Managed WordPress hosting pricing compared (2026)

Managed WordPress hosting for one business site starts at $35 a month at both Kinsta and WP Engine, as of October 29, 2026. That buys roughly 25,000 to 35,000 monthly visits, 10 GB of storage, daily backups and staging. Paying yearly brings it to $350 a year at Kinsta and $336 for the first year at WP Engine. Cloudways, which manages a cloud server for you instead of selling visit-based plans, starts at $11 a month. SiteGround’s WordPress plans renew at $17.99 to $44.99 a month after a discounted first year.

How this guide was put together: Kinsta’s, WP Engine’s and SiteGround’s prices and limits come from their own pricing pages and help docs, read on October 29, 2026. Cloudways blocks automated reading of its pricing page, so its prices come from AskGPU’s own price data, checked October 17, 2026. We haven’t hosted sites on these plans ourselves, so nothing here is a speed or uptime measurement. All prices are in US dollars, before tax.

What does managed WordPress hosting cost per month?

The entry plan at each host, for one WordPress site:

Host and plan	Monthly billing	Yearly billing	Visits included	Storage	Other limit
Kinsta Single 35k	$35/mo	$350/yr	35,000/mo	10 GB	125 GB CDN bandwidth
WP Engine Essential, 1 site	$35/mo	$336 first year	25,000/mo	10 GB	75 GB bandwidth
Cloudways, DigitalOcean Standard 1 GB	$11/mo	Billed hourly	Not set by visits	25 GB SSD	1 TB bandwidth
Cloudways, DigitalOcean Premium 1 GB	$14/mo	Billed hourly	Not set by visits	25 GB NVMe	1 TB bandwidth
SiteGround StartUp	Not priced on the page	Renews at $17.99/mo, 12 months prepaid	About 10,000/mo (SiteGround’s FAQ)	10 GB	1 website

How to read it:

• Kinsta sells plans by monthly visits or, if you prefer, by server bandwidth. Its Single 20GB plan costs the same $35 as Single 35k but caps data transfer at 20 GB instead of counting visits. Kinsta says annual billing “gives you two months free”: 10 × $35 = $350.
• WP Engine shows $35 a month on monthly billing and $28 a month billed yearly, which is $336 upfront. Its page labels yearly billing “Save 20%”, and its product data says the yearly price “includes promotional discount”. The fine print says first-year pricing is “valid for new customers purchasing Essential plans only” and “not valid for upgrades, renewals”. WP Engine doesn’t publish the renewal price, so plan on year two costing more than $336.
• Cloudways charges by the hour for a managed server on DigitalOcean (and other clouds), billed monthly in arrears. The plans list bandwidth and server size, not visits, so how many visitors a server handles depends on your site.
• SiteGround is running a limited-time first-year discount on its WordPress plans. Its pricing page now shows different first-year prices from the ones in our data, so see our SiteGround page for the current intro price. The renewal prices above match both.

For comparison, ordinary shared hosting costs less upfront: Bluehost Starter is $3.99 a month on a 36-month term and renews at $9.99, and Hostinger Premium is $2.49 a month on a 48-month term and renews at $10.99. Our three-year hosting cost ranking covers those plans in detail.

What do you get for the extra money?

Managed WordPress hosts sell maintenance as much as server space. Here is what each one lists on its entry plan:

Feature	Kinsta	WP Engine Essential	SiteGround StartUp
Backups	Automatic daily, 14 days kept	Daily automatic and on demand, kept 30 to 60 days	Free backups (on-demand backups on GrowBig and up)
Staging site	Free one-click staging	One-click staging and dev environments	GrowBig and up
CDN	Included	Included, “powered by Cloudflare”	Included
Migrations	Unlimited free migrations	Managed migrations on Business, not Essential	Free site migrations
Server type	Not stated for entry plans	“Shared” on Essential, “Isolated” on Business	Shared hosting
Uptime commitment	“Up to 99.99% uptime SLA” on all plans	99.99% SLA on Business only	Not stated on the plan cards
Support	24/7 human support in 8 languages	24/7 chat (phone on Business)	24/7 support

A few details matter when you compare:

• WP Engine’s Essential plan runs on a shared environment. Its comparison table marks Essential as “Shared” and Business (from $400 a month billed yearly) as “Isolated”. The 99.99% uptime SLA applies to Business and up.
• Kinsta’s add-ons are where the bill grows. Kinsta lists an extra WordPress site at $30 a month, 20 GB more disk at $20 a month, premium staging at $20 per site a month, Redis caching at $100 per site a month, and backups every 6 hours at $20 per site a month.
• SiteGround puts staging on GrowBig. StartUp hosts one site; GrowBig adds unlimited websites, on-demand backups and staging; GoGeek adds Git, private DNS, white-label access and priority support.

How much does it cost at 10,000, 30,000 and 100,000 visits?

