Running a WordPress site costs between $15 and $474 a year, excluding the server
A cost breakdown published on 6 September 2026 shows that the non-server expenses for a single WordPress site — covering domain, TLS, backups, uptime monitoring, transactional email, CDN, and object storage — range from $15.46 to $474.08 annually for identical traffic loads. The 30x price gap is not driven by quality differences; four of the seven cost categories have free tiers considered adequate for a site handling roughly 50 GB of bandwidth per month. Two line items — managed backups and uptime monitoring — account for 68% of the mid-range total, yet neither is strictly necessary at this scale. Domain renewals represent a notable hidden cost, with some registrars charging significantly more after the first year, while TLS certificates can be obtained for free via Let's Encrypt. The analysis used published list prices from vendor pricing pages and deliberately excluded server hosting costs.
This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

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