Managed WordPress Cost per 1,000 Visits, Compared

Managed WordPress plans are sold on a headline monthly price and a visit allowance. Both are the wrong things to compare.

The number that decides your bill is the overage rate, and the two market leaders differ on it by 4×:

Both figures are from the hosts’ own billing documentation. On a month where you run 50,000 visits over — one decent Reddit thread — that’s $25 at Kinsta and $100 at WP Engine.

Everything else in this article follows from that asymmetry.

Cost per 1,000 included visits

Normalising list monthly prices to what you pay per thousand included visits:

The mid-tier inversion is real, and it’s worst at WP Engine. Growth costs $1.09 per thousand visits against Professional’s $0.73 — moving up a tier makes your traffic 49% more expensive per visit. You pay nearly twice Professional’s monthly price for a third more traffic; what you’re actually buying is 10 sites instead of 3.

Kinsta has a smaller version of the same kink at 500k ($0.58) against 315k ($0.54).

The lesson is the same at both: check the per-visit rate before you upgrade, because the tier ladder is not monotonic and the pricing page won’t tell you.

Upgrade, or eat the overage?

This is the decision the brief for this article predicted would matter, and the arithmetic is decisive — but it goes in different directions at each host.

Two things worth pulling out.

At WP Engine, consistently exceeding Startup is the expensive mistake in managed WordPress. Running 75k visits on a 25k plan costs $30 + $100 = $130/month. The Professional plan that includes those 75k visits costs $55. You would be paying 2.4× for the privilege of not upgrading.

Kinsta has priced its first overage step to be exactly neutral. 35k → 65k is +$15 to upgrade and $15 in overages — the same number to the dollar. That looks deliberate, and it means small spikes genuinely don’t punish you. Between 65k and 125k, staying put and paying overages is actually cheaper.

So: at WP Engine, upgrade early. At Kinsta, the overage is a real option rather than a penalty.

Storage tells a different story

Per gigabyte of included storage, the ranking reverses:

Kinsta’s single-site plans hold storage at 10GB from $35 all the way to $170, rising to just 15GB at $290. You are buying traffic capacity, not disk. If your site is media-heavy rather than traffic-heavy, that’s the wrong shape entirely, and Kinsta’s disk overage is $2/GB/month on top.

Rocket.net has the cheapest storage here at its Business tier and doesn’t meter visits at all — it bills disk at $2/GB and bandwidth at $0.08/GB instead. Note its plans are $30, $60 and $100 on monthly billing; the $25/$50/$83 figures you’ll see quoted are the annual rates.

The metric itself is breaking

Here’s the development that reframes this whole category, and it’s recent enough that most comparisons haven’t caught up.

Kinsta launched bandwidth-based plans on 3 November 2025 — available at every visitor-based tier, at the same prices, switchable in the dashboard at any time. Its stated reason is bot traffic. Kinsta cites Cloudflare’s figure that “traffic from bots comprises about 42.5% of all traffic in the U.S.”, and its CTO adds that Kinsta’s “deeper analysis of our traffic patterns shows this is likely above 50%.”

Think about what that means for a metric you’re billed on. If more than half of “visits” are automated, a visit-based plan charges you for crawlers, scrapers and AI training bots.

WP Engine addresses the same problem differently, and to its credit, quite well: its billable-visit methodology states that bot-generated page views do not count, multiple hits from one IP within 24 hours count as a single visit, and admin pages, RSS feeds and incomplete loads are excluded.

So both leaders have responded to bot traffic — Kinsta by offering an alternative metric, WP Engine by filtering the existing one. Neither approach is obviously superior, and it’s a more interesting difference than the price tables.

The practical advice: if your analytics and your host’s visit count disagree wildly, that gap is the story. At Kinsta you can switch billing models to sidestep it. At WP Engine, check the counting methodology before disputing a bill.

Looking past these two

If neither metered plan suits you, the alternative isn’t a cheaper meter — it’s a host that doesn’t meter. Kinsta alternatives puts both against unmetered options per 10,000 visits, where the gap widens sharply as traffic grows.

Verdict by traffic band

Not a single winner, because the right answer genuinely moves.

Under 25k visits. WP Engine Startup at $30 or Kinsta’s 35k at $35. Kinsta gives 40% more headroom for $5, and its overage rate is a quarter of WP Engine’s. Kinsta, on the risk profile alone.

25k–100k, predictable. WP Engine Professional at $0.73 per thousand is the best value on this page in that band, and it includes 3 sites. WP Engine — but do not linger on Startup.

25k–100k, spiky. Kinsta. A bad month costs $0.50 per thousand rather than $2.00, and that difference compounds precisely when you can least predict it.

100k–500k. Kinsta’s 315k tier at $0.54 per thousand is the strongest per-visit rate in this range, and WP Engine’s Growth tier is its weakest. Kinsta.

Media-heavy at any traffic level. Rocket.net — cheapest storage at its Business tier, no visit metering, and disk overage at the same $2/GB Kinsta charges but from a much larger included base.

If bot traffic is inflating your counts. Kinsta’s bandwidth-based plans, or Rocket.net’s unmetered model. This is a real category of problem now, not a hypothetical.

The hosts

Kinsta is the better-designed pricing model of the two leaders: a $0.50 overage rate, an early tier where overage and upgrade cost exactly the same, and the option to leave visit-counting behind entirely. Its weakness is storage — 10GB held constant across a fivefold price increase.

