The short answer. We costed hosting 20, 50 and 100 small client sites two ways, on per-site managed plans and on your own servers with a control panel, and we show how to price the third way, a capacity pool you fill with as many sites as fit, from what your own sites use. Prices were taken on 5-6 November 2026 and the main ones re-checked on 7 November 2026; every input is listed below so you can swap in your own.
- In cash, running your own servers costs least: £106-162 a month for 20 sites with a DIY panel (£91-100 on xCloud or GridPane managed servers, which use smaller servers), against £266-273 on Kinsta or WP Engine agency plans.
- Once your team's server time is counted, the picture changes. At 3 hours per server per month and £48.06 an hour, DIY panels cost £395-451 for 20 sites, £744-856 for 50 and £1,442-1,665 for 100. That is the figure any managed option has to beat.
- A capacity pool's cost depends on what your sites use, not on how many there are. So we don't give it a price per portfolio size: price it from your own sites with the formula below, or ask an engineer to size it with you.
- Per small WordPress site at list price, Kinsta and WP Engine agency plans are hard to beat (about £6-14 a site), as long as your sites stay inside their visit and storage allowances.
So the choice is rarely about the bill alone. It is about who patches and who is on call, which platforms you run, and what happens to your price when the portfolio grows.
The three ways agencies pay for hosting
1. Per site, with caps
You buy a plan for a number of WordPress installs, with an allowance of visits (or bandwidth) and storage.
- Kinsta agency plans: Agency 20 at $340 a month, Agency 40 at $450 and Agency 60 at $675, with 500,000, 750,000 and 1,250,000 estimated visits a month (or 250, 500 and 750 GB of bandwidth) and 50, 100 and 150 GB of storage. They are bought through "Talk to sales", not online (Kinsta).
- WP Engine (UK prices): Essential for up to 30 sites at £260 a month, with 400,000 visits and 50 GB, and extra sites at £15.60 each (up to 40); Business from £312 a month, billed annually, for 30-50 sites and 400,000-800,000 visits. Visits over the allowance are billed at $2 per 1,000 (WP Engine).
What to watch: how visits are counted (bots included), storage, per-site add-ons, and the price step to the next tier.
2. Your own servers, plus a panel
You rent virtual servers and run them with a control panel. The panel fee is small and flat: from nothing (CloudPanel) to $39 a month (Laravel Forge Business) or $29.99 per server (Plesk Web Pro in 2026). A 4 vCPU / 8 GiB server in DigitalOcean's London region is $48 a month (DigitalOcean). Your team patches the operating system and PHP, checks backups, watches monitoring and answers the alerts.
Vendor-managed servers sit in between: Cloudways, xCloud's managed servers and GridPane's PeakFreq patch the server stack, and you still size the servers and handle escalations.
3. A capacity pool
You buy cores, memory and disk in one region and put as many sites and staging environments on them as fit. Corefinity's CoreCluster works this way: it is priced by capacity, not by visits or sites, it starts from £300 a month + VAT for the smallest package (CC4), and sites are limited only by the package's capacity. You add cores, memory or disk yourself as your sites need them, and the upgrades take effect in minutes.
The worked example
Assumptions
| Input | Value in the model | Why, and how sure |
|---|---|---|
| A small client site | A low-traffic WordPress or Laravel brochure site, about 10,000 visits a month, under 10 GB of files and database | Assumption |
| Portfolio | 20 sites (2 DIY servers, 3 team members), 50 sites (4 servers, 5 members), 100 sites (8 servers, 8 members) | Assumption: 12.5 sites per 4 vCPU / 8 GiB server. That is inside xCloud's advice of "not to host more than 15 sites in an instance", and well below GridPane's and SpinupWP's figures for brochure sites |
| Your team's time on servers (DIY) | 1, 3 or 6 hours per server per month: patch reviews and reboots, alerts, backup checks, PHP upgrades, incidents | Assumption, and the weakest input. Vendor sources quote 3-10 hours a month for small portfolios (ServerSpan, TopSyde, Pantheon). Use your own number |
| Your team's time (vendor-managed servers) | 0.5, 1 or 2 hours per server per month | Assumption: the vendor patches, you still size servers and escalate |
| Your team's time (fully managed: Kinsta, WP Engine, a managed cluster) | 0 server hours | Application work (WordPress and plugin updates, deploys) is left out of every option because the agency does it everywhere |
| Hourly cost | £48.06: a £65,000 Linux engineer salary × 1.22 for employer costs ÷ 1,650 productive hours. A contractor at £65 an hour is the alternative | Salary Reported (IT Jobs Watch), uplift Verified (UK impact assessment), hours Assumption |
| DIY extras | Off-site backups to Backblaze B2 (6 GB per site), uptime monitoring (UptimeRobot Team, €39), transactional email (Postmark, $18). Managed WordPress plans add email only | Prices Verified (Backblaze, UptimeRobot, Postmark), volumes Assumption |
| Currency and tax | GBP, ex VAT. USD and EUR prices converted at Bank of England spot rates of 5 November 2026: $1.3476 and €1.2002 to £1 | Verified (Bank of England series XUDLUSS and XUDLERS). A VAT-registered UK agency recovers VAT |
| Bandwidth and egress | Not costed for any option: small sites are assumed to stay within each provider's included allowance | Assumption |
| Not in the model | On-call cover outside working hours, incident overtime, the cost of a breach or of losing a client, WordPress and plugin updates | Left out on purpose; they are real costs |
How to size a capacity pool
A capacity pool has no price per site and no fixed number of sites per package: every site and staging environment shares the cores, memory and disk you buy. To price one for your portfolio:
- Count environments: your sites, plus the staging copies you keep running.
