JEPISTA is a hosting comparison website and YouTube channel that helps people find the best WordPress hosting for their needs. By putting WordPress hosts through a variety of real-world testing scenarios, JEPISTA identifies the best hosting and software solutions to help everyone from bloggers to business owners find success and make money online.

Check out our interview below with JEPISTA Founder Yoshi Fukaya to learn more about their experience with Kinsta.

The Problem

After testing a variety of WordPress plugins and hosting, JEPISTA was unable to find a suitable combination that offered fast loading times without complex plugin configurations.

“When running a WordPress site, there is an endless variety of hosts and plugins to choose from. There are many caching and optimization plugins to speed up your site. While using these plugins can improve the performance of the site, it can also result in compatibility issues with existing plugins. In some cases, the conflicts may negatively impact the performance of the site as a whole.”

As a website that uses an affiliate marketing business model, JEPISTA realized the correlation between a fast-loading website and successful affiliate conversions. To improve the speed of their website, JEPISTA researched and tested all of the popular performance-enhancing plugins on the market, along with many of the popular WordPress hosts in Japan. In the end, they weren’t able to find a solution that they were happy with.

“If there was a plugin that looked good, I bought it, installed it on my site, checked compatibility with other plugins, and ran performance benchmark tests. There were some plugins that improved performance. However, the degree of improvement was limited, and even after testing dozens of plugin configurations, I never came across something that I was satisfied with.”

The Solution

After a few rounds of research, JEPISTA found Kinsta – a managed WordPress host known for its excellent support and high-performance servers powered by the Google Cloud Platform. Since Kinsta offered hosting locations in Tokyo and Osaka, they decided to test out the service.

“When I first learned about Kinsta, I was skeptical. Prior to Kinsta, I had used other overseas WordPress hosts, and never had a great experience. For starters, most overseas hosts do not have a data center in Japan. However, Kinsta has data centers in both Tokyo and Osaka, which sets them apart from most overseas hosting companies.”

“I tested Kinsta’s features including the staging environment, premium DNS, free CDN, expert customer support, and server performance. All of Kinsta’s features were easy to set up with just a few clicks, and the MyKinsta dashboard is very easy to use, even for beginners. Regarding Kinsta’s server performance, I measured overwhelmingly faster load times compared to other hosts.”

The Result

After moving to Kinsta, JEPISTA saw a nearly 3x performance increase with page load time dropping from 922 ms to 331 ms. Compared to 11 other WordPress hosts, JEPISTA found that Kinsta provided the fastest WordPress hosting in Japan. With Kinsta’s excellent customer support and managed services, JEPISTA found they had more time to focus on creating content and expanding their website.

3x Performance Boost After Migrating to Kinsta

“The data below shows the results of benchmark tests that I carried out on the JEPISTA site before and after migrating to Kinsta.”

Speed test before migrating to Kinsta.
Speed test before migrating to Kinsta.(Source: JEPISTA)
Speed test after migrating to Kinsta.
Speed test after migrating to Kinsta.(Source: JEPISTA)

“I tested more than 10 WordPress hosting providers and Kinsta was much faster than the rest. For example, when comparing Kinsta with Xserver, Mixhost, and ColorfulBox (hosts with a reputation for speed and performance in Japan), Kinsta was nearly three times faster.”

WordPress hosts speed deviation ranking. (Source: JEPISTA)

“After testing Kinsta’s WordPress hosting, I ended up deciding to continue hosting JEPISTA on Kinsta because the server performance was just too good to pass up. After years of struggling with site performance, the issue was completely solved by a simple migration to Kinsta. Best of all, I’m now able to save a lot of time! By moving my site to Kinsta, I’m now able to spend more time creating content to increase my affiliate income instead of constantly responding to server performance issues.”

Kinsta’s Professional and Responsive Support Team

“Previously, when I was using a domestic WordPress host in Japan, I occasionally had to contact customer support. The typical response time was 1-2 business days, and I was satisfied with this as long as the response was polite and helpful. Since I started using Kinsta, I realized the quality of support from most domestic providers is mediocre at best. This is because the responsiveness and quality of Kinsta’s support team is in a whole other league.”

“On Kinsta, customers can get support via chat directly in the MyKinsta dashboard. For many services, not just domestic providers but overseas providers as well, it usually takes at least one business day to get a reply after contacting support. However, with Kinsta, I received a reply from the support staff within 8 minutes, not 1 business day! I still recall how surprised I was because I had never experienced such fast support. With Kinsta’s support, a customer can move along with a project as quickly as possible, thus saving time and money.”

“Kinsta’s support is not just about speed. All of their support representatives are “technical experts”. In most cases, the general flow of support is to have a tier-one engineer first, followed by escalation to a more technical engineer if necessary. However, Kinsta has no tiered support, and their chat system connects you directly to a qualified expert who can solve your problem. This means that Kinsta’s support does not waste time with escalation protocols. I’ve received support from Kinsta over 100 times, and in those 100+ times, I have never had a problem that was not resolved.”

An Ally for Your WordPress Business in Japan

If you’re looking for super-fast WordPress hosting in Japan backed by an industry-leading support team, look no further than Kinsta. With hosting locations in both Tokyo and Osaka, we’re equipped to take the complexities of WordPress hosting off your shoulders.

“I’m very lucky to have found Kinsta because I no longer have to spend time on maximizing the performance of my site. While there are many hosting companies out there, it’s rare to see a user-centric company like Kinsta that continually invests in the necessary infrastructure to improve server performance and customer experience. From my experience, hosting companies like GoDaddy are more common. They invest heavily in advertising and marketing, but are less user-centric than Kinsta.”

“With so much information out there, it’s difficult to find the “right information”. It’s common to see advertisements like, “Fastest Hosting in Japan! (according to our research)”, and online influencers often talk about their “recommended WordPress hosts” without presenting objective facts and measurements. Without real data, it’s impossible to choose the best server for your site. Thus, we recommend using objective data like “speed test results” from reputable sources when choosing your web host.”

Kinsta is continuing to grow. Even though they already provide high-quality hosting, their service keeps getting better with new features. In just the past few months, the Japanese language support, including the MyKinsta dashboard and knowledge base, has also improved significantly. I sincerely hope that you are able to find the right server for your site, like how I was able to find Kinsta after 10 years of searching for a great host.

Yoshi Fukuya
Yoshi Fukuya, Founder
JEPISTA