Managed hosting TCO and savings calculator

How the 12-month total is built

Three lines make up each column, and all three are shown so nothing is hidden:

• Hosting. The monthly sticker price times twelve. For the managed tiers it scales with your number of sites using disclosed per-site baselines: roughly $35/site on premium (Kinsta, WP Engine) and around $16/site on budget managed (Cloudways). Real quotes move with plan and resources, so confirm on each vendor before committing.
• Maintenance. Your dev hours per month at your blended rate. Managed hosting removes a share of that work: server updates, security patching, backups and caching stop being your job. The model assumes premium managed takes back about 60% of those hours and budget managed about 40%. Adjust your hours input to match your reality.
• Performance value. If you enter a monthly revenue figure, a faster load time is turned into recovered conversions using the uplift-per-second percentage you control. A site already at or below the tier's target speed shows zero here, so the tool never invents savings.

The net 12-month number is hosting plus maintenance, minus the modelled performance value. The recommendation is simple and stated up front: high traffic (100k+ pageviews/month) or an agency footprint (three or more sites) points to managed premium, where speed and offloaded maintenance earn their keep; everything else points to the cost-sensitive budget tier.

Hosting prices and promotions change often, and that quietly changes which tier wins. Watch a host's pricing page and we will email you the moment it moves, with a one-line note on what changed. One confirmation link, nothing else until you click it.

Why the sticker price misleads

Cheap shared hosting looks like a saving until you count the rest of the bill. A $5/month plan that needs four hours of firefighting a month, at a developer rate, costs more in labour than a managed plan that needs almost none. And if the site loads slowly, every second of delay shaves conversions off an online store. Managed hosting is not automatically the right answer, but you cannot judge it on the monthly fee alone. This tool exists to put the other two lines on the table.

The line this calculator does not add: visit overage

The hosting line above is a flat per-site figure, and that is how a plan is quoted. But two of the three hosts it models, Kinsta and WP Engine, meter your site by monthly visits, and going over the plan cap is billed on top. Kinsta charges about 50 cents per 1,000 visits over the plan; WP Engine about 2 dollars per 1,000. That overage is not in the 12-month total here, because it depends on traffic this tool does not ask for. Cloudways has no visit meter, so it has no visit overage; its bill only rises when you move to a larger server.

A billable visit is also not the number in your analytics. On both Kinsta and WP Engine it is one unique IP in a 24-hour period, with known bots stripped out, so the figure that bills you usually sits below your raw analytics. Kinsta also lets a plan meter server bandwidth in gigabytes instead of visits at the same price, with overage around 50 cents per gigabyte, which can be the fairer meter for asset-heavy sites. And on a dynamic store the PHP-worker ceiling, not the visit count, is often what forces the next plan up first. The full breakdown, with the current numbers, is in Kinsta vs WP Engine vs Cloudways.

Who this is for

Anyone weighing a hosting move: a founder tired of plugin updates breaking checkout, an agency carrying a dozen client sites, or a developer deciding whether managed hosting frees up enough hours to be worth the higher fee. If you would rather hand the whole thing off, building and running fast, low-maintenance sites is exactly what Mue does.

The numbers here are a planning baseline built from disclosed assumptions, not a quote. Treat them as a way to frame the decision, then verify current plan pricing and your own load times before you switch.

Managed hosting cost questions, answered