What does managed WordPress hosting actually cost, and which shape is cheapest?
It is sold three ways, priced on three different curves. A reseller like Cloudways includes the server and charges a multiple of it: $11 / $24 / $46 / $88 for 1–8 GB on DigitalOcean. A control panel is a flat fee and leaves you buying the server yourself: RunCloud $9, ServerPilot $5 + $0.50 per app, SpinupWP $12. A fixed-price host like Kinsta ignores RAM entirely and meters bandwidth and visits instead, from $35 a month. The calculator on this page prices all three at your own server size, site count and bandwidth.
Key finding Which shape wins flips with size. At 1 GB the reseller is cheapest at $11; by 4 GB the flat panel fee has won, and at 8 GB the gap is $28 to $35 a month. Bandwidth decides it before RAM does on two of them: a 2 GB server carrying 50 GB a month is $44.32 on Cloudways AWS and $50 on Kinsta. Every figure is a published list price read on 5 September 2026, with no benchmark and no promotional pricing.
Prices verified 5 September 2026 against each vendor’s own pricing page, linked in full below.
KEY FINDING. “Managed WordPress hosting” is sold three different ways, and they are priced on three different curves. A reseller like Cloudways includes the server and charges a multiple of it. A control panel like RunCloud, ServerPilot or SpinupWP charges a flat fee and leaves you buying the server. A fixed-price host like Kinsta charges by bandwidth and visits and ignores RAM entirely. Which one is cheapest is not a fixed answer, it flips depending on the size of the server and the amount of traffic. This calculator does the arithmetic on published list prices so you can see where your case lands.
The server is only half the bill. Everything except the server — domain, TLS, offsite backup, uptime monitoring, transactional email, CDN and backup storage — prices out anywhere between $15.46 and $474.08 a year for the same site.
Set the server size, the number of sites and the bandwidth. Every row is a real product at its published price, sorted cheapest first, with the raw cloud shown in gray as the baseline you would pay if you administered the server yourself.
Managed hosting cost calculator
The same WordPress site, priced three ways: a reseller that includes the server, a control panel on a cloud you buy yourself, and a fixed-price managed host. Every figure is a published list price read on 5 September 2026, before tax.
Cheapest managed option
| Option | Kind | Per month | 12 months | Included transfer | Disk | Sites | What it is |
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What this does and does not include. Prices are list prices excluding tax, read on 5 September 2026 from each vendor’s own pricing page: Cloudways, DigitalOcean, Vultr, RunCloud, ServerPilot, SpinupWP and Kinsta. There is no performance measurement here of any kind, and no promotional pricing. Bandwidth overage is applied only where the vendor publishes a rate we checked (Cloudways DigitalOcean $0.02 per GB, Cloudways AWS $0.12 per GB, Kinsta $0.50 per GB); where a plan’s included transfer is exceeded and we have not verified the rate, the row says so instead of guessing. The panel routes bill you separately by the cloud provider, and support for the server itself stays with that provider. Kinsta is metered on bandwidth and visits rather than RAM, so its plan here is picked by your site count and bandwidth, not by the server size.
Three things the arithmetic makes obvious
The panel fee is flat, so it disappears as the server grows. RunCloud Essentials is $9 whether the Droplet under it costs $6 or $48. A reseller’s markup is proportional: Cloudways runs 1.83 to 2.00 times the DigitalOcean price at every size. On a 1 GB server that arithmetic favours the reseller, because $11 all in beats $9 plus a $6 Droplet. By 4 GB it has reversed, and at 8 GB the gap is $28 to $35 a month.
Bandwidth decides it long before RAM does, on two of the clouds. AWS on Cloudways ships 2 GB of included transfer and bills $0.12 per GB after that, so a 2 GB server carrying 50 GB a month costs $44.32 rather than the $38.56 on the price card. Kinsta’s whole meter is bandwidth and visits, which is why its plan in the calculator moves with your traffic and not with the server size. DigitalOcean and Vultr ship terabytes and rarely trip.
The gray bar is the number people forget. A raw Droplet is always the cheapest row, because it excludes the thing every other row is selling. The distance between the gray bar and the one above it is the price of not being the system administrator. Whether that is a bargain depends on what an hour of your time costs, which we put a number on in managed hosting versus a VPS you run yourself.
What is deliberately not in here
- Performance. We did not benchmark anything. Every number is a published price, and no row is faster than another on this page.
- Promotional pricing. List prices only, so the comparison stays valid after the promotion ends.
- Unverified overage rates. Where a plan’s included transfer is exceeded and we have not read the vendor’s rate ourselves, the row says so instead of guessing.
- Support quality, uptime, and how good the dashboards are. Real differences, not price, and not measurable from a pricing page.
- Tax. Every vendor here adds it based on your billing address.
Sources
- Cloudways pricing, all providers and both server tiers: cloudways.com/en/pricing.php and the Vultr provider page
- DigitalOcean Droplet pricing, Regular and Premium tabs: digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets
- Vultr Cloud Compute pricing: vultr.com/pricing
- Control panels: RunCloud, ServerPilot, SpinupWP
- Kinsta plans and overage: kinsta.com/pricing
- The longer write-ups behind these numbers: managed DigitalOcean hosting, Cloudways pricing line by line, DigitalOcean vs Vultr on Cloudways, Standard vs Premium, Cloudways vs Kinsta