A cheap VPS will outperform hosting that costs eight times as much. Whether you should buy one is a question about your time, not your budget.
A Hetzner CX22 — 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe — costs about €3.79/month and will comfortably outrun a £30/month managed WordPress plan on any synthetic benchmark you care to run. This is true, widely repeated, and incomplete in a way that costs people weekends.
What the benchmark leaves out
The £30 is not buying CPU. It is buying the answer to about a dozen questions you will otherwise own personally:
- Who applies the kernel security update the week it drops?
- Where do backups go, and has anyone verified one restores?
- Who notices the site is down at 2am on a Sunday?
- Who debugs the PHP-FPM pool exhaustion when traffic spikes?
- Who renews the certificate when certbot's renewal hook silently fails?
- Who cleans up after a compromise, and how do you know one happened?
- Who configures the SMTP relay because your VPS cannot send email and port 25 is blocked?
All of these are tractable. None is hard individually. Together they are a small ongoing job, and the honest estimate is two to four hours of setup, then fifteen minutes a month if nothing breaks — plus one genuinely stressful evening per year when something does.
The arithmetic, done properly
| Self-hosted VPS | Managed WordPress | |
|---|---|---|
| Server | £3.50/mo | £30/mo |
| Backup storage | £0.50/mo | Included |
| Monitoring | Free tier | Included |
| SMTP relay | Free tier | Usually not included either |
| Setup time | 3 hours, once | 20 minutes |
| Ongoing | ~15 min/month + incidents | ~0 |
| Cash per year | ~£48 | ~£360 |
The £312 annual saving is real. It is also about six hours of your year in the good case. If your time is worth £50/hour, the saving is roughly £12 — and the good case assumes nothing goes badly wrong.
So when is self-hosting the right call?
When you want to. That is not a joke and it is not a cop-out. Running your own server is a skill worth having, the control is genuinely useful, and people who enjoy it do not experience the maintenance as a cost. If you find this stuff interesting, the £4 box is one of the best-value things in computing.
It is also clearly right when:
- You are hosting many sites. One £8 VPS running ten sites changes the arithmetic completely — managed hosting charges per site.
- You need something managed hosting will not run: a queue worker, a custom PHP extension, a Node service alongside WordPress, a non-standard cron schedule.
- You are learning deliberately, and the site can afford to be down while you learn.
And when it is the wrong call
When it is a business site, you are the only person who can fix it, and you do not actually enjoy this. The failure mode is not dramatic — it is that updates quietly stop being applied around month four, backups fail silently in month seven, and month eleven is a compromised site and a very bad weekend.
The middle option most people should take
Cloudways at about £9/month puts a managed control plane on top of a DigitalOcean or Hetzner-class server. You get VPS performance, staging, one-click SSL, automated off-site backups and server-level caching, without ever opening an SSH session. It is not as cheap as raw Hetzner and not as hands-off as Kinsta, and for a large number of people it is exactly the right trade.
If you do want the raw box, our self-hosting walkthrough covers the whole build — firewall, nginx, PHP-FPM, certificates, hardening and backups that actually leave the server.
Published 16 August 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.