I run three small WordPress sites for local businesses, maybe 3,000 visits a month between all of them, on a shared plan that was $2.95/month and just renewed at $14.99. I have about $20/month total to work with and I can manage a Linux box if I have to, though I would rather not be on call for it. What are people paying now, and I mean the number on the second year's invoice.
Genuine question back at you: do those three sites need WordPress? Two of my client sites were brochureware that changed twice a year, and moving them to static hosting took the monthly cost to zero and the maintenance to nothing. The third had a booking form and stayed on a real host.
One of them is literally opening hours and a phone number. Point taken, painfully.
Hetzner's smallest cloud instance is about EUR 3.79-3.99 a month after their April adjustment, and it will run three small WordPress sites without noticing them. Add a managed panel if you want the cPanel feel back. The catch is the location if your clients are in North America, since latency is fine but some clients care where the disk physically is.
Whatever you pick, check the renewal terms on the domain too. Some hosts bundle a free domain and then charge $25 to renew it, and getting the transfer auth code out of them is deliberately tedious.
I pay $11 a month for a small VPS with an independent provider, three sites, two years, no repricing at any point. The lesson I'd hand you is that price stability is worth more than the headline rate, and small independents are much better at that than the big brands are.
$20 a month is a lot of budget for 3,000 visits. Whatever you do, don't let anyone talk you into managed WordPress at $30 per site for that traffic.
@pop_filter_paz · 20h ago · 3 replies
The $2.95 to $14.99 jump isn't a bug, it's the product. Most of the big-name shared hosts are Newfold Digital brands now, Bluehost and HostGator and iPage and Network Solutions and dozens more under one roof since the Endurance and Web.com merger, and the intro-to-renewal gap is the entire business model. Three low-traffic WordPress sites on a small VPS with a panel is about EUR 5-10 a month all in and does not reprice on you.
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@first_repo_finn · 3h ago
I genuinely did not know those were the same company. It explains why switching between two of them years ago felt completely identical.
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@invoice_ivy · 3h ago
Counterweight: a VPS means you own the security updates. For a freelancer with three client sites that's a real hour or two a month, and if you'd rather not, a smaller independent host at a flat $8-12 is honest money.
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