Managed WordPress vs
$4 shared hosting.
Cheap shared hosting is often the single most expensive line item in a WordPress budget. Not for what it costs — for what it costs when things break. Here's the math, drawn from fleet incidents I've personally cleaned.
The reinfection math
A cheap shared host saves you ~$250/year vs entry managed WordPress. One malware cleanup with SEO recovery costs $1,200–$3,000, plus 4–12 weeks of lost organic rankings. Reinfection rate on shared hosting inside 90 days runs 35–60% in my incident logs. On managed WordPress: under 5%. The cheap host costs more in expected value the moment your site becomes worth attacking.
When shared is actually fine
One personal blog, no logins, no ecommerce, no email captures, no traffic to speak of. If a hack means shrugging and reinstalling — sure, save the money. The moment the site holds a customer list, a checkout, or ranks for anything you'd miss — you've outgrown $4/mo.
The honest verdict
Cheap hosting is expensive. I'll tell any client this before I clean their site — because the same cleanup on the same host reinfects, and cleaning twice is more expensive than moving once. See the WP Engine vs Kinsta comparison for the managed-WordPress head-to-head.
Need to move hosts?
Managed WordPress migration — zero-downtime DNS swap, verified backups both sides, documented rollback. Plus post-move hardening on the new host.