Benchmarked ten identical WP sites: $6 VPS vs $35 managed host

Same theme, same plugins, same content, same database dump. Five on a $6/month VPS I configured myself, five on a well-known $35/month managed host. Measured over three weeks.

Time to first byte, median, from four regions
VPS: 218ms
Managed: 141ms

TTFB, 95th percentile
VPS: 1,340ms
Managed: 290ms

That second table is the whole story. The median is close enough that you would never notice in a speed test — which is exactly what people run before declaring the cheap host fine. The tail is where the difference lives, and the tail is what your actual visitors hit at the wrong moment.

Load test, 200 concurrent
VPS: errors at around 90 concurrent without tuning, 160 after I spent an evening on it
Managed: no errors, no intervention

What it actually cost
The VPS saved $29/month, so $348 a year. I spent roughly seven hours setting it up properly and about an hour a month since. At any sane hourly rate the saving is gone before month three.

When I would still pick the VPS
If you are running ten sites on one box the economics flip completely, and if you need control the managed host will not give you, there is no decision to make. For a single site that earns money, paying the $35 is the correct lazy answer and I say that as someone who enjoys configuring servers.

The 95th percentile framing is the useful contribution here. Everyone benchmarks medians because medians make cheap hosting look fine.

Ten sites on one box is where I landed. $20 VPS, ten sites, and the whole thing costs less than one managed plan. The failure mode is that one bad site takes down ten, which has happened to me exactly once and was enough to add monitoring.

Would also add: the managed host saves you on the day something breaks, not on an average Tuesday. Hard to benchmark and the main thing you are buying.

Agreed, and I could not measure it so I left it out. Both managed incidents during the window were resolved before I noticed them.

As a beginner this is reassuring. I was about to spend a weekend learning nginx to save $29 on a site that makes nothing yet.

Learn nginx because you want to, not to save $29. The $29 is not your problem at zero revenue, output is.