The scenario and its assumptions
One WordPress site running LearnDash, 500 enrolled students, a 10-hour course library (600 minutes) and normal transactional email. Prices are list prices from each vendor's page on 2026-10-30, before tax. Change any assumption and recompute the affected line; nothing here is a quote.
Concurrency matters more than the 500 headcount. Logged-in students bypass page caching, so every lesson load uses a PHP worker. Kinsta's PHP documentation says each thread processes one request at a time and that extra requests wait when all threads are busy. That is why the managed option below steps up from the cheapest plan.
| Assumption | Value used | Change it if |
|---|---|---|
| Students | 500 enrolled | You have more than a few dozen online at once during live launches |
| Video library | 600 minutes | Your library is larger; video scales with minutes |
| Video watched per student per year | 50% of the library (300 minutes) | Your completion rate is higher |
| Transactional email | 6 messages per student per month, 3,000 a month | You send drip notices daily |
| Self-managed VPS admin time | Not priced | You pay someone to maintain servers |
The fixed lines: license, email and video
LearnDash: the Liquid Web software page lists LearnDash at $350 a year for one site, billed yearly. The 10-site license is $599 a year.
Email: 3,000 messages a month fits Postmark's Basic plan, which lists 10,000 emails a month for $15.00, so $180 a year. Amazon SES lists an a la carte outbound rate of $0.10 per 1,000 emails, which would put 36,000 messages a year at about $3.60 plus your time to set it up. This budget uses Postmark.
Video: Cloudflare Stream lists $5 per 1,000 minutes stored, bought in $5 monthly increments, and $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered, with encoding free. 600 minutes uses one storage block: $60 a year. 500 students watching 300 minutes each is 150,000 minutes delivered: $150 a year. Total $210. Serving video from the WordPress host instead would push large files through plans that bill bandwidth; Kinsta, for example, lists CDN overage at $0.05 per GB.
Hosting setups compared
| Setup | Plan and price | Annual hosting | What you get | Main trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shared | SiteGround GrowBig: $4.99/mo first 12 months prepaid, renews $29.99/mo | $59.88 first year, $359.88 at renewal | 50 GB, about 100,000 visits a month by SiteGround's estimate, staging, daily backups | CPU and memory limits are not published; renewal is six times the intro rate |
| Managed | Kinsta Single 65k: $42/mo billed annually ($500/yr) | $500 | 65,000 visits, 10 GB, 250 GB CDN, 4 PHP threads, free standard staging, 14-day backups | Visit overage at $0.50 per 1,000 visits |
| Managed, cheaper tier | Kinsta Single 35k: $30/mo billed annually ($350/yr) | $350 | 35,000 visits, 2 PHP threads | Two threads is thin for logged-in traffic |
| VPS | DigitalOcean Basic 4 GiB / 2 vCPU at $24/mo, daily backups at 30% of Droplet cost, SpinupWP Essentials at $12/mo | $288 + $86.40 + $144 = $518.40 | 80 GiB SSD, 4,000 GiB transfer, daily backups, a server control panel | You own updates, security and restores |
Annual totals
The first-year SiteGround figure is attractive because of the intro rate. Compare renewal-year totals when you choose, since that is what you will pay from year two onward.
| Line | SiteGround GrowBig | Kinsta Single 65k | DigitalOcean + SpinupWP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hosting (renewal year) | $359.88 | $500.00 | $518.40 |
| LearnDash, 1 site | $350.00 | $350.00 | $350.00 |
| Postmark Basic | $180.00 | $180.00 | $180.00 |
| Cloudflare Stream | $210.00 | $210.00 | $210.00 |
| Total, renewal year | $1,099.88 | $1,240.00 | $1,258.40 |
| Total, first year | $799.88 | $1,240.00 | $1,258.40 |
| Swap Postmark for SES | about -$176 | about -$176 | about -$176 |
The line that dwarfs hosting: payment processing
Stripe lists 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful domestic card transaction, plus 1.5% for international cards and 1% when currency conversion is needed. If 500 students each pay $200 once, that is $100,000 in sales and $3,050 in standard card fees: 500 x ($5.80 + $0.30). That is more than twice the most expensive annual total above.
You cannot remove card fees, but you can avoid adding to them. When you compare this budget with a hosted course platform, check whether that platform charges its own transaction fee on top of card processing, and add both lines to its side of the comparison.
Who should pick which setup
- SiteGround GrowBig fits a first-year budget and a site where students rarely overlap. Re-price at renewal and watch for resource warnings during launches.
- Kinsta Single 65k fits an owner who wants support to own server problems and has steady logged-in traffic. Check visits monthly; Kinsta's overage documentation says sites keep running and visit overages are billed.
- DigitalOcean fits someone already comfortable patching servers. It has the most headroom per dollar, but an hour of your time each month changes the comparison.
- If you have only a few dozen paying students, price a hosted course platform for a year against the roughly $740 of non-hosting fixed lines here before committing to any of the three.
Questions before you decide
How much is a LearnDash license per year?
The Liquid Web software page lists LearnDash at $350 a year for one site, $599 for 10 sites, $799 for 25, $899 for 50 and $999 for 100, all billed yearly.
Is SiteGround's $4.99 a month the real price?
Only for the first 12 months, prepaid. SiteGround's page says GrowBig renews at $29.99 a month, so the second year costs $359.88 rather than $59.88.
Why not use Kinsta's cheapest plan for 500 students?
Kinsta's PHP documentation lists 2 PHP threads on the Single 35k tier and 4 on Single 65k. Logged-in students bypass page cache, so two threads can queue requests during busy periods.
What does video cost for 500 students?
Using Cloudflare Stream's published rates, a 600-minute library costs $60 a year to store and 150,000 minutes of viewing costs $150, so about $210 a year.
Sources & verification
Product details and prices can change. Check the linked provider before buying.
- LearnDash pricing (Liquid Web software) Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- SiteGround: web hosting plans Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- Kinsta: pricing Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- Kinsta: PHP threads and memory Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- Kinsta: overages Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- DigitalOcean: Droplet pricing Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- DigitalOcean: Backups pricing Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- SpinupWP: pricing Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- Postmark: pricing Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- Amazon SES: pricing Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- Cloudflare Stream: pricing Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- Stripe: pricing Accessed 30 Oct 2026
Sources link directly to providers. Product buttons may use separately labeled affiliate links. Read our disclosure.