Managed WordPress hosting compared: Kinsta to Cloudways

Managed WordPress hosting takes server updates, caching, backups and security off your hands, but the six hosts compared here package that in different ways. We compared the entry plans of Kinsta, WP Engine, Rocket.net, Pressable, Liquid Web (Nexcess) and Cloudways using each host’s own pricing, documentation and terms pages.

This is a comparison of published plans, not a speed or uptime test: we did not host sites on these platforms for this article. Prices are in US dollars as shown on the hosts’ pages, before tax, and several hosts show local currencies or change offers often. The Nexcess address now redirects to Liquid Web and its WordPress hosting is sold under that brand, so the plan names below are Liquid Web’s.

Sources checked on 2 November 2026. Availability and prices can change; confirm the linked primary sources before acting.

Entry plans at a glance

Five of the six sell per-site plans with a monthly visit or bandwidth allowance. Cloudways is different: you rent a cloud server and can put as many sites on it as it can handle.

Host	Entry plan	Price	Allowance	Over the allowance
Kinsta	Single 20GB or Launch (1 site)	$35 a month, or $350 a year; first month free for new plans	Single 20GB: 20 GB bandwidth, 10 GB storage. Launch: about 75,000 visits, 15 GB bandwidth, 15 GB storage	$0.50 per 1,000 visits or per GB of bandwidth; disk $2 per GB a month
WP Engine	Essential (1 site)	$28 a month billed annually ($336); first-year pricing for new customers; monthly billing shown in your local currency	25,000 visits, 10 GB storage, 75 GB bandwidth	$2 per 1,000 extra visits, billed monthly
Rocket.net	Starter (1 install)	$30 a month, or $25 a month billed annually; $1 introductory offer	Visitors “unmetered”, 10 GB storage, 50 GB bandwidth	$2 per GB of disk, $0.08 per GB of bandwidth (the terms also list $1 per 1,000 visitors)
Pressable	Signature 1 (1 install)	$25 a month, or $250 a year	Up to 30,000 visits, 20 GB storage	$1.20 per 1,000 visits, $1 per GB
Liquid Web (Nexcess)	Pro WordPress, 1 site	$19 a month	50,000 visitors, 20 GB storage; bandwidth not listed on the plan page	Usage-based extras listed in plan details
Cloudways	Flexible, DigitalOcean Standard “Micro” server	$11 a month, billed hourly in arrears; the Premium server with NVMe storage is $14	Unlimited sites and visits within a 1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 25 GB SSD server with 1 TB transfer	$0.02 per GB of extra bandwidth on DigitalOcean

Two details change the real cost more than the headline price. First, renewal: WP Engine says renewal pricing is “subject to change”, Kinsta’s free month is followed by the regular price, and Rocket.net says it does not raise prices on renewal. Second, overages: WP Engine bills visit overages monthly even on an annual plan, and Rocket.net advertises unmetered visitors while its terms of service still include a clause charging $1 per 1,000 visitors over the allowance, so ask which applies to your plan.

What is included

Host	Staging	Backups	CDN	Email	Migration
Kinsta	Free one-click staging	Daily, kept 14 days on entry plans, plus up to 5 manual backups; 6-hourly ($20) and hourly ($100) add-ons per site a month	Included, 260+ locations	Not included	Unlimited free migrations
WP Engine	One-click staging and development environments	Daily automatic checkpoints kept 30 days, plus on-demand backups	Included (Cloudflare)	Limited default email	Free with the migration plugin; managed migration on Business
Rocket.net	One-click staging clone	Daily, kept 30 days	Included, 330 edge locations with a WAF	Not offered	Free, unlimited
Pressable	Production, staging and sandbox	Files every 24 hours, databases hourly, kept at least 30 days; on-demand on every plan	Edge cache and global CDN	Paid extra	Free site migrations
Liquid Web (Nexcess)	Staging sites	Daily, kept 14 days on Pro (30 days on Elite)	Edge CDN powered by Cloudflare	Not stated	Self-serve migration tool; done for you on Elite
Cloudways	Free staging and cloning	Automatic and on-demand; frequency from hourly to weekly, default daily kept a week	Paid add-on, from $4.99 per domain a month	Paid add-on, $1.50 per mailbox a month	First site free

None of the per-site hosts bundles full email hosting, so budget for a separate mailbox provider and set up authentication records; our guide to fixing business email deliverability with SPF, DKIM and DMARC covers that part.

