Our Hosting Journey From a Landing Page to Rocket.net

When we launched LifterLMS in 2014, as hard as this probably is to believe, 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. This was deliberate, and purely because we built the very first early version of LifterLMS in 60 days. A time at which 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.

As you can probably tell, considering you’re reading this post from us 12 years later, the answer to that question was “yes”. 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.

We quickly consolidated our setup onto a single WordPress site and started building toward that. Then we had to decide where to host our site.

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 infrastructure was not as much of a problem as who was ultimately responsible for running the infrastructure. Our entire hosting operation ran through one person, which meant one point of contact.

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

And so, as the story goes, we went back to managed hosting and moved to WP Engine.

This was also around the time when lifterlms.com was a lot more than “a marketing site” for a software product. It had:

• More traffic
• More transactions
• More logged-in users
• More moving parts

Eventually, we hit scaling limits that our WP Engine configuration struggled to keep up with.

The types of scaling problems that can’t just be fixed with caching. 😅

Based on a whole range of factors considered before making a decision, we ultimately felt it was time to look around yet again…

Eight Years With Pagely

We explored many 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 throughout that transition and 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, 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 both the frontend and backend), especially on mobile, and that impression appeared 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.

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.

The homepage can be cached into oblivion, especially with Cloudflare Enterprise, in theory, not a single request if you serve 10,000 in 10 seconds needs to result in a single request reaching our origin server at Rocket.net.

The real tests are things like checkout and /wp-admin, i.e., the dynamic parts of the website that cannot be cached and have to be computed for every single user. In the case of Rocket.net, those held up too. 🎉

The other thing worth mentioning 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 our team already uses 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 continues to lead the Rocket.net product.

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 the LifterLMS Academy are production websites that must remain fast for everyone who visits.

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 DigitalOcean…

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 that a managed WordPress host is not designed to support.

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, plus demo content.

These sandboxes spin up in seconds.

You can build a course, walk through the student experience, and try the whole LifterLMS ecosystem without touching a hosting account or configuring anything. It is the fastest way to try LifterLMS.

Those same sandboxes also double as the environments we use for testing, research, product marketing content, including screenshots, videos, and documentation. When you see a LifterLMS feature demonstrated somewhere, there is a very 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 sites, regardless of where we chose to host that.

Running that ourselves does not contradict the lesson we learned back on AWS. It is the lesson applied. Our production websites belong with a managed WordPress hosting expert team who monitor them around the clock. Custom infrastructure built for one specific job belongs with us.

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.

Brands change hands. Teams get absorbed into larger groups.

And if we’re being honest, whether the hosting (and support) improves or deteriorates is something only time will tell after the acquisition.

Knowing this is useful when you choose a host:

Buy into the strength of the platform and the people behind it.

And then, keep monitoring for continuous improvement across the areas that matter to your use case, as well as the fundamentals: performance, support, security, etc.

LMS Sites Are Heavy, and That Is the Whole Point

An LMS site is not a brochure site. Neither is an ecommerce site. And almost all hosting advice on the internet is written for brochure-marketing sites.

Our own properties are a fair example. LifterLMS.com sells LMS software through a heavily customized WooCommerce instance, consistently has a high number of concurrent visitors, and continuously runs license activation and renewal processes.

The LifterLMS Academy is a full learning platform powered by LifterLMS itself.

• Logged-in students
• Carts & Checkout
• Quiz submission,
• Subscription renewals
• And license/plugin activation checks

…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 about WordPress hosting, and 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 outgrew 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.

You have told us time and time again that you want your favorite LMS, add-ons, and hosting handled by the people who actually understand the LMS itself, what it does to a server, and how to run successful sites.

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.

And so, with that, I’m incredibly excited to announce that we’ve started working on putting that together.

If you want your learning business hosted by the team that builds your learning platform, please fill out the form at LifterLMS.com/hosting, and we will follow up with the details.

The LifterLMS WordPress Hosting Journey Video

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 that we (and our community) recommend here. WP Engine, Pagely, and Rocket.net are all on it, which tells you something about how we think about this.

The right hosting partner for your business depends on your traffic, budget, stack, how much work you want to be responsible for, and so much more than what we can cover in this post alone. If you want to go deeper, Matt Medeiros built a free course called Hosting Decoded (powered by LifterLMS, of course 🙌) for exactly this decision.

No paywall, no affiliate push, no single vendor endorsement. It is a genuinely useful resource, and we are proud that it runs on LifterLMS.

Over the past 12 years and across the five hosting environments we used for our sites in production (and countless more we tested), the main takeaway is this: 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. 🚀

– Chris Badgett
Founder & CEO, LifterLMS