Hosting for LearnDash, MemberPress and online course sites
Choose hosting for a WordPress course or membership site: LMS and membership plugin needs, logged-in traffic, launches, video and platforms.
Start by deciding whether WordPress is the right base at all. The platform comparisons, such as hosted course platforms versus a WordPress LMS, cover the trade-off between control and workload. If you choose WordPress, the plugin comparisons help you pick the LMS and membership plugins before you size hosting for them.
Once the plugins are settled, read the hosting guide for your specific LMS or membership plugin, then the guides on PHP workers and logged-in performance. Course sites behave differently from blogs because logged-in students bypass most page caching, so concurrent learners matter more than monthly visits.
Before launch, read the launch traffic, load testing and email delivery guides, and decide where course videos will live. If the site is already slow for members, check the plugin and caching guides before assuming you need a bigger host.
A three-year cost comparison using published Teachable plans and fees, LearnDash licence pricing, hosting and card processing, plus the control and maintenance trade-offs.
Seat pricing against pay-per-GB delivery, domain-level privacy against signed embed tokens, LearnDash embedding rules, and a worked cost example for 500 students.
What SiteGround's WooCommerce-branded plans include compared with its standard WordPress plans, how renewal cron, caching and staging behave for WooCommerce Subscriptions, and the signs a subscription store has outgrown shared hosting.
Turn a busy class into a hosting requirement: PHP threads, uncached requests, LearnDash's own app sizing table, and a rehearsal you can run before you pay.
The exact MemberPress URLs to exclude from cache, the logged-in cache settings for common plugins, and how to tell a cache problem from a capacity problem.
A cutover plan for LearnDash or MemberPress sites: freeze or sync learner data, keep Stripe webhooks from being lost, re-apply cache exclusions, and roll back without losing new orders.
How SiteGround's dynamic cache decides what to cache, which cookies and URLs it already bypasses, what a membership or course site still needs to exclude, and how to verify each page with the X-Proxy-Cache header.
Plan choice, PHP version, permalinks, staging, caching exclusions, cron and email checks for a LearnDash course site on SiteGround, drawn from SiteGround and LearnDash documentation.
A starter, growing and high-volume shortlist built from LearnDash's documented server floor and the specs hosts publish, with first-year cost math and upgrade triggers.
MemberPress's own requirements plus four selection criteria: uncached logged-in traffic, payment webhooks, scheduled tasks and email, with how SiteGround, Kinsta, WP Engine and Liquid Web line up on published features.
Why renewals depend on a reliable scheduler and uncached checkout, what WooCommerce and Subscriptions require, and which published host features fit a small, growing or large subscription store.
LifterLMS's recommended versions, its own guidance on shared hosting and the $30-a-month line, caching rules, and a pre-purchase checklist mapped to real plans.
Published Kajabi tiers against a WordPress host, LMS plugin and email stack, priced at 100 and 1,000 students, with the work Kajabi takes off your plate.
MemberPress plan tiers and transaction fees against Paid Memberships Pro's free core and paid plans: gateways, course features and which suits a simple paywall.
How PHP workers (Kinsta calls them threads) cap concurrent uncached requests, what Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround and a DigitalOcean server document about them, and a worked example sizing workers for a quiz deadline.
A pre-launch checklist covering how Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround and DigitalOcean bill and enforce spikes, temporary upgrades, cache rules, checkout tests and support escalation.
Why host mail often falls short for enrollment and receipt emails, published free-tier limits at Mailgun, Postmark, SMTP2GO and Amazon SES, and the checks to run after setup.
Paid Memberships Pro's own requirements and caching rules for logged-in members, mapped to SiteGround, Kinsta, WP Engine and Liquid Web by site size, with the capacity factors each host publishes.
What Liquid Web's October 2026 town hall recap says about LearnDash licensing, renewals, pricing and support for existing customers, and a practical checklist for renewal dates, site counts, add-ons and backups.
Course-feature vocabulary from LearnDash documentation and the SCORM and xAPI specifications, with a column on which features create database writes or file uploads that change what your hosting must handle.
What SPF, DKIM and DMARC each prove, how Gmail and Yahoo sender requirements apply to enrollment, receipt and newsletter email, and a setup checklist for each service that sends mail as your domain.
The difference between WP_MEMORY_LIMIT, WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT and the server PHP memory_limit, what LifterLMS, Tutor LMS and LearnDash publish about requirements, and what Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround and a cPanel VPS let you change.
Why a single MP4 in the WordPress media library buffers for students on slow connections, how HLS renditions, playlists and segments work, and how a bitrate ladder changes storage and bandwidth math, with worked numbers.
A setup checklist for a new LearnDash install on Kinsta, built from both vendors' documentation: requirements, cache exclusions for course pages, PHP thread counts by plan, and Kinsta's server cron.
What WP Engine documents about caching for logged-in users, path exclusions, PHP workers, memory, the 60-second limit and alternate cron, turned into a LearnDash setup checklist.
The setup order for MemberPress on SiteGround from both vendors' documentation: cache exclusions for protected pages and payment notifications, a real cron job for reminders, and staying under SiteGround's email limits.
WooCommerce's official server requirements translated into plan features to check, plus what subscriptions and memberships add: scheduled jobs, cache exclusions, concurrency and execution limits.
Moodle's documented PHP, database, cron, moodledata and document-root requirements for current releases, and why they point toward a VPS rather than WordPress-only managed hosting.
What LearnPress actually documents (WordPress 6.0+, PHP 7.4+), why WordPress.org's recommendations are the better floor, which add-ons raise resource needs, and a sizing table by concurrent learners.
Sensei LMS's published minimums, what selling courses adds through Sensei Pro and WooCommerce, the stricter server floor that results, cache rules and a year-one cost example on SiteGround and Kinsta.
What the H5P plugin writes to disk and the database, the PHP extensions and upload settings it depends on, why it adds files faster than megabytes, and a checklist before you publish interactive lessons.
What a SCORM zip contains and unpacks into, the PHP upload and execution limits it has to clear, how file counts hit hosting caps, the current state of WordPress SCORM plugins and a pre-upload checklist.
How Spaces object storage and its built-in CDN are billed, the private versus public file trade-off for paid course material, the limits that affect video files, and monthly cost examples for three course libraries.
DigitalOcean's documented block on SMTP ports 25, 465 and 587, which provider ports and API routes still work, and a setup and test sequence for enrollment and receipt email.