Start with these five pages: they are built on our own measurement or our own arithmetic rather than only on a vendor’s page. Two report what we measured, and what broke, on the server this site runs on. Three turn dated, published prices into calculations you can redo with your own numbers. Each states its date, its method and what it did not measure.
Measured on this site’s own server
How much RAM WordPress needs, measured
On 30 August 2026, 27 hours after the containers started, the WordPress stack on this site (Caddy, php-fpm and MariaDB) used 262 MiB in docker stats (cache-adjusted), and the whole 2 GB Amazon Lightsail machine reported 753 MiB in use in free -m. Summed per-process RSS for php-fpm read about 1.9–2× the container’s own figure; RSS counts shared pages once per process, which most likely explains most of the gap (PSS was not measured). One low-traffic instance on one day, not a minimum requirement. Use it as a worked example of how to measure your own machine before you choose a server size or set pm.max_children.
Self-hosting WordPress on Docker and Caddy: 4 things that broke
In this site’s first three days on Docker, Caddy, php-fpm and MariaDB, four things broke and three of them failed silently. One example: we added /ads.txt for AdSense, AdSense reported it missing, and opening it in a browser returned WordPress’s own 404 page instead of the file. The failures happened and were fixed on this site. The Caddy behaviour was checked against Caddy’s documentation on 30 August 2026 and again on 13 October 2026; the incidents were not re-run. Use it as a list of what to check after moving WordPress to Docker and Caddy: each failure is described with how it showed up and how it was fixed, and a read-only curl line on that page reads the status code, content type and size of a file on your own site.
Calculated from dated, published prices
Managed hosting cost calculator
Prices the same WordPress site three ways at your own server size, site count and bandwidth: a reseller that includes the server (Cloudways), a control panel on a server you buy yourself (RunCloud, ServerPilot or SpinupWP) and a fixed-price host (Kinsta). At 1 GB the reseller is cheapest at $11; by 4 GB the flat panel fee has won. The inputs are list prices read on 5 September 2026 and partly re-checked on 13 October 2026. Nothing was benchmarked. Use it by setting the server size, the number of sites and the bandwidth; the bare cloud server is shown in gray as the baseline you would pay if you administered it yourself.
Hetzner Cloud Backups vs Snapshots: which costs less
Hetzner documents Backups at 20% of the server price and Snapshots at €0.0143 per compressed GB-month. On an EU CPX22 the break-even is 272.6 to 279.6 compressed GB-month, depending on whether the €0.50 a month Primary IPv4 is counted in the server price. They are not substitutes: Backups run daily through seven rotating slots, while Snapshots are made by hand and stay until you delete them. Prices checked 1 September 2026; the server prices excluding IPv4 still matched Hetzner’s 15 June 2026 price-adjustment notice when re-read on 13 October 2026. Use it by adding up the compressed size of every snapshot you keep and comparing it with the break-even for your plan; price is only one of the two things the page says decide it.
Cloudways vs DigitalOcean: what the managed layer costs per hour
Across four matched Standard tiers checked on 1 September 2026, Cloudways costs $5, $12, $22 or $40 a month more than the same DigitalOcean server bought directly, 1.83 to 2.00 times its price. If the managed layer saves you 1, 2 or 4 hours of server work a month, the 1 GB premium costs $5.00, $2.50 or $1.25 an hour and the 8 GB premium $40.00, $20.00 or $10.00. The hours are scenarios, not measurements. Use it by comparing the hourly figure with what an hour of your own time is worth. That page carries two disclosed Cloudways affiliate links.
How the rest of the site is checked and funded is on the About and Affiliate Disclosure pages.