Most WordPress hosting comparisons online compare CPU, memory and disk. This one does not. It is about one thing: money — and specifically the kind of math that counts your time as money too.
The 30-second version
| Item | Self-hosted | Managed |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost (including your time) | NT$1,380–2,530 | avg. NT$299–999/mo (billed yearly) |
| Who handles operations | You | Your host |
| Biggest cost | Plugin licenses and update risk | A fixed yearly fee |
| How many sites make it worth it | Three or more | One or two |
| Not counted above | The expected cost of update breakage and getting hacked | |
WordPress has a different cost structure from other tools
Start with a difference many people never notice.
When you self-host n8n or NocoDB, the big costs are the server and your ops time. WordPress is not like that — its big costs are the plugin ecosystem and update risk. A WordPress site that actually works in production usually needs four categories of plugin — caching, backup, security and forms — and the free tier of each has clear functional ceilings.
Worse, WordPress has three things that update independently: core, plugins and themes. All three release on their own schedules, so conflicts are the norm, not an accident. That cost appears on no host’s price list.
Your hourly rate belongs in the cost table
If you are a freelancer or an employee, your time has a clear opportunity cost. Three hours fixing a layout that broke after an update is three hours not spent on billable work. The figures below use NT$600/hour as the conversion rate; substitute your own number and redo the math.
The full cost of self-hosting WordPress
| Item | Per month | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| VPS | NT$300–600 | It has to run PHP and a database; 2 GB of RAM is the practical starting point |
| Domain | About NT$30 | Annual fee, amortized |
| Paid plugin licenses | NT$200–500 | Caching / backup / security / forms, annual fees amortized |
| Initial setup, amortized | NT$150–400 | 3–6 hours (environment, SSL, choosing plugins), spread over 12 months |
| Core and plugin updates | NT$300–600 | About 0.5–1 hour a month, including recovery when something breaks |
| Backups and restore checks | NT$300 | About 0.5 hours a month. An untested backup is not a backup |
| SSL renewal and odds and ends | NT$100 | Mostly automatable, but still needs an occasional look |
| Total | NT$1,380–2,530 | In a month where nothing goes wrong |
For comparison, RoamerHost managed WordPress is avg. NT$299/mo for WordPress Basic (NT$3,588 billed yearly, 1.5 vCPU / 10 GB) and avg. NT$999/mo for WP × Roamer AI Pro (NT$11,988 billed yearly, 2 vCPU / 10 GB), including SSL, a dedicated subdomain, automatic backups and environment maintenance. Pro also includes Business-tier Roamer AI access, so site work you would otherwise do by hand — building pages, changing layouts, updating plugins — can be handed to the AI just by describing it.
But that table is not entirely fair to self-hosting
To be honest about it: there are three ways that table is unfair to self-hosting, and you should know them.
First, one VPS can host several WordPress sites. If you run five sites, the server cost is paid once and the marginal cost per site drops a long way. That is self-hosting’s most real advantage, and it grows with the number of sites.
Second, the free tier of many plugins genuinely is enough. If your site is pure content, traffic is modest and you take no orders, free caching and backup plugins will hold up. That NT$200–500 goes straight to zero.
Third, if you are already a WordPress developer, this time is not an extra cost. Maintaining your own site keeps your skills sharp, and billing that time at full rate is not reasonable.
So where is the break-even point
| Your situation | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| One site, and you are not technical | Managed — one site absorbs all of self-hosting’s fixed costs; the math never works |
| Three or more sites, and you already do ops | Self-host — the marginal cost is thin enough to be worth it |
| The site runs orders, bookings or forms | Managed — what you buy is “when it breaks, it is not your problem” |
| You want to learn servers and WordPress internals | Self-host — here the time is tuition, not a loss |
| You need unusual modules, or to run things besides WordPress | Self-host — a managed environment always has boundaries |
Two variables that never make it into the table
The odds of an update breaking the site. WordPress core, plugins and themes all update separately, so version conflicts are the norm. The value of a managed environment is not that it never breaks; it is that the environment is uniform, someone else handles the breakage, and there is a restore point to go back to. Self-hosted, when you update on a Friday night and find the homepage layout has fallen apart, that weekend is yours.
The expected cost of being hacked. WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world, which makes it the top target for automated scanning attacks. The cost of cleaning up one intrusion — removing the malware, confirming there is no backdoor, restoring data, dealing with Google’s security warnings — comfortably exceeds a full year of managed hosting. You cannot put that in a monthly cost table, but it belongs in your head when you decide.
If your site has been hacked once, you probably already know what I mean.
FAQ
Q: A VPS is only about three hundred a month. Why did you come up with over a thousand?
Because your time is counted. Updates, verifying backups, renewing SSL, chasing problems — about an hour in a month where everything is fine, and a whole evening on the day something breaks. At NT$600/hour, the time costs more than the server rent.
Q: What if my time is not worth much?
Then self-hosting is much cheaper and this math does not apply to you. For students, people who want to learn server operations, or working WordPress developers, self-hosting is a reasonable choice — for a developer that time keeps their skills sharp, it is not pure loss.
Q: Do I have to count the plugin licenses?
Not necessarily. For a pure content site with modest traffic and no orders, free caching and backup plugins hold up, and that line goes to zero. The sites that need paid versions are the ones with payments, memberships, or traffic past a certain scale.
Q: Does more sites always mean self-hosting?
Yes, this is self-hosting’s most real advantage. The server cost is paid once, the marginal cost per site drops a long way, and the advantage grows with the number of sites. The dividing line sits around three sites.
Q: How do you price the cost of being hacked?
You cannot put it in a monthly table, but removing the malware, confirming there is no backdoor, restoring data and dealing with Google’s security warnings comfortably exceeds a full year of managed hosting. WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world, which also makes it the top target for automated scanning attacks.
Sources and further reading
Specifications and best practices for the WordPress ecosystem are defined by the official documentation:
- WordPress user documentation
- WordPress developer documentation — technical specs for plugins and themes
Further reading
- WordPress hosting pre-purchase FAQ: migration, multiple sites and traffic
- Moving WordPress off shared hosting: six things you will actually hit
- Why OpenLiteSpeed: picking an engine for WordPress hosting
- WordPress Redis object cache: two invisible optimizations you can feel
- WordPress hosting FAQ: plugins, PHP settings and troubleshooting
- RoamerHost managed WordPress plans
Want someone to build it for you?
When requirements go beyond what plugins can do, someone has to touch the code. Roamer Tech takes on advanced WordPress development:
