Cheap hosting is the most expensive thing you can buy for WordPress

The cheapest number on the page was the most expensive one.

It just didn't say so.

In early July a client sent us a comparison. Our hosting on one side. A cheap cloud provider on the other. The cheap one was, of course, much cheaper.

The client wasn't being difficult. They were doing what any sensible business owner does: looking at two prices and asking why one is higher.

Fair question. So I answered it.

A box, and nothing else

The cheap plan offered 1 GB of memory and 1 vCPU. The provider itself described that size as suitable for personal websites and simple blogs.

For a static page, maybe. For WordPress, with plugins, a booking form, a shop or a busy admin, no. It works on day one. It struggles on the first busy weekend. Like moving a family of five into a studio flat: technically everyone fits, until someone wants to use the bathroom.

So I told them what our smallest machine is: 8 GB of memory, 2 vCPU and 120 GB of disk, for 81 € + VAT a month. With administration and security supervision included. On the cheap plan, that service didn't exist, and backups were charged separately, by usage.

Those last lines are the part the comparison didn't show.

A cheap cloud server is a box. Someone still has to update it, secure it, watch it, back it up and wake up when it falls over. If that someone isn't in the price, it's you. Or it's us, unpaid.

The cheapest hosting is the one where you haven't counted who fixes it yet.

A few days later we were setting up a dedicated machine for that client. I don't think it was about winning an argument. Once everything was on the table, the comparison simply looked different.

The version of me who'd have matched the price

I'll admit something. Earlier in Foxnice's life, I might have matched the cheap price.

I'd have squeezed a site onto a small box, told myself we'd keep an eye on it, and then spent hours I never billed keeping it alive.

This spring we had a server go down again and again. I know exactly what it feels like to apologise for infrastructure. I don't want to do it again to save a few euros.

And the machine matters more than people think. That same month we were embedding a booking engine into a rural lodging's website with an iframe. Simple, fast, and the guest never leaves the lodging's site. It also means the engine's speed is now part of their website's speed. What's underneath ends up on the shop window.

When someone puts two hosting prices side by side, I'd ask three boring questions. How much machine, in numbers, not "Starter" or "Pro"? Who administers it? And what does an afternoon offline cost this business? A lost booking, a lost sale, a phone that won't stop ringing. Compare that, not the monthly fee.

We've run Foxnice since 2014 without investors. We can't subsidise cheap hosting with our own time, and our clients can't afford to lose bookings. Charging what a reliable server really costs is the honest version of the deal. For both sides.

The cheap price was real. It just wasn't the whole price.

The whole price includes the person who answers when it breaks.

P.S. "Suitable for personal websites and simple blogs" is the most honest sentence I read all July. Nobody reads it.