What a hosting plan sells you: sites, visits, and the allowance that shrinks as you climb

Managed WordPress hosting prices itself on three numbers at once: what you pay, how many installs you may run, and how much traffic and storage those installs share. Comparisons usually reduce that to the first, occasionally the second, and almost never the relationship between them. That relationship is where the tiering logic lives, and on the one ladder in our record that publishes all three at every rung it is unusually clear.

Pressable's entry plan is $25 a month, and it carries one WordPress install, thirty thousand visits a month and twenty gigabytes of storage. Its largest published tier is $675 a month for one hundred installs, two million visits and three hundred and twenty-five gigabytes. Between those two points the price rises twenty-sevenfold and the install count a hundredfold, which already tells you the ladder is priced per site rather than per server.

Divide it out and the pattern is consistent. The cost per install falls at every step, from the entry tier's whole monthly price for its single site down to a little under seven at the top, so a large ladder rung is a genuinely cheaper way to host a site than a small one. Storage per install falls just as steadily and rather faster: twenty gigabytes on the entry plan, ten on the next, seven, five, four, and a little over three at the top. A site on the largest plan is allotted roughly a sixth of the storage a site on the smallest one gets.

Traffic behaves differently and is the more interesting of the two. Visits per install start at thirty thousand on the entry tier, fall to fifteen thousand across the middle of the ladder, then settle at twenty thousand from the fifth rung upward. The single-site plan is by some distance the most generous per site, and the middle of the ladder is the least. If you are running one busy site, climbing is not buying it more headroom; it is buying permission to add sites that will share the headroom.

It is worth being exact about what those allowances are, because the arithmetic above can mislead if taken too literally. The visit and storage figures are the plan's totals, not a per-site quota enforced site by site. One site on a five-install plan may use the whole allowance. The per-install division matters when you actually fill the installs, which is the situation the pricing anticipates: these are plans designed for somebody running many modest sites, and the shape of the ladder says so more plainly than the marketing does. An agency with twenty small client sites is the intended buyer of the upper rungs; a single growing site is not, and would be paying for install capacity it cannot use.

So the buying question in this category is not which plan is cheapest but which shape of workload you have. Few large sites and many small ones are priced very differently by the same ladder, and the rung that is best value per site can be poor value for your actual site. Work out your own visits and storage first, then find the cheapest rung that clears them, and treat the install count as a constraint rather than a feature unless you genuinely have sites to fill it with.

There is a second thing to check in this category, and it is a different problem entirely. Shared hosting cards frequently print two monthly figures for the same plan: an introductory rate and a higher standing one. Bluehost and SiteGround both do this on every tier we read, so each of their plan cards carries two prices per month and only one of them is what you will pay after the first term. Which figure a comparison shows you depends on which one it picked up, and the two are far enough apart that a table mixing them is not comparing anything. Before trusting any shared-hosting comparison, including ours, check whether the number quoted is the intro rate or the renewal, because on those pages both are printed and both look like the price.

Managed hosting of the kind priced above tends not to do this, which is a real difference between the two halves of the category and is arguably worth more than a few pounds a month. A plan with one price is easier to budget than a cheaper plan with two, and the gap between an introductory shared-hosting rate and its renewal is usually larger than the gap between shared and managed hosting in the first place.