When we launched LifterLMS in 2014, our own marketing site did not run on WordPress.
It was a LeadPages landing page. A completely separate WooCommerce site handled the actual buying and the license keys. Two systems, two logins, no connection between them.
That was deliberate. We built the first version of LifterLMS in 60 days, and the only question worth answering was whether anyone actually wanted this thing. A simple landing page answered that faster than a real website would have.
The answer came back yes when 42 people bought the first version of LifterLMS.The market wanted a more powerful WordPress LMS solution with courses, memberships, engagements, and ecommerce all in one place.
So we consolidated onto a single WordPress site and started building toward that.
Then we had to decide where to put it.
Media Temple, Roughly 2014 to 2016
Media Temple was our first real web host. It was a popular, well-regarded choice at the time, especially among designers and developers, and it did exactly what we needed while we were small.
We were a young company with a young product and modest traffic. The site was mostly marketing pages and a checkout. Nothing about our setup was demanding yet.
That changed faster than we expected.
The Year We Ran Our Own Servers
As LifterLMS started to scale, we decided to take hosting into our own hands. We moved onto Amazon Web Services and hired a systems administrator to manage it.
It lasted somewhere between six months and a year.
The technology was not the problem. The structure was. Our entire hosting operation ran through one person, which meant one point of contact, one calendar, and one set of hours.
When something needed attention, we were waiting on an individual rather than a team. And for all the theoretical control that comes with running your own infrastructure, we found we actually had less practical control over the server than we wanted.
What we needed was a team, not a person.
WP Engine
So we went back to managed hosting and moved to WP Engine.
This was the period where lifterlms.com stopped being a marketing site and started being a business system:
- More traffic
- More transactions
- More logged-in users
- More moving parts
Eventually we ran into scaling limits and content delivery issues around images that our configuration could not clear.
Our requirements had changed shape, and the setup we were on was built for a different profile of site than the one we had turned into.
Time to look around again…
Eight Years With Pagely
We explored a lot of hosts during that stretch. The one conversation that made the difference was with Matt Medeiros, who was working at Pagely at the time and who knows the hosting world about as well as anyone in WordPress.
We moved to Pagely and stayed for roughly eight years. That is a long time in this industry, and it happened because Pagely was genuinely good at the enterprise WordPress problem we had become.
Partway through, in November 2021, GoDaddy acquired Pagely.
It’s worth saying… because acquisitions make people nervous: the service stayed strong and the team stayed strong. We were a customer through that transition and we did not experience a drop-off. Good people kept doing good work.
What eventually moved us was the same thing that had moved us every time before. We kept growing, the site kept getting heavier, and we started wanting more speed and more hosting resources than our setup was delivering.
Rocket.net, 2026
We migrated to Rocket.net in the summer of 2026.
The qualitative read was immediate. The site simply felt faster (on the frontend and backend), especially on mobile, and that impression showed up before we had measured anything.
Then we measured it… Total request response time on the homepage came in at roughly half of what we had been seeing. A meaningful piece of that traces to DNS performance and to the Cloudflare Enterprise tier included in the plan, which is a stack configuration difference rather than a mystery.
We also ran load testing at traffic levels well above normal, and the new environment handled it comfortably.
The real test for a site like ours is never the homepage. It is checkout and it is wp-admin, the dynamic parts of the website that cannot be cached and have to be computed for every single user. Those held up too.
The other thing worth naming is Rocket.net’s support. We are on the Enterprise plan, and support runs through a shared Slack channel. Being able to describe a problem in the same tool where our team already works, and get a skilled hosting engineer in the thread, is a different experience from filing a ticket and waiting.
Rocket.net joined Hosting.com in August 2025, announced at WordCamp US. Founder Ben Gabler became Chief Product Officer at Hosting.com and still drives product for Rocket.net.
Not Everything Runs in One Place
Our public properties now sit on managed WordPress hosting with Rocket.net. A good amount of what we do does not, and that has been true for most of the LifterLMS story. The sandbox sites described below have been running since before we ever moved to Pagely.
We run our own infrastructure on DigitalOcean for the custom work, and the two jobs are genuinely different. LifterLMS.com and Academy.LifterLMS.com are production websites that have to stay fast for everyone who shows up. The DigitalOcean side is purpose-built machinery, built for specific jobs, where we want our hands directly on the configuration.
