WordPress Hosting is a Grift – I Built a Serverless OS to Escape It

I remember the exact moment I decided to burn the ships.

I was looking at a renewal invoice from Bluehost. I had been paying them $100 a year for what they called “Premium WordPress Hosting.” And as I looked at the dashboard, filled with flashing banners for “Pro” upgrades, “Security” add-ons, and “SEO” boosters, I realized something.

I wasn’t paying for infrastructure. I was paying for the privilege of being upsold.

If you type “Best WordPress Hosting” into Google right now, you will see a list of companies – Bluehost, SiteGround, WP Engine – fighting to charge you a premium for DECADES-old technology.

The modern WordPress hosting industry is mostly arbitrage on your ignorance. They take a cheap $5 DigitalOcean droplet, put a cPanel on it, crowd 500 sites onto the same server, and market it as a “Managed Solution.”

So, being a systems engineer, I did the math. I moved the site to my own backroom server. It ran faster. It cost zero. It was easy.

But the hosting bill was just the tip of the iceberg. The real grift was the Plugin Ecosystem.

Held Hostage for A Few Lines of Code

After I moved the site away from shared WordPress hosting, I needed to add a simple contact form. I just wanted to capture an email address and save it to a database.

In the world of software engineering, this is “Hello World” level complexity. It is:

1. An HTML <input> tag.
2. A POST request.
3. A database INSERT.

10 lines of code. Maybe 15 if you add validation.

But in WordPress Land? This is what I found:

• Plugin A: Free, but it doesn’t save entries to the database unless you buy “Pro.”
• Plugin B: Saves to the database, costs $99/year/site.
• Plugin C: Totally free, but the code looked like spaghetti and I’m pretty sure it was harvesting my data.

I sat there, staring at a checkout screen asking for $99 a year to unlock a feature that takes 10 minutes to code.

I felt extorted.

Why are we, as developers and agency owners, paying “rent” for basic functionality? Why is “Security” a paid add-on for managed WordPress hosting? Why is “Speed” a premium tier?

These shouldn’t be products. They should be architecture.

The Real Problem: The “Frankenstein Stack”

WordPress was built in 2003 for blogging. It wasn’t built for modern digital business. To make it do what an agency needs today (Funnels, Gates, API integrations), you have to bolt on 20 different plugins.

• You need MemberPress for access control.
• You need WooCommerce for payments.
• You need Zapier to glue them together.
• You need Wordfence because standard WordPress hosting is insecure by design.

You end up with a Frankenstein Monster. And you are the janitor, spending your Friday nights updating PHP versions and praying a plugin update doesn’t white-screen your client’s site.

You are a Tenant in your own business.

The Solution: Build Sovereignty (AMODX)

I decided I was done paying rent.

I spent the last 20 years architecting safety-critical systems for avionics and medical devices. I know how to build things that don’t break. So I applied that rigor to the Agency Stack.

I wanted to learn how to make applications with a serverless stack, and when I realized what can be done with it, I started making AMODX (Agency Management On Demand Extreme).

It is not just “Another CMS.” It is a Serverless Operating System built on AWS. It eliminates the need for traditional WordPress hosting entirely.

1. Zero Rent (Serverless Architecture)

AMODX doesn’t run on a server that you pay $20/month for. It runs on AWS Lambda and DynamoDB.

• Cost when idle: $0.00.
• Cost when scaling: Pennies per thousands of requests.
• The difference: You pay Amazon directly for the raw compute. You cut out the hosting middleman.

2. Zero Bloat (Native Features)

I refused to build a plugin system that allows third parties to hold features hostage. The core primitives of business are built-in:

• Identity: Native (AWS Cognito). No membership plugins.
• Payments: Native (Stripe Integration). No WooCommerce bloat.
• Data: Native (DynamoDB). No slow SQL queries.
• Lead Capture: Built-in. It saves to the database. For free. Because that’s how software should work.

3. Zero Hacking (Immutable Security)

WordPress hosting gets hacked because the database is connected to the public internet via a PHP script.
AMODX is Static. The public site is a pre-rendered snapshot (Next.js/ISR) sitting on a global CDN. There is no database connection for a hacker to exploit. There is no wp-admin.php to brute force.

The “Maverick” Move

I didn’t build this to compete with Wix or Squarespace. Those tools are for people who want a brochure.

I built this for Builders. For the technical agency owners who are tired of the hosting grift. For the developers who know that a contact form shouldn’t cost $99.

AMODX is Open Source (Apache 2.0).
I am giving you the code.
I am giving you the deployment script (npx cdk deploy).

I am not asking you to pay me a subscription. I am asking you to stop being a Tenant and start being an Owner.

If you want to join the rebellion, check out the repository. It’s time to stop paying for WordPress hosting and start building assets.