- Measure what they use today: CPU and memory at busy times, and the disk each site takes up, files and database.
- Pick the package that covers that with headroom on all three, and add cores, memory or disk where one runs short. CoreCluster starts from £300 a month + VAT (CC4); our order page lists every package and add-on price.
Talk to an engineer and we'll size it with you from your current sites. We don't publish a number of sites per package, because it depends entirely on the sites.
Check disk as well as cores. Brochure sites with large media libraries can fill their disk long before they use their share of CPU, so size on all three resources, not just the core count.
What each option costs
GBP a month, ex VAT. "With your time" adds server hours at £48.06: DIY 1 / 3 / 6 hours per server, vendor-managed 0.5 / 1 / 2. The central case is in bold. Per site uses the central case. A capacity pool such as CoreCluster is not in this table: it is priced by capacity, so price it from your own sites' usage (above).
| Option | 20 sites: cash | 20: with your time | 50: cash | 50: with your time | 100: cash | 100: with your time | Per site, 20 / 50 / 100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CloudPanel + Hetzner (no UK region) | £106 | £203 / £395 / £683 | £167 | £360 / £744 / £1,321 | £289 | £673 / £1,442 / £2,596 | £20 / £15 / £14 |
| Enhance + DigitalOcean London | £125 | £221 / £413 / £702 | £197 | £390 / £774 / £1,351 | £345 | £730 / £1,498 / £2,652 | £21 / £15 / £15 |
| Laravel Forge Business + DigitalOcean London | £147 | £243 / £435 / £723 | £219 | £411 / £796 / £1,372 | £363 | £747 / £1,516 / £2,670 | £22 / £16 / £15 |
| Plesk Web Pro (2026 licence) + DigitalOcean London | £162 | £258 / £451 / £739 | £279 | £471 / £856 / £1,432 | £512 | £896 / £1,665 / £2,819 | £23 / £17 / £17 |
| xCloud managed, 4 GB servers¹ | £91 | £139 / £187 / £283 | £136 | £233 / £329 / £521 | £227 | £419 / £612 / £996 | £9 / £7 / £6 |
| GridPane PeakFreq, 4 GB servers¹ | £100 | £148 / £196 / £292 | £154 | £250 / £347 / £539 | £263 | £455 / £647 / £1,032 | £10 / £7 / £6 |
| Cloudways, DigitalOcean 8 GB | £163 | £211 / £259 / £355 | £315 | £411 / £507 / £699 | £616 | £808 / £1,000 / £1,385 | £13 / £10 / £10 |
| Kinsta agency plans² | £266 | £266 | £514 | £514 | £848 | £848 | £13 / £10 / £8 |
| WP Engine UK plans² | £273 | £273 | £325 | £325 | £637 | £637 | £14 / £7 / £6 |
¹ These use 4 GB servers, half the memory of the DIY servers, which flatters them.
² Kinsta at 50 sites is Agency 60; at 100 sites it is Agency 60 and Agency 40 together, and whether Kinsta sells that combination is our assumption (its agency plans are sold through "Talk to sales"). WP Engine at 20 sites is Essential for up to 30 sites; at 50, one Business plan; at 100, two Business plans, because the 30-site Essential plan takes at most 40 extra sites. WP Engine's figures are the "from" prices on its UK plans page, and Business is billed annually; 50 sites on one Business plan may need a higher tier, so treat the WP Engine rows as a floor. At 10,000 visits a site, 100 sites make about 1 million visits a month, against 800,000 for two Business plans at their starting allowance, and the model adds no visit overage. Check how the allowance works before you rely on that figure.
