The sticker prices
Broad strokes, as commonly advertised across the industry:
| Category | Typical advertised range | What you're buying |
|---|---|---|
| Shared hosting | $3–$15 / month | Space on a server shared with hundreds of other sites |
| Managed WordPress | $25–$125 / month | WordPress with core updates, caching and backups handled |
| VPS / cloud instance | $10–$80+ / month | Your own virtual server — and all of its upkeep |
| Agency-managed hosting | $30–$300+ / month | Hosting plus a human who maintains the site itself |
If those numbers were the whole story, this would be a short article. They aren't, for four reasons.
Reason 1: the renewal jump
The advertised price at the big consumer hosts is very often a first-term teaser. The price that matters is the renewal price — commonly two to four times the number on the banner — and it's in the fine print, not the headline. Multiply the renewal by twelve before comparing anything.
Reason 2: the add-ons
Backups, SSL certificates, malware scanning, staging, priority support — at many hosts, each is a separate line item. A $5 plan configured to the standard a business actually needs has a way of becoming a $20 plan. Price the configured total, not the base.
Reason 3: the maintenance nobody budgets
This is the big one, and the least visible. A CMS-based site is software, and software needs constant tending: updates that have to be applied (and sometimes un-applied when they break the layout), plugins that go stale or get abandoned, compatibility puzzles after every major release. That tending is either your hours — evenings you didn't plan to spend — or paid hours at whatever your developer charges. Industry maintenance retainers commonly run from tens to hundreds of dollars a month, and unlike hosting, that line has no ceiling: a hacked site's cleanup bill can exceed a decade of hosting fees in one incident.
Reason 4: downtime and slowness are costs too
A site that's down doesn't send an invoice, and neither does a site that loads slowly enough that people leave. But both show up in revenue, and both trace back to hosting decisions: single-server architectures fail as a unit, and pages assembled on every request are slow in a way no plan upgrade fully cures.
Why flat pricing is possible at all
Here's the part the ranges above obscure: most of what makes hosting expensive is the maintenance burden of the software stack, not the serving of pages. Remove the stack — no CMS, no database, no plugins, pages pre-built and served from an edge network — and the recurring costs mostly disappear with it. There's nothing to patch weekly, nothing to scan for malware, nothing to break at renewal time.
That's the architecture behind our own pricing, which we publish without asterisks: $120 a year, or $365 a year with the site's upkeep and content changes included — a dollar a day, the same at renewal as on day one, migration free. We're not listing it here as a sales pitch so much as an existence proof: when the architecture is right, the honest all-in number fits on one line.
The checklist before you pay anyone
- What is the renewal price, in writing?
- What does it cost configured — with backups, SSL and security on?
- Who maintains the site (not the server), and at what rate?
- What does a content change cost, and who makes it?
- When it breaks at 9pm Friday, who notices, and when?
Five answers, and the real number — the only one worth comparing — falls out of them.