The cheapest plan at each host that covers the traffic, on yearly billing where it’s offered:

Monthly visits	Kinsta	WP Engine	SiteGround (renewal)	Cloudways
10,000	Single 35k: $350/yr	Essential 1 site: $336 first year	StartUp: 12 × $17.99 = $215.88/yr	DO Standard 1 GB: 12 × $11 = $132/yr
30,000	Single 35k: $350/yr	3-site plan (75,000 visits): $624 first year	GrowBig: 12 × $29.99 = $359.88/yr	Depends on server size
100,000	Single 125k: $900/yr	10-site plan (100,000 visits): $1,248 first year	GrowBig: $359.88/yr	DO Premium 4 GB: 12 × $54 = $648/yr

Notes on the table:

• WP Engine jumps at 25,000. Its one-site plan includes 25,000 visits, so a site at 30,000 either pays overage or moves to the 3-site plan ($65 a month, or $624 billed yearly).
• SiteGround’s visit figures are estimates. Its plans say “unlimited traffic”; the visit numbers (about 10,000 for StartUp, 100,000 for GrowBig, 400,000+ for GoGeek) come from its FAQ, via our data.
• Cloudways’ rows are not like-for-like. A 4 GB server isn’t sold against a visit count, and neither Cloudways nor AskGPU can tell you which size your site needs without load testing. Cloudways offers a 3-day free trial without a card, which is the cheapest way to find out.

Kinsta’s full visit ladder, monthly and yearly:

Kinsta plan	Visits	Storage	CDN bandwidth	Monthly	Yearly
Single 35k	35,000	10 GB	125 GB	$35	$350
Single 65k	65,000	10 GB	250 GB	$50	$500
Single 125k	125,000	10 GB	500 GB	$90	$900
Single 315k	315,000	10 GB	750 GB	$170	$1,700
WP 2 (2 sites)	70,000	20 GB	250 GB	$70	$700
WP 5 (5 sites)	125,000	30 GB	500 GB	$115	$1,150

WP Engine’s Essential capacity options:

WP Engine Essential	Visits	Storage	Bandwidth	Monthly	Yearly (first year)
1 site	25,000	10 GB	75 GB	$35	$336
Up to 3 sites	75,000	15 GB	150 GB	$65	$624
Up to 10 sites	100,000	20 GB	240 GB	$130	$1,248
Up to 30 sites	400,000	50 GB	550 GB	$330	$3,168

What happens if you go over your visit limit?

Neither Kinsta nor WP Engine takes a site offline for going over. Both charge instead, and they count visits the same way: one unique IP address per day.

• Kinsta charges “$0.50/1,000 visits” over the limit, $0.50 per GB of server bandwidth on bandwidth-based plans, $0.05 per GB of CDN bandwidth and $2 per GB per month of extra disk, prorated daily. It emails you at 80% and 100% of your limit, and again at 10% over on visits. Overages are normally settled at renewal, but an “extreme overage” (as large as the plan price, or $500, whichever is less) can mean immediate payment or a required upgrade.
• WP Engine says it “does not throttle” sites during a traffic spike. Its help article lists $2 per 1,000 extra visits for its Startup, Professional, Growth and Scale plans; it doesn’t name the current Essential plans, so check your contract. Overages are “charged monthly, regardless of if plan is paid monthly or annually”, and visits “cannot be purchased as a product extension”, only raised by upgrading.

Worked example: a Kinsta site that outgrows Single 35k

A site on Kinsta Single 35k ($35 a month) gets 50,000 visits in a month:

• Overage: 50,000 − 35,000 = 15,000 visits. 15 × $0.50 = $7.50.
• That month costs $35 + $7.50 = $42.50, still less than Single 65k at $50.

At 70,000 visits the overage is 35 × $0.50 = $17.50, so the month costs $52.50, more than the $50 plan that includes 65,000 visits. So one busy month is cheaper to absorb, but a site that stays above roughly 65,000 visits should move up. Kinsta’s own docs give a bigger case: 65,000 visits over on Single 35k comes to $32.50.

The same 50,000-visit month on WP Engine’s one-site plan, if the $2 rate applies, would be 25 × $2 = $50 on top of $35. That’s why WP Engine’s limits push you toward the 3-site plan sooner.

What does managed WordPress hosting cost over three years?

One business site at about 30,000 visits a month, from these prices:

Option	Year 1	Years 2 and 3	3-year total
Kinsta Single 35k, yearly	$350	2 × $350	$1,050
Kinsta Single 35k, monthly	12 × $35 = $420	24 × $35 = $840	$1,260
WP Engine 3-site plan, monthly	12 × $65 = $780	24 × $65 = $1,560	$2,340
SiteGround GrowBig	Intro year: see our SiteGround page	24 × $29.99 = $719.76	Intro year + $719.76
Cloudways DO Premium 2 GB	12 × $28 = $336	24 × $28 = $672	$1,008
Cloudways DO Standard 2 GB	12 × $24 = $288	24 × $24 = $576	$864

Kinsta’s first month is free on select plans for new customers, Single 35k among them, so its real first-year bill can be lower. WP Engine’s yearly price ($624 for the 3-site plan) is a first-year price only; with no published renewal price, a three-year yearly total can’t be worked out honestly, so the table uses monthly billing.