Two examples of what lives on Digital Ocean…
The first is our AI agents. We have been building internal AI tooling to help the team work faster, and that kind of system has requirements a managed WordPress host is not designed around.
The second is our sandbox sites, better known as the $1 demo. For a single dollar you get a private LifterLMS site for 30 days with the core plugin and every add-on we make already installed + demo content, and it spins up in seconds. You can build a course, walk through the student experience, and try the whole suite without touching a hosting account or configuring anything. It is the fastest way to see the product for real.
Those same sandboxes do double duty inside the company. Our team spins them up constantly for testing, for research, and for producing marketing content like screenshots, videos, and documentation. When you see a LifterLMS feature demonstrated somewhere, there is a good chance it was recorded on one of these.
That workload has nothing in common with a marketing site. Sandboxes get created and destroyed all day long, on demand, from a template, and they need to clean themselves up when the 30 days run out. We have been running this program for years, through several of the moves described above, because it was never going to fit alongside our main site no matter who was hosting it.
Running that ourselves is not a contradiction of the lesson we learned back on AWS. It is the lesson applied. Our production websites belong with a managed WordPress hosting expert team who watch them around the clock. Custom infrastructure built for one specific job belongs with us. Knowing which workload goes where is most of the skill.
The Industry Keeps Consolidating
Look at our own history and you can see the shape of the whole hosting market.
Media Temple was acquired by GoDaddy in 2013, before we ever signed up, and the brand was eventually retired in 2023. Pagely was acquired by GoDaddy in 2021, while we were a customer. Rocket.net joined Hosting.com in 2025, a year before we migrated to it.
Consolidation is the normal state of WordPress hosting, not an emergency. Brands change hands. Teams get absorbed into larger groups. Sometimes the hosting gets better, sometimes the hosting quality deteriorates.
Knowing this is useful when you choose a host. Buy on the strength of the platform and the people. Monitor for continuous improvement vs. continuous decline.
LMS Sites Are Heavy, and That Is the Whole Point
An LMS site is not a brochure site. Neither is an ecommerce site. And most hosting advice on the internet is written for brochure marketing sites.
Our own properties are a fair example. LifterLMS.com sells LMS software through customized WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions, carries real traffic, and runs license activation and renewals continuously. Academy.LifterLMS.com is a full learning platform powered by LifterLMS itself.
None of that caches away. A logged-in student, a checkout page, a quiz submission, a subscription renewal, and a license check are all dynamic requests that have to be computed in real time, for each person, while other people are doing the same thing. Add a live cohort or a launch and the concurrency spikes hard.
That is why we have been picky with WordPress hosting, and that is why we have moved as often as we have. Every move traces back to the same cause. We grew, our sites got heavier, and our requirements outran the setup we were on.
Nothing about that is a knock on any host we have used. It is a statement about how demanding this category of site is.
Hosting, Built by the People Who Build Your LMS
We are building LifterLMS hosting.
This service comes from our community. So many of the people we work with love this brand, trust this team, and would simply rather have everything in one place with one company. They have told us they want their LMS, their add-ons, and their hosting handled by the people who actually understand what an LMS does to a server. We are putting that together to meet the need.
12 years of running heavy LMS and ecommerce properties across five different environments taught us exactly where these sites strain and exactly what they need to run fast. That experience is going straight into the hosting offer.
If you want your learning business hosted by the team that builds your learning platform, get in touch. Fill out the form at LifterLMS.com/hosting and we will follow up with the details.
Where to Go From Here
We are very happy with our recent move to Rocket.net. We are also not interested in telling you it is the only right answer, because it is not.
There are excellent hosts in this ecosystem, and plenty of them have delivered great results for LifterLMS customers. We maintain a list of the WordPress web hosts we and our community recommend at LifterLMS.com/Recommended-Resources. WP Engine, Pagely, and Rocket.net are all on it, which tells you something about how we think about this. The right host depends on your traffic, your budget, your stack, and how much of the work you want to own.
If you want to go deeper, Matt Medeiros built a free course called Hosting Decoded on LifterLMS for exactly this decision. No paywall, no affiliate push, no single vendor endorsement. It is a genuinely useful resource and we are proud it runs on LifterLMS.
Twelve years, five environments, one lesson. The hosting that fits you at launch is not the hosting that fits you at scale, and outgrowing a host is a sign your business is working.
Together, we build the future of online education.
It is great to be with you on the journey 🚀
