True website hosting costs

Total cost of ownership is the full cost of running a site built on WordPress – not just the hosting invoice. It includes DevOps and engineering labor costs, plugin/theme licensing, security tooling, backups, support, and the revenue risk of downtime. The advertised hosting fee is only one line item in that total.

AWS and GCP only sell raw infrastructure – compute and storage. Everything sites on WordPress need on top of that (including security hardening, patching, backups, a CDN, autoscaling, 24/7 support) has to be built and maintained separately, usually by an internal DevOps team or hired agency partner.

The server bill is just the starting point. Add setup and migration, security tooling, developer tools, and ongoing support and advisory, and typical self-hosting TCO runs into the thousands per month – often several times the visible hosting fee alone (see the full breakdown).

TCO tells you what self-hosting costs across its lifecycle while ROI tells you what a managed platform returns for that spend – faster time-to-market, fewer outages, and DevOps hours redirected to revenue-generating work instead of server maintenance.

Self-hosting for a mid-to-large site typically runs $3,250-$55,000/month plus $2,000-$22,000 in setup and migration – driven mostly by DevOps support, security, and developer tooling rather than the server bill itself.

Yes – the same TCO argument at a larger scale. Managed hosting replaces variable DevOps headcount, security tooling, and support contracts with one predictable cost, while adding uptime SLAs and compliance controls that would otherwise have to be built in-house. The larger and more complex the environment, the more that avoided overhead is worth relative to the hosting fee.

Self-hosting doesn’t automatically put a business out of UK GDPR compliance, but it shifts the full compliance burden onto the internal team – security controls, 72-hour breach notification, access logging, and audit trails all have to be built and proven independently. This takes time and incurs cost, while a managed hosting provider would handle these tasks.