Two managed WordPress hosts at three to five times the price of shared hosting. What you get for it, where each wins, and the cheaper options that get most of the way.
Managed WordPress hosting costs £20–£100/month for a site that would run on £6/month shared hosting. The question is not whether that is expensive — it is — but whether the difference buys anything you need.
What you are actually paying for
Not raw speed. A well-configured LiteSpeed shared host with page caching will post competitive numbers against either of these for a brochure site. What the premium buys is the removal of a category of work: updates tested before they land, backups you can restore in one click, staging that mirrors production exactly, a plugin-conflict rollback, and support staffed by people who will read your debug.log rather than tell you plugins are out of scope.
Roughly: if a broken site costs you money within an hour, that is worth £30/month. If a broken site is an annoyance you fix on Sunday, it is not.
Head to head
| WP Engine | Kinsta | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | ~$20/mo annually | ~$35/mo |
| Infrastructure | Google Cloud + AWS, London region | Google Cloud premium tier, London, + Cloudflare enterprise edge |
| Control panel | User Portal — functional, dated | MyKinsta — best in the category |
| Support | 24/7 chat, phone on higher tiers | 24/7 chat with WordPress engineers |
| Plugin restrictions | Blocklist bans some caching/backup/search plugins | Shorter list, mostly caching plugins |
| Included extras | Genesis themes, Smart Plugin Manager, Local dev app | APM performance tool, free expert migrations, edge caching |
| Email hosting | None | None |
| Overages | Charged per extra 1,000 visits | Charged per extra 1,000 visits |
| Owner | Silver Lake (private equity) | Independent |
Kinsta wins on the day-to-day
MyKinsta is the reason people switch. Cloning a site to staging, flipping PHP versions, reading real-time performance data and searching-and-replacing across the database are all two clicks and do not require a support ticket. Google Cloud's premium network tier plus Cloudflare's edge is a measurably faster combination than WP Engine's default, particularly for international visitors. Support is staffed by people who write WordPress rather than people who read about it.
WP Engine wins on ecosystem and price floor
It is cheaper at entry, it has the deeper agency tooling, and the bundled extras are real: Smart Plugin Manager updates plugins and visually regression-tests the result, which is genuinely useful on client sites. Local — their free local development app — is the de facto standard for WordPress developers regardless of host. The transferable-billing and multi-site agency plans are more mature.
The plugin blocklist is the sharper edge. It bans most caching plugins (their own caching replaces them, reasonably), but also some backup and related-post plugins, and discovering a client site depends on a banned plugin after migrating is an unpleasant afternoon. Check the list first.
The options that get 80% of the way for less
- Rocket.net (~$25/mo) — bundles Cloudflare Enterprise into every plan, which is why it benchmarks close to Kinsta for less. Younger company, shorter track record.
- Cloudways (~$11/mo) — managed layer over a DigitalOcean or Vultr server. Staging, backups, one-click SSL, no SSH required, true monthly billing. Less hand-holding, considerably cheaper.
- Nexcess — the one to shortlist for WooCommerce, and one of the very few managed hosts that includes email.
The thing nobody mentions until after you migrate
Neither WP Engine nor Kinsta hosts email. Not forwarding, not a single mailbox. If your domain's mail currently runs on your old shared host, migrating breaks it, and you will need Google Workspace (~£5/user/month) or Microsoft 365 on top. Budget for it before the move, not during.
Published 27 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.