The arithmetic for the cheapest managed option that counts visits: 3 × $350 = $1,050, or $29.17 a month. Shared hosting from Bluehost Starter over 36 months is 36 × $3.99 = $143.64, and a renewal year after that costs 12 × $9.99 = $119.88. The difference is what you pay for the managed layer.

Cloudways Standard or Premium: is NVMe worth it?

A common question about Cloudways is whether its Premium servers are worth the extra money. On DigitalOcean servers, the two lines have the same vCPU, RAM, disk size and bandwidth; Premium uses NVMe storage instead of SSD and costs more:

Server	Standard (SSD)	Premium (NVMe)	Difference per month	Difference per year
1 GB, 1 vCPU, 25 GB	$11	$14	$3	$36
2 GB, 1 vCPU, 50 GB	$24	$28	$4	$48
4 GB, 2 vCPU, 80 GB	$46	$54	$8	$96
8 GB, 4 vCPU, 160 GB	$88	$99	$11	$132

Cloudways bills these by the hour (the 1 GB Standard server is $0.0164 an hour), so you can switch and compare without a long commitment. Its prices exclude tax. Our data notes that Cloudways costs roughly twice the same server bought directly from DigitalOcean; the gap is the management layer. See Cloudways vs DigitalOcean for that comparison.

What to watch for

• First-year prices. WP Engine’s yearly price is a promotion for new Essential customers, and SiteGround’s first-year price renews at $17.99 to $44.99 a month. Kinsta’s yearly price isn’t labeled as a promotion.
• Visit counting. Both Kinsta and WP Engine count one visit per unique IP per day. Bots: WP Engine says known bots are excluded; Kinsta’s FAQ doesn’t say so on the pricing page.
• Overage billing on yearly plans. WP Engine bills overages monthly even when you prepay a year. Kinsta normally settles them at renewal, unless the overage is “extreme”.
• Site counts. Kinsta’s Single plans host one WordPress install; a second costs $30 a month or a move to WP 2 ($70). WP Engine’s one-site plan is exactly one site.
• Storage. Kinsta’s entry plans include 10 GB and WP Engine’s 10 GB. Media-heavy sites can hit that before the visit limit; Kinsta charges $2 per GB per month over.
• Refunds. Kinsta covers all plans with a 30-day money-back guarantee after any free period. SiteGround and Hostinger offer 30-day money-back guarantees (our data). WP Engine’s plans page doesn’t state a refund window.
• Taxes. Kinsta says its “prices exclude tax”; WP Engine says “taxes and overages may apply during checkout”.

Which managed WordPress host should you choose?

• A small business site under about 10,000 visits: managed hosting may be more than you need. SiteGround StartUp or a shared plan from Bluehost or Hostinger covers it for far less; compare them in Hostinger vs Bluehost and Hostinger vs SiteGround.
• One site at 10,000 to 35,000 visits that you want looked after: Kinsta Single 35k at $350 a year is the simplest fixed price here, with staging, daily backups and free migrations included.
• A site that may spike: Kinsta’s $0.50 per 1,000 visits overage is cheaper per visit than the $2 WP Engine lists for its older plans.
• Several small sites: SiteGround GrowBig allows unlimited websites at $29.99 a month on renewal. On WP Engine, the 3-site plan is $65 a month; on Kinsta, WP 2 is $70.
• A developer comfortable picking a server size: Cloudways from $11 to $28 a month gives more raw resources per dollar, with hourly billing and plans sold by server size rather than visits, but you choose the server and watch its load.
• An agency or high-traffic store: WP Engine Business (from $400 a month yearly) adds isolated resources and a 99.99% SLA; Kinsta’s ecommerce-recommended plans start at Single 65k ($50).

For every hosting type, including VPS, see our web hosting hub.

Sources

• Kinsta: WordPress hosting plans, read October 29, 2026
• Kinsta Docs: WordPress Hosting Plans, Overages, read October 29, 2026
• WP Engine: Plans & Pricing, read October 29, 2026
• WP Engine Support: How visits are counted, read October 29, 2026
• SiteGround: Hosting for WordPress, read October 29, 2026
• SiteGround: Web Hosting, read October 29, 2026
• Cloudways, Bluehost and Hostinger prices: AskGPU price data (Cloudways checked October 17, 2026; Bluehost October 17, 2026; Hostinger October 25, 2026), from Cloudways: Pricing, Bluehost: Shared hosting and Hostinger: Web hosting