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 Small-Business Owner
Owns a heating and plumbing firm with twelve staff, a WordPress site a nephew built and twelve mailboxes on the same contract. Does not know what PHP is and does not want to learn it. When the site shows a warning or the mail stops, they need someone on the phone in German the same day, backups that the support can restore, and an invoice that matches the price on the website, year after year.
Kinsta
This judge's pick
Raidboxes
Criterion by criterion
Performance, uptime & infrastructure
Kinsta
Thirty selectable data centres on Google Cloud, a CDN with more than 300 edge locations, HTTP/3, PHP versions from 7.4 up to 8.5, and checks every three minutes — that is a fast, well-documented setup. The uptime guarantee of 99.9 %, up to 99.99 %, comes with real service credits and a public status page showing ninety days of history, including an openly posted Google Cloud outage in the London zone. We found no public information on CPU or RAM figures per tariff, and the Redis object cache is a paid add-on.
Raidboxes
The tariffs spell out real numbers — vCores, RAM, SSD storage, a Varnish cache with its size, a 99.99 % uptime figure, HTTP/2, an integrated global CDN and a Redis add-on, and the demo-migration measurements with over 500 samples are the kind of evidence I can respect. But that uptime number is a claim, and I found no public information on an SLA with compensation, incident history on the status page, redundant storage, or how long old PHP versions stay available.
Control panel, WordPress & developer tooling
Kinsta
The MyKinsta panel is what a non-technician like me needs: one-click staging and cloning, automatic plugin and theme updates with visual checks and a rollback, plus SSH, Git, WP-CLI and Composer for whoever comes after my nephew. There is a public REST API in open beta with a downloadable specification covering sites, staging, backups, domains and DNS, real server cron jobs per site container, unlimited users with role-based permissions and single sign-on. We found no public information on a management command-line tool or on handing a site to a client with the billing transferred.
Raidboxes
Everything my WordPress site needs day to day is documented: one-click installation, one-click staging with push to live, cloning and templates, automatic WordPress, plugin and theme updates I can configure, bulk actions over many sites, single sign-on, plus SFTP, SSH with WP-CLI and Git, phpMyAdmin and Adminer for whoever I hire. There is even an agency view where a finished box is handed over to my company while I stay admin. I found no public information on a public API, team roles or Composer.
Security, backups & recovery
Kinsta
Every website runs in its own isolated container, behind a Cloudflare enterprise firewall with DDoS protection, free wildcard SSL with automatic renewal, two-factor login, continuous malware monitoring and a hack-fix guarantee at no extra cost. Daily automatic plus manual backups are kept at least two weeks and restore with one click, and ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II are published — but the backups sit on the same machine as the site, and copies at AWS or Google Cloud are a paid add-on. Disaster recovery replicating to a second data centre exists only for dedicated servers, with extra cost and expected downtime.
Raidboxes
Daily and manual backups with 7, 14 or 30 days retention depending on the plan, stored on a separate specially secured server, container isolation per site, free SSL, DDoS protection, an exploit detector, one-click IP blocking, two-factor login by app, email or text, and ISO 27001 stated — that covers most of my worries. What keeps me cautious: the terms put the duty of backing up my own data on me and grant restores only back onto their storage, not the backups themselves, and I found no public information on point-in-time restore of single files or databases, malware cleanup, or a second backup location.
Scaling, migration & exit
Kinsta
Moving in is about as painless as it gets: free, unlimited migrations done by their team with no downtime and a malware scan included, usually finished within a working day, with a $49-per-site express option and a refund if the eight-hour target is missed. Growing means more PHP workers, storage or sites without moving the site, up to a dedicated server from $300 per month, and the limits for visits, storage and bandwidth are printed openly. Leaving is documented too — cancellation self-service in the panel at the end of the period, a full backup download, and deletion or return of data on written direction — though we found no public information on a deletion deadline, overage rates or domain transfer out.
Raidboxes
The free migration is genuinely spelled out — a copy of my site within two business days, no downtime, my current host stays live, fourteen days to test before I decide, and no payment data needed — and resources can be adjusted in real time with a burst mode and priced add-ons like SSD extensions. The main limits per tariff are published. But I found no public information on the cancellation period for the hosting itself, transferring a domain out, exporting my mailboxes, or when my data is deleted after the contract ends.
Support, domains & email
Kinsta
Support runs around the clock in eight languages, staffed by WordPress developers and Linux engineers with no first-line filter, an average first reply under two minutes and a 47-minute average resolution — but it comes exclusively through the chat in MyKinsta, with no telephone line, which for me when the site is down is a genuine problem. The migration documentation states that setting up email is not included and I would handle it myself; we found no public information on mailboxes, webmail or domain registration in the same account, so my twelve mailboxes would have to live somewhere else. Account managers and schedulable meetings start only on the larger tariffs.
Raidboxes
Real WordPress experts, in German and English, in live chat every day from 8 to 22 including weekends and public holidays, answers in under ten minutes, and the support is included in the hosting — that part I genuinely like, plus a help centre, status page and an agency programme with personal partner support. Domains and mailboxes are bookable, the email running through Mailbox.org in Germany. But when my site shows a warning I want a phone call, and I found no public information on a support phone number, on mailbox size, webmail or spam filtering, and the chat is closed overnight.
European sovereignty
Kinsta
The contracting party is Kinsta Inc. of West Hollywood under Delaware law, but customers choose their data centre region, European regions included, there is a published data processing agreement with the standard contractual clauses, and a full subcontractor list naming Google, Cloudflare, AWS, Hubspot and others with their locations. What I dislike as a German business owner: the analytics cluster that processes visitor IP addresses sits in the United States, the support tools are American, and disputes would go to arbitration in Wilmington, Delaware. Thorough, honest documentation — but of an American company, with the legal weight resting in the United States.
Raidboxes
A German GmbH in Münster with a commercial register entry and German VAT ID, the server location stated as Equinix in Düsseldorf, and a privacy policy that actually names its subcontractors with their locations, including Mailbox.org in Germany for the mailboxes — that reads European to me. The captured pages give different figures for where hosting runs, because the privacy policy lists Amazon Web Services in Luxembourg and DigitalOcean in the USA as hosting providers while the security page names Equinix Düsseldorf, and I found no public information on a published data processing agreement, so I cannot go higher.
Pricing transparency
Kinsta
The single tariff shows the first month free and then the regular monthly price of $30, taxes excluded and in US dollars as stated, and every add-on I checked carries a public price: more storage, extra sites, hourly backups, Redis, the dedicated server, disaster recovery with its setup fee, even the express migration at $49 per site. If the site goes over its visit or storage limits it stays online and warnings come at 80 % and 100 %, but we found no public information on what an overage unit actually costs — the kind of surprise I do not want on an invoice. Cancellation is self-service, there is money back within thirty days, and a price rise can be avoided by terminating before it takes effect.
Raidboxes
Six tariffs with monthly prices, several showing the regular price next to the discounted one, add-ons individually priced from domains at 1,50 € and mailboxes at 3,00 € to staging, Redis and performance extras, VAT treatment spelled out as net prices plus 19 % VAT for business customers, and the new-customer discount terms stated until 30.12.2026 for at most twelve months on top of a 10 % annual discount. As someone whose invoice has to match the website year after year, I mind that the captured pages give different figures for some plan prices, and I found no public information on the minimum term, setup fees or what a restore costs.
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.