxes, a 30-day money-back guarantee, and a long add-on price list — an extra site 30 $ a month, extra storage 20 $ per 20 GB, Redis 100 $ per website, 6-hourly backups 20 $, disaster recovery 300 $ per month plus a 300 $ setup fee, expedited migration 49 $ per site with a refund if the 8-hour target is missed. What keeps the three-year figure from being exact: we found no per-unit overage prices and no side-by-side renewal prices for every plan and term.
Raidboxes
All six tariffs are published as monthly euro prices with the discounted first-term price and the regular price shown side by side, the new-customer discount has its terms, duration and expiry stated, add-ons from Redis to staging to SSD space are priced per plan, and VAT treatment is explicit (net prices, 19 % for business customers). Different captured pages give different figures for identically named plans, which I would clarify before signing. I found no public information on the minimum term, setup fees, restore fees or what a burst beyond quota costs, so I cannot compute the true cost over a contract from the public pages alone.
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.