2016-06-30

Kinsta hosting is not new, but a few of you might not know about it yet.

Kinsta is one of the top names in the Managed WordPress Hosting industry & is also where ShoutMeLoud has been hosted for the past year. A few days ago I upgraded my plan which now lets me host up to 20 WordPress sites.

I will leave the full detailed review on Kinsta for another day, but if you are interested in learning more about them, you can do so from the following two links:

Learn more about Kinsta on their official page

Best Managed WordPress Hosting for High-Traffic Sites

The other day I had to add a sub-domain to my blog (which is hosted on Kinsta) and install WordPress onto that sub-domain.

Sub-domains are helpful when you wish to add new stuff to your existing domain.

What kind of stuff?

Well, you can add many new side projects such as:

Membership site

Jobs site

Coupon site

As you know, you can create any kind of website with WordPress because of its versatility and customization capacity. So when you decide to expand your operations with a new website, you can easily create it with WordPress and install it via a sub-domain to keep your branding intact.

Now, let me show you the step-by-step process:

Adding WordPress to Sub-Domain on Kinsta Hosting

In my case, the domain’s DNS is managed by CoudFlare.

If your domain is not configured to use CloudFlare, you should do that right away. It doesn’t matter if you are on shared hosting, VPS, or Managed WordPress Hosting; a DNS managed by CloudFlare has many advantages.

One of them is that it protects you from hacking attempts & lethal attacks such as DDOS. You can read more about CloudFlare’s benefits over here & this is the guide you need to follow to configure CloudFlare for your domain. It takes about 10 minutes to configure everything, but doing that will help you a lot later on.

Now, it’s time to start installing WordPress on Kinsta.

One thing which you should know about Kinsta is you can install any number of WordPress sites (allotted in your package) & you can add a new domain or sub-domain later on.

In this case, we will be adding a sub-domain.

Login to Kinsta Dashboard

Click on Sites > Add Site



On the next screen you need to select your server location. You have the option to select from 3 server locations:

US Central

Europe

Asia Pacific

Select the one which is closest to your target market.

The next few steps are simple. Give a meaningful name to your new install (for your purposes only).

Click on “Add”.

The Kinsta auto installer will setup WordPress for you. This should take about 1 minute.

Once this is done,  click on “Sites”.

Click on the install name & on the next screen you will see the details about the installation. What’s important here is the I.P. address for your install. (We need to point our sub-domain to that IP.)



Now you need to login to your CloudFlare dashboard & go into your DNS settings. Here you need to add a new “A record” for the sub-domain & point it to the IP address given.

So if the sub-domain is pro.shoutmeloud.com, here is what I’m adding:

Note: When you make changes using CloudFlare, you don’t need to wait for DNS propagation. Changes take effect immediately.

Assigning Domain to your WordPress Install on Kinsta Hosting

So far, we have done the following things:

Added a new WordPress install on Kinsta hosting

Created a new sub-domain & pointed it to the Kinsta server.

Now, the final piece of this puzzle is to add that sub-domain into our newly installed WordPress site.

For this, you need to click on Site > (Installation name) > Domains

Click “Add Domain” and type in the sub-domain name that you wish to add.

Once this is done, you should be able to access your newly installed WordPress site on your sub-domain.

One last thing which you need to do after logging into your new WP sub-domain is go to Settings > General & update the WordPress Address & Site Address.

Change it to your sub-domain. Example:

Change http://proshoutmeloud.kinsta.com to http://pro.shoutmeloud.com

You’ll see that once you start doing this that it’s pretty easy and straight forward. But do let me know if you get stuck somewhere (or you can always get help from the hosting’s customer support team).

Overall, I’m enjoying what Kinsta has been offering. With them, we grew from a quarter million PV/month to 1.5 million PV/month.

Of course, a lot of credit goes to a lot of other things as well, but in terms of hosting, it provided me with the right infrastructure to grow ShoutMeLoud. Stay tuned as I will do a thorough review of Kinsta hosting in the coming days.

For now, if you have any questions regarding the above tutorial, feel free to ask me in the comments section.

Also check out these related reads:

How To Host Sub-Domain On Different Hosting Accounts

Sub-Domain vs. Sub-Directory for WordPress Addon Blogs

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Installing WordPress on Sub-Domain with Kinsta Hosting: Tutorial is a post from ShoutMeLoud - Shouters Who Inspires

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