How one line is built (Forge, 20 sites): 2 servers × £35.62 + Forge £28.94 + backups £0.62 + monitoring £32.49 + email £13.36 = £146.65 in cash; + 2 servers × 3 hours × £48.06 = £288.36; total £435.01, or £21.75 a site.
Reading the numbers
Where a capacity pool loses
- Cash. A panel on rented servers has the lowest cash cost of anything here. If you have a capable sysadmin with spare hours, it saves real money.
- Small WordPress-only portfolios. At list price, Kinsta and WP Engine agency plans cost less per small site, with mature tooling, while your sites stay within their caps.
- Vendor-managed servers. xCloud managed, GridPane PeakFreq and Cloudways are the lowest all-in costs at the central labour figure. That middle ground is the hardest comparison for a cluster.
- Reselling. If you sell hosting under your own brand with your own invoices, look for white label or client billing (Cloudways, for example, sells a Client Billing & Reporting add-on). CoreCluster does not offer either.
Where your own time decides it
- Once your team's time is counted, the DIY totals above are what a managed option has to beat. Whether a capacity pool beats them depends on what your sites use: price it from your own usage and compare. The difference is who carries the work.
Where a capacity pool wins
- Past the DIY comfort zone. A common rule of thumb in agency threads is "five to twenty sites: your own VPS with a panel" (r/SiteManagement). Beyond that, patching, monitoring and being on call grow with every server.
- Mixed portfolios. WordPress, WooCommerce, Laravel and Magento 2 clients on one platform and one bill. Kinsta's and WP Engine's agency plans host WordPress only.
- Plan cliffs and per-site add-ons. Per-site plans step up at fixed site counts and price extra sites as add-ons. In a pool, the number of sites is limited only by the package's capacity, which you add as your sites need it.
- Who patches and who is on call. On fully managed hosting, a managed cluster or a managed WordPress plan, the host runs the operating system and server stack. On a DIY panel, you do. When PHP's critical fixes landed on 21 October 2026, Laravel Forge's own guidance was "You must update PHP on each of your servers yourself" (Laravel Forge).
The break-even, worked out from your own sites
Once you have priced a capacity pool for your sites (formula below), a DIY panel costs the same when your team spends:
hours per server per month = (capacity pool price − DIY cash cost) ÷ (servers × your hourly cost)
If your servers take less of your team's time than that, DIY costs you less. If they take more, it costs you more.
Price changes to factor in
- cPanel, from 16 December 2026: Solo $32.99, Admin $38.99, Pro $58.99, Premier $76.99 a month, and $0.55 for each account above 100 on Premier (2026: $29.99, $35.99, $53.99, $69.99 and $0.49). cPanel has priced by account since June 2019 (cPanel 2027 licensing guide).
- Plesk, from 1 January 2027: Web Admin 18.99, Web Pro 33.99 and Web Host 73.99 a month, the same figures in US dollars and pounds (€15.99, €28.99 and €62.99) (Plesk 2027 licensing guide). The model uses Web Pro at $29.99. At $33.99 the Plesk lines rise by about £6, £12 and £24 a month at 20, 50 and 100 sites; bought in pounds at £33.99, by about £23, £47 and £94.
- Hetzner raised prices on 1 April 2026 for existing and new products, and again on 15 June 2026 for new orders and rescales of cloud servers (Hetzner, February 2026; Hetzner, May 2026). A CPX32, the model's cash-floor server, went from a reported €10.49 a month before April to €13.99 and then €35.49, before the €0.50 IPv4 charge; Hetzner's price list shows €35.99 with IPv4, the price the model uses.
Run the numbers for your own agency
Your own servers:
(servers × server price) + panel fee + backup storage + monitoring + email
+ (servers × your hours per server per month × your hourly cost)
Example, 20 sites on 2 servers: 2 × 35.62 + 28.94 + 0.62 + 32.49 + 13.36 + (2 × 3 × 48.06) = £435.01.
