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You may have wondered: how much could it cost to host a WordPress site that attracts 45 million unique visitors per month, reaches peaks of 40 users per minute, and requires 100GB of disk space? If the question has ever crossed your mind, you're in for a rather enlightening surprise as you understand the rates offered by some of the world's leading specialist and reputable providers in WordPress hosting for high-traffic sites.
At first glance, the example might seem trivial or even unreachable, especially if you're thinking "my traffic is infinitely lower." However, imagining a site of this size and considering the related hosting costs is a particularly instructive exercise in style. This allows you not only to have a broader overview of the rates in force in the sector, but also to better understand how costs can scale as resource and performance needs increase.
Evaluating the costs associated with a WordPress site of this size is an effective way to understand the current landscape of hosting services, to evaluate the options facing you, and to make informed decisions about which hosting provider might be best for your needs. specific needs, regardless of the size of your site or the volume of traffic you currently handle.
To do this we necessarily had to play dirty, pretending to be potential customers interested in receiving a quote to be hosted on their Hosting service.
To this end we remained vague, pasting a photo in which they are seen about 7 MILLION unique visitors in just 5 days and therefore calculating the estimate over 30 days for an estimated volume of 45 million unique visitors.
To be clear, we are talking about the forty-fifth most visited website in Italy, and among the first 1800s in the world.
The trend and the data mentioned are also confirmed by similarweb.com. Obviously for reasons of privacy and professionalism we cannot reveal the name of the mysterious customer.
Obviously the screenshot, sent to their online support is absolutely real. These are real numbers of one of our very satisfied customer who makes this traffic:
FlyWheel alternative
We were lucky enough to strike up our first conversations with the FlyWheel support team, who were extremely friendly and well versed in walking us through the various features of their hosting plans. Our goal was to get an idea of the price range to host a site that has similar characteristics to the one we had in mind, especially a viral blog built on WordPress.
During these interactions, we had the need to clarify some points to better understand the various services available. We wanted to know in particular if it was possible to manage user or ecommerce areas, even if these functions would not have been necessary for our blog, being it purely editorial in nature and intended for reading only.
In response to these questions, the support comforted us by explaining that, despite the lack of these specific functions, the caching functionality of their service could have been of great help in optimizing the performance of our site.
It is clear that the FlyWheel team knows what they are doing. This is demonstrated by the fact that they are among the few WordPress hosting services that can competently handle high traffic and offer high performance. However, as is often the case, the question of price is fundamental.
After clearly expressing our need to have an idea of the price range, we had the opportunity to discuss it in more detail. FlyWheel assistance, after kindly making us wait a moment, presented us with three different hosting plans.
We decided to collect and share with you the screenshots of the details of these plans, so as to document the discussion as transparently as possible. The cost of each of the plans is clearly stated at the end of each screenshot.
What you can read in the image that the support sent us is exactly this one you find below:
You read that right. From 6 THOUSAND to 12 THOUSAND US dollars PER MONTH.
These are roughly the amount you'd spend to keep a high-traffic WordPress site online on these specialized overseas services.
Kinsta alternative or WPEngine alternative
We will not blame their prices and their choice of being very expensive on the market, for a whole series of non-trivial reasons, first of all the difference in the cost of IT services in the US and in other countries other than Italy, or secondarily also to salary remuneration of specialist figures such as systems engineers and network experts unlike contracts with Italian metalworkers, but it should be noted that you can really save important figures if you rely on companies like ours that usually offer the highest quality at absolutely competitive costs, in this about a tenth of what we read.
It must in fact be said that our current client of 45 million unique visitors per month is hosted on a managed solution which could be very similar to the intermediate proposal of $ 9000 per month they sent us.
The solution with which we provide WordPress hosting to our customer is dedicated, that is a dedicated server with managed support, assistance on blocking problems H24, triple backup, monitoring, optimization, and at a cost of less than 1000 euros per month.
This means at best a saving of about 90 dollars a year, and at worst the impossibility of not being able to put an editorial project online that is giving enormous satisfaction to the current owners.
Update to April
They let us know from the owner of the website in question that after the passage on our hosting, our optimizations together with the exhausting work of the editorial staff, the Google algorithm has rewarded the site with an almost doubled number of visits.
In fact, in the month of April the WordPress site went from about 50 million visitors per month to over 85 million per month as shown by the Google Analytics statistics below which includes both normal and AMP traffic.
Obviously always online and at maximum performance.
If you think keeping a high traffic WordPress project online means spending an arm and a leg, do not hesitate to contact us. You will discover a new reality a new way of dealing with and solving the problems of high traffic sites, obtaining among other things as well as better speed also better indexing and ranking.
