If you want to make a WordPress website, you need WordPress hosting. In fact, since the WordPress software itself is free, hosting and a domain name are really the only two non-negotiable paid elements to launch a WordPress website.

That means that, when you’re trying to figure out how much your WordPress website will cost, the cost of WordPress hosting is going to play a big role in whatever number you arrive at.

So, what should you expect to pay for WordPress hosting? Well, it depends, which is why we wrote this post! Otherwise, we could’ve just answered the question in the first paragraph.

On the low end, you can find WordPress hosting for under $10 per month. However, it can also easily cost $30+ per month or even well into the hundreds per month for a high-traffic, mission-critical website like a WooCommerce store.

In this post, we’ll help you figure out the cost of WordPress hosting for your specific situation, as well as what factors go into determining the price of WordPress hosting and why there’s so much variation.

What Is WordPress Hosting?

At a high level, WordPress hosting is just hosting that’s optimized to run the WordPress software. At a bare minimum, that means it meets the WordPress software’s minimum requirements (which virtually all web hosts do).

However, the world of WordPress hosting has evolved significantly. Modern solutions offer more than just the basics. They integrate features that enhance the user experience, such as:

  • One-Click WordPress Installers: Simplifying the setup process, allowing users to launch their websites swiftly.
  • Automatic Updates: Ensuring that the WordPress core, themes, and plugins are always up-to-date, enhancing security and performance.
  • Performance Optimizations: Implementing caching, CDN integration, and other strategies specifically fine-tuned for WordPress, ensuring faster load times and smoother user experiences.

While many providers offer basic WordPress hosting on shared servers to keep costs low, there’s a growing trend towards more premium solutions, particularly managed WordPress hosting.

Managed WordPress Hosting: This premium solution offers an environment meticulously optimized for WordPress. It not only ensures performance enhancements but also integrates robust security measures tailored for WordPress. Features like automatic backups, malware scanning, and staging environments (allowing users to test changes safely) are standard. Managed hosting alleviates much of the administrative burden, letting users focus on content creation and business growth.

For those who’ve embraced the power of the Elementor website builder, Elementor Hosting stands out as a prime choice within managed hosting solutions. Tailored to maximize the capabilities of websites built with Elementor, this hosting offers an infrastructure optimized for Elementor’s features. Users benefit from lightning-fast load times, enhanced security, and a suite of tools that seamlessly integrate with the Elementor ecosystem, making it a top-tier choice for the Elementor community.

How Much Does WordPress Hosting Cost?

WordPress hosting costs can vary based on the type of hosting you choose. While shared hosting might seem like an affordable option, it often comes with hidden challenges, especially for non-technical users. Configuring settings, managing updates, and ensuring optimal performance can be daunting tasks on shared platforms.

 

Shared WordPress Hosting: 

bluehost's pricing plan

Typically, cheap shared WordPress hosting will cost between $5 to $20 per month at full price. Many shared hosts offer promotional prices for the initial billing cycle, but these rates often increase significantly upon renewal. Shared hosting environments can be challenging for those without technical expertise, as they require manual setup, frequent monitoring, and can suffer from slower performance due to shared resources.

Managed WordPress Hosting: Managed WordPress hosting offers a more streamlined and performance-optimized solution. Prices for managed hosting generally range from $10 to $100+ per month, based on the features and resources you need.

Introducing Elementor Hosting: 

 
pricing

We’re excited to bring you our managed WordPress hosting, starting from just $9.99 per month. Not only do you benefit from a robust hosting solution, but this price also includes our Elementor Pro website builder, valued at $59, at no additional charge. Here’s why our hosting solution stands out:

  • Optimized Performance: With SSD storage, advanced caching, and CDN by Cloudflare, our hosting ensures your website loads swiftly, offering an enhanced user experience.
  • Ease of Use: Our hosting comes with WordPress, Elementor Pro, and the Hello Theme pre-installed. Dive right into building without the hassle of installations. Plus, our user-friendly dashboard streamlines site management.
  • Security and Reliability: We provide automatic updates, ensuring your website is always running the latest, most secure versions of WordPress and Elementor. With daily backups and 24/7 monitoring, rest assured your site’s data is in safe hands.
  • Value-Added Features: From staging environments to site cloning, our hosting offers tools that simplify website management.


While there’s a broad range in WordPress hosting prices, it’s essential to consider the value and ease-of-use you’re getting. With Elementor hosting, not only do you get a top-tier managed hosting solution, but you also benefit from the power and flexibility of the Elementor Pro website builder, all presented in a user-friendly dashboard.

What Factors Determine the Cost of WordPress Hosting?

Let’s go through some of the biggest factors that affect the cost of WordPress hosting.

1. The Type of WordPress Hosting

One of the biggest high-level factors in the cost of WordPress hosting is the type of hosting that you’re purchasing. There are three main “types” of WordPress hosting for most users. We’ve ordered them roughly from the cheapest to the most expensive:

  1. Shared WordPress hosting – your site shares resources with other accounts/sites on the server, which is why shared hosting has the lowest WordPress hosting cost of any type.
  2. VPS/Cloud VPS WordPress hosting – your site gets dedicated resources from a slice of a single machine (a traditional VPS) or on a cloud network of multiple machines (a cloud VPS). While, like shared hosting, you’re only getting part of a machine, the key difference between a VPS and shared hosting is that the resources you’re allocated are 100% yours – you never need to share them with other accounts on that server/network.
  3. Managed WordPress hosting – a more premium offering, typically using some type of cloud hosting infrastructure and giving your site all the resources it needs. Your site may or may not have dedicated resources, but the host uses its technology to make sure your site is given extra resources during traffic spikes.

