Ch. 8: WordPress vs static, the hosting bill that scared me

Ch. 8: WordPress vs static, the hosting bill that scared me

My hiking-gear site hit 70k sessions/mo by month 11 on shared WordPress hosting. Then a small traffic spike took the site down for 6 hours during a gift-guide season. I lost maybe $200 in clicks. The host wanted $90/mo to 'upgrade.'

I seriously considered migrating to Astro static + Cloudflare. Free hosting, sub-second loads. I spent a weekend prototyping. Then I priced the real cost: I had 240 posts I edited weekly, and a non-technical VA who lived in the WP editor. Static would've saved $90/mo and cost me 6 hours of VA retraining plus a build pipeline I'd babysit.

I moved to managed WP at $30/mo instead. Boring. Correct.

Lesson banked: static wins on speed and cost, but if a human edits daily, the CMS friction outweighs the hosting savings. Pick the bottleneck that's actually yours.