Hosting 40 small sites: compared shared, VPS and managed over a year of real bills

Actual annual numbers for 40 low-traffic content sites.

Shared (cheap host): $380/yr. Fell over twice during traffic spikes. Support was a chatbot.
Single VPS, self-managed: $640/yr plus maybe 30 hours of my time. Never went down. I became the support chatbot.
Managed WordPress: $4,300/yr. Never went down, never thought about it once.

For 40 sites that each make $50-300/mo, the VPS is correct and the managed option is a luxury. At 5 sites making $2k each, managed is obviously correct. The crossover is about where your hourly rate exceeds the price difference, which is a boring answer but it is the answer.

Ran the same comparison and landed in the same place. 30 hours a year of server admin is the real cost people forget to price.

The 30 hours is front-loaded though. Year two was about four hours for me once it was set up properly.

I pay for managed purely so that an outage is someone else's Saturday. Worth every cent at my margins.

Subbed. Please keep updating this instead of vanishing like every other journey thread.