Managed hosting cost calculator

Updated 8 September 2026. Before JavaScript ran, this page served $0 as the headline price. It now ships the default configuration’s real answer in the HTML, so the number is correct before and after the script loads, and a reader without JavaScript is told what the figures represent.

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, which covers domain, TLS, offsite backup, uptime monitoring, transactional email, CDN and backup storage, prices out anywhere between $13.48 and $474.08 a year for the same site.

Set the server size (how much RAM WordPress used on our server), 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.

Prices partly re-checked 13 October 2026. The calculator below still uses the list prices read on 5 September 2026. On 13 October we re-read each vendor’s page without logging in. These matched the calculator: DigitalOcean Regular Droplets ($6, $12, $24 and $48 for 1 to 8 GB), ServerPilot ($5 per server plus $0.50 per app; Business $10 plus $1), SpinupWP ($12 and $19, extra users $2), all eleven Kinsta plans at their monthly and annual prices and bandwidth allowances, Kinsta’s $0.50 per GB bandwidth overage and $100 Redis add-on, and the Cloudways bandwidth overage ($0.02 per GB on DigitalOcean, $0.12 on AWS). The default headline, ServerPilot Economy on a 2 GB DigitalOcean Regular Droplet at $17.50, uses only prices that matched; that it is the cheapest managed option shown also assumes the rows we could not re-check have not dropped below it. These could not be re-checked from a read without logging in: Cloudways plan prices and RunCloud (no usable price list in the page we received), Vultr (the site refused the request) and DigitalOcean’s Premium AMD tab (not in the page we received). Treat those rows as 5 September prices. One value is wrong: the table’s Disk column shows 10 to 15 GB for every Kinsta row, while Kinsta’s page lists 20 to 60 GB for the WP 2 to WP 40 plans. Disk does not enter any price on this page.

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 and Kinsta’s overage page
• 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