WordPress hosting compared: what we put clients on, and why

Every WordPress hosting comparison on the first page of Google earns a commission on the hosts it ranks. That’s simply how the category works: CNET, EXPERTE, Themeisle, PCMag, WebsitePlanet and the YouTube roundups all run affiliate links, and the ordering tends to follow the payout as closely as the performance. Google’s own AI summary reads the same five names back to you.

We take no affiliate money from any host, and we don’t sell hosting either. We manage other people’s WordPress sites, which means we get the support ticket when the host is the problem, and we see the renewal invoice twelve months after the $1.99 signup price expires.

Here’s the comparison from that seat: what we put clients on, what it costs at renewal, and what breaks.

Intro price is the wrong axis

The number every roundup sorts by is the promotional rate for a 36-month prepay. It stays true for exactly one billing cycle. Bluehost’s $1.99 becomes $8.95 or more. Hostinger’s $2 lands somewhere in the $8-11 range. Those are still cheap, and there’s no scandal in it if you’ve budgeted for it, but a table ranked by a number you pay once and never again is telling you close to nothing.

Sort by renewal price and the ranking shuffles. Sort by what happens when the site gets busy and it shuffles again.

Three tiers, and how to tell which one you’re in

Almost every WordPress site we touch belongs in one of three brackets, and which bracket you’re in decides far more than the brand does.

Shared hosting: fine, actually

There’s a lot of snobbery about shared hosting and most of it is unearned. A five-page brochure site for a local business, 2,000 visits a month, no store, no membership area: shared hosting at $8 a month is the correct answer, and anything more is you spending the client’s money to feel professional.

Where it falls over is CPU. Shared plans meter you on processes and execution time rather than bandwidth, so the throttle arrives during exactly the traffic you were hoping for. We’ve had a client get a mention in a newsletter, pick up 400 concurrent visitors, and serve 503s for an hour while the host’s limiter did its job. If a marketing campaign is coming, shared hosting is a liability.

Managed WordPress: you’re paying for somebody else’s pager

Kinsta, WP Engine, Flywheel and the rest charge $25-60 a month for what is, technically, a modest container. On raw specs that’s terrible value, but the specs were never the point. You’re paying so that somebody else is awake at 3am, so that backups get tested, and so the platform stops you installing the plugin that would have taken the site down.

For a company with no technical staff and a site that generates revenue, that’s worth every penny. Two caveats we’ve been bitten by. Visit-based pricing means a bot crawl or a mild viral moment produces an overage invoice, and the better hosts warn you first while the cheaper ones simply bill. And the banned plugin lists are real: caching plugins, most backup plugins and some search plugins are blocked, which occasionally breaks a site you’ve inherited.

We’ve moved several clients off WP Engine and wrote up how that goes in leaving WP Engine. It’s usually a pricing decision rather than a quality one.

VPS: cheapest per unit, most expensive in attention

A Hetzner CPX21 (2 vCPU, 4 GB, 80 GB NVMe) costs about $9 a month and will comfortably run three WordPress sites that would bill $90 a month on managed hosting. We run client sites this way on CyberPanel, and the performance gap at that price isn’t close.

The catch sits in the word “unmanaged”. Nobody patches the kernel, nobody notices the disk filling up, nobody tests the backups. Add a management retainer and the real cost lands between shared and managed, which is honest arithmetic and the reason we don’t push everyone this way. We went through the comparison properly in budget VPS versus managed hosting.

What we actually put clients on

Brochure site, no store, under 10k visits a month: shared hosting from a provider with a sane renewal rate, or a slot on a VPS we already manage.

WooCommerce doing real revenue: a 4 vCPU / 8 GB VPS with Redis object caching and LiteSpeed, or managed hosting if the client wants no relationship with servers whatsoever. WooCommerce is where cheap hosting costs the most, because a cart that times out is a lost order and it never shows up in your logs as a failure.

Multiple sites for one agency or group: a single larger VPS, panel-managed, with sites isolated by user. The economics get almost silly here. Ten sites on managed hosting runs $250-600 a month, and the same ten on a $50 server run faster.

A site with compliance requirements or an in-house IT team: whatever that team already knows. The best host is often just the one somebody in the building can already administer.

Things worth checking that no roundup mentions

• The renewal price, in writing, for the plan you’re actually buying.
• Whether staging is included or sold as an add-on. You will need it.
• Where backups are stored. Same-server backups aren’t backups.
• PHP version support and how fast they add new ones. A host still capping you at PHP 8.0 is telling you about their whole operation.
• Whether you can get a shell. Not because you’ll use it weekly, but because the day you need it you’ll really need it.
• Migration policy. Most hosts migrate you in free and charge nothing to leave, but a few hold DNS hostage or won’t hand over backups.

Where that leaves you

There is no best WordPress host. There’s a bracket that matches your traffic and your appetite for server admin, and inside that bracket the brands resemble each other far more than the review sites can afford to say. Pick on renewal price, backup policy and support quality, in that order, and you’ll do better than following any ranked list, this one included.

If you’d rather not make the call yourself, that’s most of what we do. We run hosting support for clients on all three tiers, handle WordPress support whoever the host turns out to be, and move sites between them without downtime as part of our migration pack. If you’re weighing a move off shared hosting right now, our notes on migrating from shared hosting to a VPS cover the sequence.