In a move applauded by many WordPress site owners, Kinsta has announced that it will no longer charge customers for bandwidth consumed by bots, scrapers, or AI-driven tools. As reported by Roger Montti in Search Engine Journal, this update marks a significant shift in how managed WordPress hosts handle automated traffic, which has increasingly strained hosting resources in the age of generative AI.
According to Kinsta’s CTO, Daniel Pataki, the decision comes amid a sharp rise in bot traffic, some of which is legitimate (from indexing and analytics tools). Still, much of it is harmful or wasteful. “In the past 12 months, we’ve seen bot traffic rise due to the prevalence of both good and bad uses of AI,” Pataki explained, noting that such activity skews normal traffic metrics and inflates bandwidth consumption.
Montti’s article highlights that Kinsta’s new pricing model gives customers a choice between visit-based and bandwidth-based billing, offering greater flexibility and transparency. Users can now switch between these models depending on their needs, with no penalties or hidden charges for bot-related bandwidth. The company is also enhancing its Cloudflare integration and internal filtering systems to manage automated requests better.
As Montti points out, Kinsta’s approach directly addresses a growing pain point in web hosting. Bot and scraper traffic can account for up to half of a website’s total bandwidth, leading to unnecessary costs for site owners. By absorbing that burden, Kinsta aims to rebuild trust and align its billing practices with the modern web’s operational realities, where automation and AI agents are unavoidable.
Kinsta describes the change as part of its long-term commitment to customer success, transparency, and sustainable pricing. “Reducing bot-related costs as quickly as possible will have the greatest impact,” Pataki emphasized.