$osscostcalc.comSelf-hosting cost intelligence

Self-hosting WordPress cost

CMS / Blog

WordPress is the most widely used open-source CMS in the world, powering a large share of the web. Self-hosting it on a tuned LEMP stack with caching is inexpensive at small scale, and cost grows mainly with traffic, media storage, and database size.

The tables below show the recommended minimum specification for WordPress at each user scale, and the cheapest matching plan on each of our tracked providers. Prices are approximate monthly list prices in USD.

Up to 100 users

Recommended minimum: 1 vCPU · 2 GB RAM

LEMP stack with page caching handles small sites comfortably.

ProviderPlanSpecsMonthlyDeploy
DigitalOceanPremium AMD · 1 vCPU1 vCPU / 2 GB$14Deploy
HetznerBestCPX112 vCPU / 2 GB$5.18Deploy
LinodeShared 2GB1 vCPU / 2 GB$12Deploy

Up to 500 users

Recommended minimum: 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM

Add Redis object cache + a CDN for media-heavy traffic.

ProviderPlanSpecsMonthlyDeploy
DigitalOceanPremium AMD · 2 vCPU2 vCPU / 4 GB$28Deploy
HetznerBestCPX213 vCPU / 4 GB$8.98Deploy
LinodeShared 4GB2 vCPU / 4 GB$24Deploy

Up to 1,000 users

Recommended minimum: 4 vCPU · 8 GB RAM

PHP-FPM tuning + external MySQL for sustained concurrency.

ProviderPlanSpecsMonthlyDeploy
DigitalOceanPremium AMD · 4 vCPU4 vCPU / 8 GB$56Deploy
HetznerBestCPX314 vCPU / 8 GB$16.90Deploy
LinodeShared 8GB4 vCPU / 8 GB$48Deploy

Up to 5,000 users (Enterprise)

Recommended minimum: 8 vCPU · 32 GB RAM

Enterprise architecture: horizontally scale PHP-FPM across multiple app nodes behind a load balancer, move MySQL/MariaDB to a managed primary-replica cluster, front everything with a full-page cache (Varnish or Nginx FastCGI cache) plus a global CDN, and keep a shared Redis object cache. Store uploads on object storage rather than local disk.

ProviderPlanSpecsMonthlyDeploy
DigitalOceanCPU-Optimized · 16 vCPU16 vCPU / 32 GB$294Deploy
HetznerBestCPX5116 vCPU / 32 GB$65.50Deploy
LinodeDedicated 32GB16 vCPU / 32 GB$288Deploy

Prices are approximate list prices and may change at any time; verify on the provider's official site before purchasing. Specs are conservative single-node starting points. Deploy links may contain referral codes. Try the interactive calculator.