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Moving WordPress From Shared Hosting to a KVM VPS: Sizing, Stack and Costs

October 4, 2026Mario Marin
Published: 4 October 2026
Most WordPress sites start on shared hosting, and most of them should. The move to a VPS makes sense when the limits of a shared plan start costing you visitors or sales, and when you, or someone on your team, is happy to look after a Linux server. This guide covers how to tell it is time, which KVM VPS size a WordPress site actually needs, the server stack to run, how to move without downtime and what it all costs per month.

Five signs you have outgrown shared hosting

  1. The admin area crawls. Public pages may be cached and fast, but the dashboard, the editor and WooCommerce orders are not, and they show you how much CPU you really get.
  2. Your host emails you about "resource limits". Entry process limits, CPU seconds and inode counts are how shared plans keep one customer from hurting the others.
  3. You cannot install what you need. No Redis, no server level page cache, an old PHP version, no SSH, no cron you control.
  4. Speed changes with the time of day. When performance swings for no reason on your side, the reason is usually on someone else's side of the server.
  5. The renewal arrived. Introductory shared hosting prices often jump at renewal, and the gap to a VPS becomes small or disappears.

What changes when you move

On a KVM VPS the whole virtual machine is yours: its own kernel, its own RAM and root access to install anything. The flip side is that you are now the administrator. Security updates, the firewall, backups and the occasional 2 am alert are your job. Our VPS plans are self managed, so if that sentence makes you nervous, read the last section before you order.

Pick a size

WordPress cares about two things: how many PHP workers can run at once, which follows the vCPU count, and whether the database and caches fit in RAM. Anonymous visitors served from a page cache cost almost nothing. Logged in users, carts and checkouts cost real PHP time on every request. These are sensible starting points:
SitePlanvCPU / RAM / SSDBucharest price
Blog or company site with page cachingVPS I KVM1 / 2 GB / 20 GB€4 a month
A few sites, or a small WooCommerce shopVPS II KVM2 / 4 GB / 40 GB€6 a month
Busy shop, membership site or online coursesVPS III KVM2 / 8 GB / 60 GB€10 a month
Agency hosting many client sitesVPS IV KVM4 / 16 GB / 80 GB€16 a month
To see why 4 GB is comfortable for a small shop, here is a typical memory budget on VPS II KVM: about 300 MB for the operating system, 1 GB for the MariaDB buffer pool, 256 MB for Redis and eight PHP workers at around 80 MB each, roughly 640 MB. That leaves well over a gigabyte for the file cache and for traffic spikes. If your media library is large, add disk instead of a bigger plan: extra storage is €4 a month per 50 GB, up to 150 GB more.

The stack we would run

  1. Debian 13 or Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, both on our install list.
  2. Nginx or Caddy as the web server, with a full page cache for anonymous visitors.
  3. A current PHP 8 release with FPM, its worker count matched to your vCPUs and RAM.
  4. MariaDB, with the buffer pool sized to your data rather than left at the default.
  5. Redis as a persistent object cache, which takes a lot of repeated queries off the database.
  6. Free Let's Encrypt certificates with automatic renewal.
  7. A firewall that only allows SSH, HTTP and HTTPS, SSH keys instead of passwords, fail2ban, and automatic security updates.
If you would rather click than type, server control panels can install most of this for you. Either way, keep WordPress, its plugins and the operating system on automatic minor updates.

Moving without downtime

  1. A day before, lower the TTL on your domain's DNS records to five minutes, so the final switch takes effect quickly.
  2. Build the VPS, install the stack and harden it before any visitor arrives.
  3. Copy the site files, especially the uploads, themes and plugins folders, with rsync over SSH, or download and upload an archive if the old host has no SSH.
  4. Export the database from the old host and import it on the new server. Copy the database settings into the new configuration file.
  5. Point your own computer at the new server through your hosts file and test everything: pages, logins, forms, search, and a real test order if you run a shop.
  6. Pause content changes, run a final database export and import, then switch the DNS record to the new IP address.
  7. Issue the certificate as soon as the domain resolves to the new server, and keep the old hosting account for a week in case anything was missed.
The same thinking applies to any server move, and we wrote it up in more depth in our cutover runbook for moving a VPS without downtime.

Mail and backups, the two things people forget

Mail. Do not send WordPress mail straight from the server. Mail from a fresh server address tends to land in spam, whoever hosts it. Use a transactional email provider and an SMTP plugin, and keep your mailboxes where they are.
Backups. Our VPS plans do not include snapshots or automatic backups at the moment, so set this up on day one: a nightly database dump and a copy of the uploads folder, sent to storage somewhere other than the VPS, with at least a week of history. Then test a restore once. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup.

What it costs

PlanMonthlyYearlyYearly, per month
VPS I KVM€4€43.20€3.60
VPS II KVM€6€64.80€5.40
VPS III KVM€10€108€9
VPS IV KVM€16€172.80€14.40
These are Bucharest prices. The yearly cycle takes 10% off the plan price, there is no setup fee, traffic is unmetered and one IPv4 address is included. Other countries add a small location fee, and the order form shows which locations have stock before you pay. At the time of writing that is Bucharest, Sofia and Ashburn. Not sure about a size? Order it on hourly billing first: VPS II KVM costs €0.0083 an hour, so a full day of testing your site on it costs about 20 cents.

When to stay where you are

A VPS is not the answer for everyone. If nobody on your team wants to own a server, managed WordPress hosting, where someone else patches, backs up and watches the stack, is worth paying for. And if your site is small, fast and within its limits, there is no prize for moving. But if the signs above sound familiar and you are comfortable at a Linux prompt, a €6 KVM VPS will usually feel like a different site.
Ready to try it? Start from the KVM VPS plans, or read what a cheap KVM VPS should include before you choose.