2. The Resources That Are Available to Your Site

In the previous section, we touched on what type of resources are available to your site. That is, with shared hosting, you have to share resources, while VPS hosting gives your site dedicated resources all to its own.

Here, we’ll go into more depth about how resources affect three important parts of your site:

  1. Performance
  2. Reliability (uptime)
  3. Scalability

Performance

Creating a hosting environment that can make your WordPress site load quickly requires more resources that can be dedicated to your site. Having more resources generally takes more money, which is why you usually need to pay a little more for high-performance hosting.

Again, the cheapest WordPress hosts are able to keep their costs low by “sharing” resources between multiple sites/accounts. However, if the host puts too many sites on the same server (which often happens with budget options), this means your site will load slower because there aren’t enough resources to go around. In contrast, managed WordPress hosting solutions, like Elementor Hosting, prioritize performance, ensuring that websites load swiftly and efficiently.

 

If you’re trying to make money from your website, it often makes sense to invest in a host with more resources because how quickly your site loads will affect your conversion rates and user engagement metrics.

Reliability (Uptime)

Much of what we said about performance also applies to the reliability of your host. Ideally, you want your site to have 100% uptime, or as close to it as possible. However, creating a reliable network that never goes down also takes money and resources, which is why better reliability usually comes at a higher price tag. Elementor Hosting, being a managed solution, emphasizes reliability, ensuring that users’ websites remain accessible.

Scalability

Scalability refers to how your site performs when under heavy traffic. A site that receives 1,000 visitors per hour is going to require a lot more resources than a site that receives 100 visitors per hour (though you can limit this with tactics like caching your site).

This means that if you have a high-traffic site, you’ll usually need to pay more for hosting to get more resources, at least if you want to avoid your site slowing down during peak periods.

Note – even though many cheap WordPress hosts might advertise “unlimited traffic”, you shouldn’t expect that they’ll perform well under heavy traffic because your site still has limited resources available to it.

Elementor Hosting, with its managed infrastructure, is designed to scale with your needs, ensuring that your site remains responsive even during traffic spikes.

3. How Many Sites You Can Host

Everything we said in the previous section is multiplied if you want to host multiple websites. Instead of needing enough resources to host one website reliably, your host now needs enough to host two or more websites with the same level of reliability.

Again, that means more resources, which means more money.

Some cheap WordPress hosts also advertise “unlimited websites”. However, these are only really an option if each individual website is low-traffic and doesn’t use very many resources. If all your websites are high-traffic, you’ll quickly run through the limited resources in your account.

Basically:

  • With shared hosting, each site you add still has to share the same resources.
  • With managed WordPress hosting, each site you add also comes with an increase in the resources that are available to your sites.
  • Elementor Hosting offers plans tailored to users’ needs, ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently.

4. What Type of Site You're Building

The type of WordPress site you create will also affect how much your hosting costs because some WordPress sites are more resource-intensive than others. For example, if you want to create a WooCommerce store or set up a multisite network, you’re going to need more resources than for a simple portfolio or blog. The more complex your site, the more resources it’ll need, leading to higher hosting costs. Elementor Hosting is optimized for all types of WordPress sites, ensuring optimal performance regardless of the site’s complexity.

5. Support Quality

Running a support team requires money. For a host to have enough agents to respond quickly and dedicate time to really figuring out your problem, that host needs to invest money into hiring enough agents and training them to get the job done.

If you’re only paying $5 per month for your hosting, that’s not a lot of money left over for support after the host pays for its resources. This is why, all things equal, more expensive hosts are usually able to offer a much higher quality of support.

Elementor Hosting provides top-notch support, ensuring that users have the assistance they need when they need it.

6. Security

While many budget WordPress hosts might leave a lot of the security responsibilities to you, managed WordPress hosts, especially those like Elementor Hosting, take a proactive approach. 

Elementor Hosting provides an SSL certificate, daily backups, and DDoS attack protection. With integrated security layers, all monitored by a dedicated team of experts, Elementor ensures your websites are safeguarded against malicious activities. In contrast, with some other hosts, you might find yourself relying more on security plugins or third-party services.

 

7. "Convenience" Features

Finally, there are a lot of convenience features that can affect the price of hosting. Some common examples are:

  • Automatic backups
  • Staging sites
  • Automatic WordPress updates for the core and/or themes and plugins
  • Custom hosting dashboards designed for WordPress

You can save money by picking a host that skips these features, but then you’ll need to invest a little elbow grease and time to learn how to back up WordPress, safely apply updates, and perform other maintenance tasks yourself.

Elementor Hosting offers a user-friendly dashboard, making site management straightforward and efficient, along with other convenience features that streamline the website management process.

 

Conclusion

Navigating the world of WordPress hosting can be a complex endeavor, especially with the myriad of options available. However, understanding the factors that influence hosting costs and the value you receive in return is crucial. While it’s tempting to opt for the cheapest solution, it’s essential to consider the long-term implications on performance, security, and overall user experience.

Elementor Hosting emerges as a comprehensive solution, blending affordability with top-tier features tailored for the modern website builder. By offering an environment optimized for both WordPress and Elementor, users can enjoy the best of both worlds: a powerful website builder and a robust hosting solution.

Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting your digital journey, choosing the right hosting can make all the difference. Prioritize your website’s needs, consider the value-added features, and make an informed decision that will serve you well into the future.

Once you’ve chosen your hosting, you can check out our guide on how to create a WordPress site to get up and running.

Do you still have any questions about what to pay for hosting or how much a WordPress website costs? Ask us in the comments!