A per-site plan:
plan price + (extra sites × price per extra site)
+ (visits over the allowance ÷ 1,000 × overage rate) + add-ons you need
A capacity pool:
environments = sites × (1 + share with standing staging)
cores needed = environments × busy-time (p95) CPU per environment
memory needed = environments × busy-time (p95) memory per environment
disk needed = environments × provisioned disk per environment
monthly price = package + (extra cores × core price) + (extra memory × memory price) + (extra disk × disk price),
choosing the package and add-ons that keep each of the three comfortably below its limit
(75% is a sensible ceiling)
Use your own hours and hourly cost. If you don't track server time, a month of honest timesheets for patching, alerts, backup checks and incidents is the single most useful input you can collect.
What agencies charge clients
Ranges reported by agencies in public threads (Reported; self-selected posters, 2023-2026):
- UK: £15-30 a month per small-business site for hosting, with care plans in tiers such as £24, £99 and £149 (r/Wordpress, UK Business Forums).
- US: $50-150 a month per site for hosting and care (same r/Wordpress thread).
A bare £15-30 "hosting" line leaves little margin for managed hosting and your team's time; a £75-150 care plan leaves much more. One agency in these threads advises against calling it a "hosting fee" at all, because clients then compare it with the cheapest shared hosting (r/webdev).
If you are weighing a move, our guides to leaving WP Engine and leaving Cloudways cover the steps.
Questions to ask any host before you move your agency
- What is metered? Sites, visits, bandwidth, storage, PHP workers, CPU or memory? How are bots counted?
- What happens at the limit? An overage bill, throttling, a forced upgrade, or new sites refused?
- What does the next step cost? Add-on prices and the next tier, in writing.
- How much notice before a price change? Are first-year prices different from renewal prices?
- What is the contract? Monthly or annual, notice period, refunds.
- How do I leave? Backup downloads, database exports, DNS, and what stays behind.
- Who patches what? Operating system, PHP, web server, database, application. Who is on call at night?
- Can my clients own their accounts? And do you offer white label or client billing, if you need them?
How Corefinity's CoreCluster fits
CoreCluster is one cluster for your client sites: fully managed hosting where sites are limited only by the package's capacity.
- From £300 / €330 / $350 a month (CC4), + VAT in the UK and EU. Priced by capacity, not by visits or sites. Monthly billing, no minimum term, no setup fee.
- Scale up in minutes: you upgrade the package, or add cores, memory and disk, yourself.
- WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento 2 and Laravel. Each site runs in its own container.
- Staging and production environments for every site, with clones and push to live. Backups (snapshots) every 6 hours, kept 30 days, included. Git deployments from GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket.
- An agency portal to raise and track tickets for any client site. Works with your AI agents through an MCP server and REST API.
- Hosted on Google Cloud, in London, Northern Virginia (Ashburn), the Netherlands or Sydney. 24/7 engineer support.
- Free migration on every plan, done by our engineers.
- CoreCluster does not offer white label or client billing.
More on WordPress hosting for client sites, and on how our support works.
Method: every figure on this page comes from our cost model, with prices taken on 5-6 November 2026 and the main inputs re-checked on 7 November 2026. If a price has changed, tell us and we will update the page and its date.
Sources
Checked on 7 November 2026 unless stated "accessed 6 November 2026".
- Kinsta, Agency hosting plans
- WP Engine, UK plans
- DigitalOcean, Droplet pricing
- Laravel Forge, Pricing and PHP security advisory, October 2026
- Cloudways, Pricing
- xCloud, Pricing and Sites per server
- GridPane, PeakFreq pricing and What size servers to choose
- SpinupWP, Sites per server
- Enhance, Pricing
- Hetzner, Cloud prices, price adjustment statement and standardisation and price adjustment; earlier CPX32 prices from CloudTally (Reported, accessed 6 November 2026)
- cPanel, 2027 licensing guide; Plesk, 2027 licensing guide and pricing
- CloudPanel, cloudpanel.io (accessed 6 November 2026)
- Bank of England, spot rates XUDLUSS and XUDLERS, 5 November 2026
- IT Jobs Watch, Linux Engineer salaries (accessed 6 November 2026); UK Government, impact assessment 2026/14 (accessed 6 November 2026)
- Backblaze, B2 pricing; UptimeRobot, pricing; Postmark, pricing (all accessed 6 November 2026)
- ServerSpan, Hosting 20 client websites on one VPS; TopSyde, Why agencies outsource WordPress hosting; Pantheon, Managed WordPress hosting benefits (vendor sources, accessed 6 November 2026)
- Agency threads: r/Wordpress, r/SiteManagement, r/webdev, UK Business Forums (Reported, accessed 6 November 2026)
