Nobody manages my WordPress install. That surprises people who pay for “managed” hosting, and it is the right place to start, because the word describes a line between the provider’s jobs and mine, not a service that looks after my site. I have that line drawn twice on one Hostinger account: a shared plan carrying three of my sites, this blog included, and a KVM 1 VPS running a small Node app behind Caddy.
The industry words are managed and unmanaged, and they are not very good words. If I break a theme on the shared plan, I broke it. What that plan manages is the layer underneath: the operating system, the web server, PHP, the certificate, the DNS zone, the mailbox. On the VPS that layer is mine. All of it, including at three in the morning.
So rather than argue about definitions, here is the list. What gets done for me on one plan, what I do by hand on the other, roughly what that costs me in time, and the afternoon that explains why this blog is still on the shared plan.
The layer somebody else keeps running
On the shared plan I have never opened a terminal. Not once. This is what that buys, roughly in the order I would miss it if it disappeared:
- The operating system, the web server and PHP. When I checked with curl on 20 September 2026, this blog answered from LiteSpeed with PHP 8.3.33. I did not install that PHP version, I have never patched it, and I will not be the one who moves it to 8.4.
- The certificate. Let’s Encrypt, issued and renewed by the panel. The one on this domain expires on 6 December 2026, and I only know that because I asked openssl the other day, not because there is a reminder in my calendar.
- DNS. A zone editor with buttons instead of a text file, with the records for the domain’s own mail already in place.
- Mailboxes on the domain, with MX and SPF pointing where they should. Getting that wrong is easy and slow to notice, which is the whole problem with email.
- Backups in the panel. On Hostinger’s pricing page the Unlimited plan is the cheapest one that lists daily backups (Hostinger web hosting pricing, checked 20 September 2026). I keep my own copies as well, for reasons I go through in the backup routine I actually run.
- Somebody to email. I have never had to open a serious ticket, so I am not going to tell you how good that support is. I genuinely do not know.
None of that is exciting. All of it is work that would otherwise land on me.
The same list on the VPS, with my name on every line
The VPS runs one thing: a Node app served by Caddy and kept alive by a systemd unit. The headers give away the whole architecture. A request to it comes back with Via: 1.1 Caddy and X-Powered-By: Express, and every word there is something I chose, which means it is also something I maintain.
- System packages, and the reboot that follows a kernel update. Nobody schedules that for me.
- The web server configuration, which is a file I edit and reload rather than a toggle I flip.
- The systemd unit: start on boot, restart on crash, log somewhere I can find at speed.
- Ports and firewall rules. The VPS still does not advertise HTTP/3 in its
alt-svcheader while my shared sites do, which almost certainly means UDP 443 is closed on my side. Caddy can do it. I have not done it. That single unfinished job is the best one-line definition of unmanaged hosting I can give you. - Certificates. Caddy handles ACME on its own, which is excellent right up to the moment it does not.
- Deploys. Copy the changed files up, restart the service, watch the log. Nobody else presses that button.
- Disk and logs, which is the boring failure: nothing is broken until the disk is full, and then everything is.
- Noticing. On shared hosting, if a site falls over, the host has some chance of seeing it before I do. On the VPS I am the monitoring, unless I set some up.
The month in hours, estimated rather than measured
Here is where most articles on this subject invent a number. I have never kept a timesheet for the VPS, so I am not going to publish a figure and dress it up as data. What follows is my honest recollection, and you should read it as exactly that.
| Job | Shared plan | VPS (rough estimate) |
|---|---|---|
| OS and PHP updates | None of my business | 20 to 30 minutes a month, plus the nerves around a reboot |
| Certificate renewal | None of my business | Zero, until the month it is not zero |
| Deploying a change | Not applicable | 5 to 10 minutes per deploy |
| Firewall and ports | None of my business | Rare, but an evening when I get it wrong |
| Backups | Panel, plus my own export | My own copies, entirely on me |
| Something broke | Open a ticket | It is me. There is no ticket. |
Call it half an hour in a quiet month and a lost evening in a bad one. The average is low. The variance is the problem, because the bad evening never arrives when you have a free evening.
Automatic is not the same as right
Caddy issues and renews certificates automatically, which is one of the reasons I chose it, and on launch night it did exactly that. Two days later an iPhone refused the site as not private, because the certificate Caddy had picked by default sat on a chain that phone did not trust. Nothing on the server was broken and nothing on the server said anything. I found out the way everyone finds out, from a browser warning on my own site, and the fix was a setting I had never needed to know existed. The whole afternoon is in what a KVM 1 VPS asks of you.
What is true today: on 20 September 2026 that domain was serving an RSA certificate from Let’s Encrypt’s YR2 intermediate, valid until 21 November 2026, and it has not yet been through its first automatic renewal. I know because I asked, which is now part of the routine.
Nothing equivalent has ever happened on the shared plan. Certificates there have simply renewed, quietly, for as long as I have had the account. That is the product. You are not buying performance, you are buying the absence of that afternoon.
Managed does not mean tuned
Here is the uncomfortable half of the argument, and it is about my own site. When I checked both WordPress blogs on 20 September 2026, neither returned any page-cache header, and forcing the origin with a cache-busting query string did not slow a single request down. Every visit to my managed, fully supported shared plan was going through PHP.
That is not Hostinger failing to do its job. Page caching on WordPress is a plugin, and I had not installed one. It is a good illustration of what managed hosting actually covers: the platform, not your decisions about it.
What the VPS gives me that no shared plan will
Root, essentially. The ability to run a long-lived process, which is the actual reason my app is not on shared hosting: a Node service that stays up is not something a shared plan is built to do. Choice of web server. Ports. No hidden limit on PHP workers, because there is no PHP. If I want to add a queue or a cron that runs every minute, I add it.
What surprised me is how little of that is about price. At the published renewal rates, $11.99 a month for the KVM 1 and $10.99 for shared Premium (VPS and shared pricing pages, checked 20 September 2026), the two sit a dollar apart. The plan-by-plan version of that comparison, as opposed to this job-by-job one, is in shared or VPS, running both.
How I split my own sites
My rule now is about processes, not traffic. If the thing is WordPress or a brochure site, it goes on the shared plan, because nothing about it needs root and I would rather not own the operating system. If it needs something running permanently, it goes on the VPS, and I accept the maintenance as part of the project rather than pretending it is free. If it is genuinely static, it goes somewhere static and neither plan is involved.
The question I ask before signing anything is not “managed or unmanaged” but “who gets the call when this breaks, and is that person available that evening”. It is one of the items on the checklist I run before putting a site on a host, and it is the one I get wrong most often, because I always think I will have more free evenings than I do.
The managed platforms I have only read about
I have never been a customer of Kinsta, WP Engine, Cloudways, SiteGround or any other managed WordPress platform, so I have no opinion on their dashboards, their migrations or their support, and I am not going to borrow one. All I can do is read their pricing pages. WP Engine’s plans page lists one site at $35 a month, or $336 a year, with 25,000 visits and 10 GB of storage. Kinsta’s Single 20GB plan is $35 a month or $350 a year, and Kinsta does not publish a visit limit at all, which is worth knowing before you compare the two side by side. Both checked on 20 September 2026.
Those are prices, not verdicts. The honest summary of everything above is that managed hosting sells you an absence: no packages, no certificates, no reboots, no 3 a.m. Unmanaged sells you the opposite of an absence. Before you choose, count the jobs in the two lists near the top of this page and ask which of them you can actually see yourself doing in eight months, when the project is no longer new and interesting. That, and not the price difference, is the decision. If you want the full account it all sits on, I went through it in my review of the Hostinger account that runs both plans.