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 Skeptic
Has seen "unlimited" storage end at an inode limit in the small print, "99.9 % uptime" with no credit when it was missed, "free daily backups" that only the support could restore for a fee, and a tariff from 1 € that cost eight times as much in the second year. Asks what the limits are in numbers, what the SLA pays, who can reach the data, and what it costs to take everything and leave.
Kinsta
This judge's pick
Raidboxes
Criterion by criterion
Performance, uptime & infrastructure
Kinsta
The SLA pays, but narrowly: the base guarantee is 99.9 %, nothing is owed until downtime passes 43 minutes, credits are capped at one month's subscription value, carry no cash value, expire on termination, and must be claimed through chat within 30 days. Around it the platform is well documented — PHP 7.4 through 8.5, HTTP/3, a CDN with 300+ edge locations, container isolation, automated failover, and a status page with 90-day history showing MyKinsta at 99.97 %. We found no public CPU or RAM figures per tariff, and the Redis object cache is a 100 $ per site per month add-on rather than included.
Raidboxes
The plans spell out vCores with shared or dedicated type, RAM, SSD storage and Varnish cache sizes, and a 99.99 % uptime figure is published with a public status page — but that uptime number carries no SLA credit, and we found no public information on HTTP/3, a PHP end-of-life policy, incident history on the status page, or platform redundancy. The speed claims (up to 8x faster) rest on the vendor's own measurements across 500-plus demo migrations, not an independent or published method.
Control panel, WordPress & developer tooling
Kinsta
The MyKinsta panel plus a documented REST API cover site creation, cloning, staging with push-to-live, backups, DNS, domains, plugin and theme updates, SFTP accounts and log files, and the team side is real: unlimited role-based users, SAML SSO, an activity log and white-label options for agencies. Automatic plugin and theme updates with visual regression checks and rollback are documented, as are SSH, Git, WP-CLI and Composer. The API is explicitly in public beta with fixed rate limits that cannot be increased, and we found no public information on a command-line tool or infrastructure-as-code support.
Raidboxes
The day-to-day story is documented properly: one-click WordPress install, one-click staging with deploy to production, cloning and templates, automatic core, plugin and theme updates with configurable scope, SFTP, SSH with WP-CLI and Git, phpMyAdmin and Adminer, bulk actions across boxes, single sign-on, and an agency model where the client becomes the hosting contract party while you stay admin. What I could not find: a public platform API or CLI covering sites and backups, granular roles per project, audit logs, or Composer.
Security, backups & recovery
Kinsta
Daily automatic plus on-demand backups with 14–20 days retention, one-click restore and download, free hack cleanup, a Cloudflare Enterprise firewall and DDoS protection, 24/7 malware monitoring, two-factor login, per-site container isolation and SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 badges are all on the record. The catch sits in the backup documentation: each backup is stored on the same host machine as the site, a second location only arrives with a paid external-backup add-on, and restore works at environment level — we found no public information on single-file or point-in-time restore. Customer audit rights are conditioned on 30 days' notice, an NDA, a pre-approved plan, once per 12 months, at the customer's cost.
Raidboxes
Nightly automatic backups with retention stated per plan (7, 14 or 30 days), manual backups on demand, container isolation per project, DDoS protection, an exploit detector, two-factor login and free SSL are documented, and ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications are published for the Düsseldorf data centre. But the terms put the backup burden back on the customer, who must keep independent copies and has no claim to backup media, and we found no public information on malware cleanup, point-in-time restore of single files or databases, or where the backup server sits.
Scaling, migration & exit
Kinsta
Moving in is documented better than almost anywhere: free, unlimited managed migrations with scope and exclusions stated (email, DNS and third-party services remain the customer's), weekdays-only scheduling, bulk migrations, a 49 $ per site expedited option with an 8-hour target and a refund if missed, and a malware scan on every move. Limits are numbers — disk, server and CDN bandwidth, visits with a defined visit — with a stated overage policy and self-service add-ons from 20 $ per 20 GB up to dedicated servers from 300 $ a month. Leaving is self-service termination at period end with downloadable backups, though we found no public information on domain transfer-out terms or a deadline for deleting data after termination.