WP Engine has the single best per-visit rate on this page at its Professional tier, and the most rigorous published definition of a billable visit. Its weakness is the $2 overage and the Growth tier, which is poor value per visit unless you need the site count.

Rocket.net sidesteps the argument by not metering visits, and is the cheapest per gigabyte here. Worth a serious look if the visit-counting debate above sounds like a problem you’d rather not have.

Flywheel is worth knowing is owned by WP Engine, so you’re choosing a product and an interface rather than a different company. It’s designed around designers and agencies.

Nexcess and Elementor Hosting both sit in this bracket — Elementor’s being the obvious pick if you’re already committed to that page builder, since it’s bundled.

Cloudways is the structural alternative: you rent the underlying server and pay for managed tooling on top, which prices differently from everything above. We compared it directly in Cloudways vs Kinsta, and all three leaders in Kinsta vs Cloudways vs WP Engine.

For the broader field rather than the pricing mechanics, see best WordPress hosting.

How we checked this

Plan specifications and prices are from Kinsta’s, WP Engine’s and Rocket.net’s own pricing pages, read in August 2026, and the screenshots above are those pages.

The overage rates are from each host’s own billing documentation rather than a review site. Kinsta’s documented rates are $0.50 per 1,000 visits, $0.50/GB server bandwidth, $2/GB/month disk (prorated daily) and $0.05/GB CDN bandwidth, with notifications at 80%, 100% and 10% over, and upgrades explicitly not applied retroactively to overages already accrued. WP Engine’s is $2 per 1,000 extra monthly visitors across Startup, Professional, Growth, Scale and its Agency plans, billed monthly on the account anniversary as a “Visitor Overage Charge” even for annual subscribers. Rocket.net’s published overages are $2/GB disk and $0.08/GB bandwidth, with no visit overage because visits aren’t metered.

One correction we caught in review. Our first pass took Rocket.net’s $25/$50/$83 figures, which are its annual rates, and compared them against Kinsta’s and WP Engine’s monthly rates. The tables above now use Rocket.net’s monthly prices of $30/$60/$100 as displayed on its pricing page, so all three hosts are compared on the same billing basis. Rocket.net remains the cheapest per gigabyte, by a smaller margin than the annual rates implied.

The bandwidth-pricing launch date of 3 November 2025, the 42.5% bot-traffic figure attributed to Cloudflare, and the CTO’s “likely above 50%” remark are from Kinsta’s own announcement. WP Engine’s visit-counting rules — bots excluded, one IP within 24 hours counted once, admin pages and RSS excluded — are from its own billable-visits documentation.

An important caveat on comparability. WP Engine’s plan page defaults to annual billing — its $30/mo Startup shows “Pay $350 today” — and its published plan prices are marked as first-year pricing for new customers, while Kinsta’s and Rocket.net’s are standard rates. We have compared the numbers each host publishes, which means WP Engine’s per-visit figures flatter it relative to year two. We could not establish WP Engine’s year-two rates from its pricing page, so treat the WP Engine rows as a floor rather than a steady state.

What we did not do: we have not hosted a site on any of these platforms, measured performance, or audited a real invoice against a real month’s analytics — which is exactly where the visit-counting question gets decided in practice. This is an analysis of published pricing mechanics.

Not priced here: Flywheel, Nexcess, Elementor Hosting and Cloudways are named above but absent from the tables, because we did not read their plan pricing at source for this article and did not want to mix verified figures with recalled ones. Cloudways in particular prices on a different model — server plus management fee — which doesn’t normalise to cost per visit without distortion.

The host links above are affiliate links.

FAQ

Is Kinsta or WP Engine cheaper?

It depends on traffic shape more than volume. WP Engine’s Professional tier is the best per-visit value on the page at $0.73 per 1,000. But Kinsta’s overage is $0.50 per 1,000 against WP Engine’s $2.00, so for spiky traffic Kinsta is usually cheaper overall.

What is WP Engine’s overage charge?

$2 per 1,000 extra monthly visitors, on Startup through Scale and the Agency plans. It’s billed monthly on your account anniversary even if you pay annually.

What is Kinsta’s overage charge?

$0.50 per 1,000 visits, plus $0.50/GB server bandwidth, $2/GB/month disk and $0.05/GB CDN bandwidth. Note that upgrading doesn’t wipe overages you’ve already accrued.

Should I upgrade my plan or pay the overage?

At WP Engine, upgrade — running 75k visits on the 25k Startup plan costs $130/month against $55 for Professional. At Kinsta the first step is neutral to the dollar, and between 65k and 125k paying overages is actually cheaper than upgrading.

Do bots count toward my visit limit?

At WP Engine, no — its documentation states bot page views don’t count. At Kinsta, visit-based plans count them, which is why it launched bandwidth-based plans in November 2025, citing bot traffic above 42.5% and possibly over 50%.

Which managed WordPress host doesn’t limit visits?

Rocket.net doesn’t meter visits at all, billing disk and bandwidth overages instead. Kinsta offers bandwidth-based plans at every tier as an alternative to visit counting.

Why is WP Engine’s Growth plan poor value?

Per visit, it is — $1.09 per 1,000 against Professional’s $0.73, so your traffic gets 49% more expensive as you move up. What you’re really buying is 10 sites instead of 3. If you don’t need the sites, the tier isn’t for you.