Support, refunds and uptime promises

Host	Support on the entry plan	Refund or trial	Uptime promise
Kinsta	24/7 chat in eight languages	30 days for first-time customers; on first-month-free plans the period starts at the first renewal	Up to 99.99% SLA
WP Engine	24/7 chat; phone from the Business plan	No money-back guarantee stated; fees are non-refundable except as the terms state	99.99% SLA from the Business plan
Rocket.net	24/7 chat and tickets	30-day money-back guarantee, except Enterprise plans	99.99% uptime guarantee
Pressable	24/7 support	30-day money-back guarantee, not combinable with a free trial	100% uptime SLA
Liquid Web (Nexcess)	24/7 support	No guarantee shown on the plan page; the general terms say fees are non-refundable	99.9999% power and network SLA
Cloudways	Live chat and tickets, with stated response targets	5-day free trial without a card; no money-back guarantee found	No uptime SLA found

An uptime figure is a promise about service credits, not a measurement. Read what the SLA covers: Liquid Web’s, for example, is about power and network, not your WordPress application.

Plugin rules and how visits are counted

Managed hosts restrict plugins that duplicate their own caching or backups, or that strain shared resources. Check your plugin list against each host’s page before you move:

• Kinsta keeps a banned and incompatible plugins list that includes several backup and migration plugins, and counts a visit as a unique IP address within 24 hours.
• WP Engine publishes disallowed plugins such as W3 Total Cache, and counts one unique IP address per day (UTC), excluding known bots.
• Rocket.net has no hard ban but may disable a short list of plugins that cause problems, and forbids nulled plugins and themes.
• Pressable disallows third-party caching plugins and counts visits once per visitor per UTC day.
• Liquid Web does not state its visit-counting method on the plan page; ask before you buy if you are close to 50,000 visitors.
• Cloudways has no visit allowance: the limit is the server you choose, so plan for capacity rather than visits.

Your analytics tool will not match a host’s visit count. Compare a recent month of your own traffic with each method, especially if bots or API calls are a large share.

Which managed WordPress host suits which site

One business site with steady traffic: the per-site plans from Pressable, WP Engine, Kinsta and Liquid Web include staging, backups and a CDN. Compare the visit allowance with your traffic, then the overage rate, rather than the headline price alone.

A WooCommerce store: Liquid Web sells WooCommerce plans at the same entry price; the others run WooCommerce on standard plans, and WP Engine sells an eCommerce add-on. Backups that include the database often (Pressable backs up databases hourly) matter more for a store than for a brochure site.

Traffic that spikes: confirm how visits over the allowance are charged and when. Rocket.net advertises unmetered visitors; check the terms clause above for your plan.

Several small sites and someone comfortable with servers: Cloudways’ server-based pricing can host many sites on one server, but you size the server and add CDN and email yourself. For a wider look at that trade-off, see VPS, PaaS, managed containers or serverless.

Before you move a site

1. Write down your monthly visits, storage and number of sites, and price each host on its own plans page in your currency, including renewal.
2. Check your plugins against the host’s restricted list and remove host-specific plugins from your current provider.
3. Take a full backup and test restoring it; our guide to updating WordPress safely with WP-CLI shows a backup and rollback routine.
4. Use staging to test the migrated site, then follow our checklist for fixing URLs and redirects after a WordPress migration.
5. Move email and DNS deliberately, and lower DNS time-to-live a day before switching.

Sources and further reading

• Kinsta pricing, overages, backups, money-back guarantee — Kinsta
• WP Engine plans, how visits are counted, backups and restore, terms of service — WP Engine
• Rocket.net pricing, terms of service — Rocket.net
• Pressable pricing, how visits are calculated, backups — Pressable
• Managed WordPress hosting, managed WooCommerce hosting, terms of service — Liquid Web
• Cloudways pricing, server backups, support SLA — Cloudways

Image credits

Featured layout and explanatory diagrams: Cloudsoft Zone, CC BY-SA 4.0. No product logos or screenshots are used.