Self-hosting a WordPress website is often a trade-off between cost and time. When you have a commercial website built with WordPress, shared hosting or cheap hosting providers are often not a good option as you would want to have optimal performance while serving web pages to your visitors.
So what do you do? If you are not keen in taking things in your own hands and want a simpler experience, you can opt to set up a WordPress blog with a managed hosting provider. However if you are like me and love a little bit of linux admin then managing your own WordPress setup on a VPS can be the most cost effective option.
After shifting my WordPress website to multiple hosting providers as well as VPS providers, I have currently settled with the VPS hosting offered by Vultr. They offer high performing SSD and NVMe servers at a very nominal rate. You can take a look at VPS benchmarks to decide on other VPS hosting providers. I also opted for a cloud server control panel: RunCloud which makes it really easy to install and manage WordPress servers.
Apart from hosting costs, there are few other costs involved in running a WordPress website such as backup, e-mail etc. In this post, I have listed down all such costs incurred for my WordPress websites. Thanks to a lot of free services and offerings, I have been able to trim down the running cost to a bare minimum as can be seen below:
Annual Cost of Running my WordPress server in 2021
Currently I am hosting two WordPress blogs: SDR and TBO on this WordPress server.
| Item | Cost | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | $9 | Per domain annual renewal cost registered using Namecheap |
| Hosting | $172.8 | High Frequency Computre NVMe VPS hosting by Vultr (2GB RAM, 64GB storage with Backups) – $14.4/month |
| CDN | $240 | Cloudflare |
| SSL | $0 | Provided for Free by Cloudflare |
| Backup | $60 | Offsite backups on Digital Ocean Spaces |
| Server Management | $150 | Pro plan by Runcloud |
| Theme | $59 | GeneratePress |
| Newsletter | $0 | Mailster Newsletter Plugin (One time Cost) |
| E-mail delivery | $0 | Delivered via Sendgrid (Currently under Free Quota) |
Page views handled by this setup: 3.6 million+ annually or 300K per month
Annual Cost: $748.8
Monthly cost: $62.4
Annual Cost of Running my WordPress server in 2020
Currently I am hosting two WordPress blogs: SDR and TBO on this WordPress server.
| Item | Cost | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | $9 | Per domain annual renewal cost registered using Namecheap |
| Hosting | $172.8 | High Frequency Computre NVMe VPS hosting by Vultr (2GB RAM, 64GB storage with Backups) – $14.4/month |
| CDN | $0 | Provided for Free by Cloudflare |
| SSL | $0 | Provided for Free by Cloudflare |
| Backup | $60 | Offsite backups on Digital Ocean Spaces |
| Server Management | $150 | Pro plan by Runcloud |
| Theme | 0 | OceanWP |
| Newsletter | $49 | Mailster Newsletter Plugin (One time Cost) |
| E-mail delivery | $0 | Delivered via Sendgrid (Currently under Free Quota) |
Total annual page views handled by server: 2 million+
Total Cost: $449.8 /year or $37.5 /month
I have a set of must have WordPress plugins that I make sure to install on every WordPress website. On SDR, I wrote about these plugins as well as about WordPress setup checklist that I use before launching any WordPress site.
There are certain other costs involved in running these websites such as freelance writer fees, office rent, internet charges, advertising cost etc., however I have not included them here as those are operational and marketing costs. Most of the other sites that I manage, such as my personal website and my projects’ websites, are static sites hosted on either GitHub Pages or Netlify for free. You can learn about top static site generators as well as free hosting options for static sites.