When I first saw DevKinsta, it seemed like something really innovative. I didn’t like that it was tied to the Kinsta ecosystem, which is why I had never used it before. Now that I have a project hosted on Kinsta and needed to redesign a page, I thought, DevKinsta could really help me — it’ll speed up my process and reduce friction, so I won’t take as long. I planned to make a copy of my live site to my local DevKinsta, make the changes, push it to staging, test it with my client, and then publish to production. It was going to be great. God, it’s been anything but great.
I’ve had problems with absolutely everything. I ran into multiple issues just installing it. Then more problems connecting it to Kinsta. Downloading the project took me about five tries because it kept breaking in the middle of the download. Running it brought even more issues. Installing or updating plugins — same story. No matter how many resources I allocated to the containers, it stayed slow and froze up many times. The final straw was that, once I finally got past all those problems, redesigned the site, and tried to push it to staging — surprise — it never uploaded. It always failed.
In the end, I had to manually upload the theme and configurations. I wasted more time troubleshooting DevKinsta than actually developing and deploying. If I’d just done everything the way I used to, I would’ve finished much faster. On top of that, support is only through the forum, which is annoying — having specific problems and being directed to a forum where most of the answers are just repeats of what’s in the documentation is frustrating. It’s been a terrible experience using this ecosystem. It’s supposed to streamline things so you spend more time making everything work well, not just struggling to get the tools to function.