Why we built Forge Web Services.

If you have ever managed a WordPress site at any kind of scale, you know the feeling. The bill arrives, you stare at it, you stare at the “Managed WordPress Premium Plus” line item, and you wonder what exactly is so managed about $95 a month for a single site you could host on a $5 droplet.

That gap is what built Forge Web Services. Not a sleek pitch deck. Not a market analysis. A genuine, sustained frustration with the state of the WordPress hosting industry, and a hunch that the answer was simpler than the industry wanted it to be.

The industry's quiet trick

Other managed WordPress hosts perfected a marketing move in the last decade. Bundle a small set of conveniences (auto updates, caching, a staging environment) and price them like enterprise software. Then quietly charge extra for the things that should never have been optional: real backups, real security, real migrations, real support.

The trick worked because the alternative looked harder. Spin up your own server? Configure NGINX? Run Fail2Ban yourself? Most agencies and small business owners do not have the time. So they pay the premium and assume that is just how WordPress hosting works.

The pricing was a story. We just stopped telling it.

— our internal product principle, slightly edited for public consumption

What we changed

We started with one decision: every customer gets their own Vultr High Frequency Compute VPS. Not a shared container. Not a multi-tenant pod. A real, dedicated server with the resources you pay for, in the region you choose.

From there, the rest of the decisions wrote themselves. If you have your own server, you can run a real security stack. So we ship BitNinja at the server boundary and Phantomguard WordPress CDN & Security at the application layer. Two completely independent layers. Both included. On every plan. From Starter at $39 to Enterprise at $209.

If you have your own server, you can also run a real mail relay. So we include a professional transactional email service so order confirmations, password resets, and contact form submissions actually land in the inbox.

The pricing math, in public

Here is what assembling our Professional plan elsewhere would cost you, plainly:

• A comparable managed VPS, $45 per month
• Server-level security suite, $25 per month
• A WordPress firewall and CDN, $24 per month
• Transactional email service, $15 per month
• Daily backup service, $8 per month
• A one-time migration fee, around $30 per month when amortised

That is $147 per month for what we charge $69 for. The numbers are not magic. Most of the savings come from cutting middlemen, not from corner-cutting on the actual hosting.

What we will never do

Some decisions are about what we include. The harder ones are about what we will never do. Here is the short list, written down so we are honest about it:

1. We will never auto-charge you for an upgrade you did not request.
2. We will never ship a chatbot pretending to be support.
3. We will never lock backups behind an enterprise tier.
4. We will never call migration "white-glove" and bill $299 for it.

So far, so good

We are early. We are not pretending otherwise. But the early signal has been overwhelming and a little humbling: agencies migrating their full client portfolios, freelancers cutting their hosting line by half, small businesses running WooCommerce stores faster than they ever have, all paying once and never seeing a surprise on the next invoice.

If you have a WordPress site that you have been quietly overpaying to host, we would love to move it for you. The migration is free. The math is in the open. The price will not go up.

Welcome to Forge Web Services.