StackValue

We self-host this site on a small VPS with Docker, Caddy and WordPress. In the first 72 hours, four things broke that no setup guide mentions. Here is each one, why it happened, and the exact fix.

Cloudways on DigitalOcean costs 1.83x to 2.00x the droplet it runs on. Divide that premium by the hours you stop spending and you get what managed hosting charges per hour of freed time.

The same terabyte of outbound traffic costs $5 at Akamai and $150 at AWS Lightsail in São Paulo. Two providers never bill for it at all. Here is the marginal price of a TB at every major host, and why the included allowance printed on the pricing page is not comparable across providers.

The same gigabyte of memory costs $0.56 at one provider and $6.00 at another — an eleven-fold spread. Here is the full table, computed from current prices, with the four things that make cheap memory expensive.

Hetzner’s June 2026 increase split its own lineup in two. CX and CAX are still four times cheaper than DigitalOcean per GB of RAM. CPX and CCX are not cheaper at all any more. Which one you are on decides whether you should move.

Self-hosting one app is usually a bad deal. Self-hosting five on the same server is usually a great one. Here is the arithmetic for n8n, Supabase, Ghost, Plausible, Bitwarden and uptime monitoring, with current cloud prices.

Hetzner raised cloud prices on 1 April and again on 15 June 2026. CX23 is up 38%, CPX22 up 144%, CCX13 up 169%. The official numbers, what still makes Hetzner the cheapest, and the one action that reprices your existing server.

Every n8n hosting guide recommends a $4 box. n8n 2.x runs a task runner as a second process, and 512 MB no longer fits. Here are real prices checked in August 2026, including the renewal prices most comparisons hide.