How much it costs to move 50 sites from shared hosting to a VPS: the full breakdown

Anyone running 50 sites on shared hosting who's thinking about moving to a VPS always runs into the same question that never gets a straight answer on the forums: how much does it actually cost, in euros, to make the jump? Here we break it down line by line, with prices verified at source on 7 October 2026, valid for the publication of this guide on Friday 9 October 2026.\n\n## The VPS: what size do you need for 50 sites\n\nFifty small sites (brochure sites, blogs, non-enormous WordPress installs) on a single machine need RAM more than CPU. Hetzner Cloud's public price list, checked on 7 October 2026, shows CX33 (Shared Intel) with 4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe storage and 20 TB of traffic for €5.99 a month. For real headroom with 50 active sites, it's better to step up to CCX13 (Dedicated vCPU), 2 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe, 20 TB of traffic, at €12.49 a month, with a vCPU not shared with other customers: on a box hosting 50 sites belonging to different clients, noisy-neighbour effects are noticeable.\n\nAlternatively, for anyone who wants their data to stay in Italy, Aruba's OpenStack offering starts from an entry-level configuration with 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM and 40 GB of storage at around €6 a month, with a generous monthly traffic allowance included, but for 50 sites you'll need more RAM and therefore a higher-tier plan: here the exact figure has to be requested via the provider's official configurator, since Aruba doesn't publish a fixed price list for every combination.\n\nFor this guide we're taking €12.49/month (Hetzner CCX13) as our central reference, a realistic size for 50 average sites with some headroom.\n\n## The control panel: the line item that weighs the most\n\nHere the spread is wide, and it depends on the panel you choose.\n\n| Panel | Plan | Site limit | Price |\n| --- | --- | --- | --- |\n| Koapanel | Agency | Unlimited | €24.90/month per server, excluding VAT |\n| Koapanel | Pro | 30 sites | €14.90/month per server, excluding VAT |\n| cPanel | Premier (100 accounts) | 100 | $69.99/month + $0.49 per account above 100 |\n| cPanel | Admin | 5 accounts | $35.99/month |\n\nFor 50 sites on a single VPS, with cPanel you need at least 50 "accounts": the Admin plan (5 accounts) isn't enough, and the Premier plan at 100 accounts costs $69.99 a month for a hundred accounts, a figure that at current exchange rates still works out to more than €60 a month. With Koapanel, the Agency plan at €24.90 a month, unlimited sites, per server, excluding VAT, covers the 50 sites with no surprises when customer number 51 shows up. We're taking €24.90/month as the panel line item for the final tally: it's the figure that keeps the cost predictable even if the sites grow to 80.\n\nKoapanel is a Prime Software product.\n\n## TLS certificates: a zero-cost line if the panel automates them\n\nWith Let's Encrypt built into the panel (both Koapanel and cPanel offer it), certificate renewal for 50 domains is automatic and free. There's no cost line to add here, provided you don't need paid EV or wildcard certificates requested by specific clients: in that case the cost is set by the chosen CA and needs checking on a case-by-case basis — it's not a figure that applies across all 50 sites.\n\n## Migration hours: the time nobody bills in full\n\nThere's no official price list for "migration hours", because it depends on the complexity of each site (database, plugins, email, DNS). The practice reported by people who do this work for a living is a range of 1-3 hours per site with guided manual migration (file transfer, database dump and import, DNS verification, testing), which drops below an hour with automated sync scripts when the sites are standard WordPress installs. Across 50 sites, that translates into a wide range: anywhere from 50 to 150 hours of technical work, which at a market hourly rate for a sysadmin (roughly €25-40/hour, a figure that varies by region and isn't a published price list) works out to a labour cost of between €1,250 and €6,000 if the work is outsourced or billed in full. Anyone doing it in-house with already-salaried staff doesn't add this figure to the direct bill, but takes it away from other work: it's still a real cost.\n\n## Expected downtime: the variable you control through method\n\nWith a planned migration (low-TTL DNS prepared in advance, file and database sync before cutover, verification via the local hosts file), downtime per individual site can stay under 5-10 minutes during the DNS cutover window, propagation excluded. Without this preparation, a site can remain unreachable for hours during full DNS propagation (up to 24-48 hours in the worst cases, with high TTLs not lowered in time). There's no single "official" figure here: it's a process variable, not a price-list item, and it needs to be managed with a written migration plan before you start.\n\n## The final tally\n\n| Item | First-month cost | Ongoing monthly cost |\n| --- | --- | --- |\n| VPS (Hetzner CCX13, 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM) | €12.49 | €12.49 |\n| Panel (Koapanel Agency, unlimited sites) | €24.90 | €24.90 |\n| TLS certificates (automatic Let's Encrypt) | €0 | €0 |\n| Migration labour (50-150 hours at €25-40/hour, if outsourced) | €1,250 - €6,000 | — |\n| First-month total | €1,287 - €6,037 | — |\n| Ongoing monthly fee total | — | €37.39/month |\n\nThe figure that matters for anyone paying for the migration work out of their own pocket, with an in-house team that doesn't bill extra hours and uses scripts to speed up the transfer (closer to the lower end of 50 hours), comes to around €1,287 as a one-off cost plus €37.39 a month ongoing, figures valid as of October 2026 based on the price lists cited. If the migration is handed over to an external provider with a higher hourly rate and longer timescales, the bill can climb to around €6,000 as a one-off: the deciding factor is how standardised the fleet of sites being moved is, not the server.