Raidboxes
Migration in is genuinely free and well described — a copy within two business days, 14-day test with no payment data, no downtime, domain transferred only when you decide — and resources can be adjusted in real time with a burst mode beyond the booked quota. The exit side is thinner: domain contracts are excluded from the right of revocation, the customer has no claim to backup media, and we found no public information on domain transfer out, a path to a dedicated server or cluster, mail export, or a stated deadline for deleting data after termination.
Support, domains & email
Kinsta
Support runs exclusively through chat in MyKinsta, around the clock every day, in eight languages, staffed — per the vendor — by WordPress developers and Linux engineers with no tier-one front line, an average response under two minutes, 47-minute average resolution and published satisfaction around 96–98 %. Every customer reaches an account manager by chat, meetings bookable from the WP 10 plan upward, and the agency programme's benefits are spelled out. The response time is an average, not a guarantee; email sits outside the service — the migration guide says customers set it up themselves — and we found no public information on phone support or domain registration.
Raidboxes
Live chat every day from 8 to 22 including weekends and holidays, response in under ten minutes, real WordPress people in German and English with no ticket queue, a help centre, a status page, and an agency programme with stated benefits including personal partner support. Fourteen hours a day is not around the clock — the around-the-clock mention is tied to the performance add-on — the premium support question in the FAQ is raised without a captured answer, and we found no public information on a customer phone channel, DNS management, mailbox sizes or spam filtering.
European sovereignty
Kinsta
You contract with Kinsta Inc. of West Hollywood under Delaware law, disputes go to arbitration in Wilmington with a jury-trial waiver, and the FTC oversees the Data Privacy Framework compliance; EU Google Cloud regions are selectable by the customer and standard contractual clauses with the UK Addendum and Swiss Amendments are published. The subprocessor list is public and specific: DNS on AWS in the United States, support on HubSpot and Intercom in the United States, log storage on Clickhouse in the United States, and Kinsta's own analytics cluster processing IP addresses and access logs hosted in the United States. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 are published; we found no public information on an EU contracting entity or EU representative.
Raidboxes
Raidboxes GmbH in Münster with a German commercial register entry and VAT ID, the Equinix data centre in Düsseldorf named by location, and a subprocessor list with locations and stated safeguards (EU standard contractual clauses, EU-US Data Privacy Framework) for the US providers among them. We found no public information on a published data processing agreement or a parent company, and the privacy policy lists DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services as hosting subprocessors alongside the German data centre, so the captured pages give different pictures of where hosting runs.
Pricing transparency
Kinsta
Add-on pricing is unusually complete — hourly backups at 100 $ per site per month, external backups at 10 $ per 500 MB plus 1 $ per GB bandwidth, disaster recovery at 300 $ a month plus a one-time 300 $ setup, expedited migration at 49 $ per site — and prices are stated in USD with taxes excluded. Of the tariff table itself, the pages we read price only the Single plan (first month 0 $, 30 $ a month list), the overage policy promises to bill based on the actual usage without a published unit rate, and we found no public information on renewal prices shown side by side with first-term prices. Hosting plans auto-renew for up to twelve months and fees are otherwise non-refundable, though a 30-day money-back guarantee and self-service termination are documented.
Raidboxes
Monthly net prices for all six plans with the regular price printed next to the discounted one, the 50 % new-customer discount capped at twelve months and valid until 30.12.2026 on top of 10 % for annual payment, extensive add-on prices (staging, Redis, SSD extension, domains, mailboxes), and VAT treatment stated as net prices plus 19 % for business customers. What a buyer still cannot compute from the captured pages: minimum term, setup fee, restore and traffic-overage costs — we found no public information on those.
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.