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Supercharge Your LMS Hosting With Rapyd Cloud

Discover how to make your LMS website fast, handle large traffic spikes, easily serve concurrent users, and avoid unnecessary plugins with Rapyd Cloud Hosting.


Upgrade Your WordPress LMS Hosting To Fix Slow Sites And Scale For Concurrent Learners

Course sites and membership sites break the shared hosting model. Learners stay logged in for hours, quizzes and video lessons hit the server constantly, and a Monday morning cohort launch can send a hundred concurrent users at a stack that was built for a hobby blog. This webinar walks through why traditional WordPress hosting fails at LMS scale, and how Rapyd Cloud’s dynamic boost, LiteSpeed servers, and per-site VPS model handle real course business traffic.

What You’ll Learn

  • Why a LifterLMS or BuddyBoss site consumes far more server resources than a normal WordPress blog
  • What PHP workers really are, and how they set the ceiling on concurrent learners
  • How the shared hosting industry ended up in a race to the bottom, and what that costs course creators
  • How Rapyd Cloud’s dynamic boost technology gives every site burst capacity without pricing it out of reach
  • What a real white-glove migration looks like, with two to four minutes of downtime

Key Takeaways

  • Match your hosting to your actual traffic pattern, not to the price tag
  • Concurrency, not raw visitor count, is what kills course sites on shared hosting
  • Server-level malware protection and offsite daily backups belong in the plan, not sold as an add-on plugin
  • Cohort launches, live class blocks, and market-open bursts all deserve host-side elasticity
  • Ask any prospective host how they handle a Monday morning of one hundred simultaneous learners

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do LifterLMS sites strain WordPress hosting that works fine for a blog?

Blog visitors stay under two minutes and most pages can be cached. Course learners stay logged in for hours, click constantly to load lessons, submit quizzes, and load videos, and every one of those hits requires a live PHP worker on the server. Add BuddyBoss social learning, WooCommerce checkout, gamification, or a Monday cohort launch, and the same shared box that was fine for a blog runs out of RAM and starts returning 502 and 503 errors.

What is a PHP worker and why does it matter for a busy LMS site?

A PHP worker is the server process that draws a WordPress page for a logged-in user. It cannot be cached and it cannot be delivered from an edge network. Each worker holds RAM (often 200 to 300 MB on a LifterLMS or BuddyBoss site) and CPU while it renders. If ten workers are busy, the eleventh request queues, and the site gets slower and slower under concurrent load.

How does Rapyd Cloud handle traffic bursts like a Monday morning cohort launch?

Every Rapyd site runs on its own VPS with its own web server, database, and Redis. Dynamic Boost then hands out extra CPU cores and RAM in real time when the site gets busy, and scales back down when the burst is over. A cohort that only needs sixteen cores for two hours on Monday morning gets them for those two hours, without paying for a server that idle the rest of the week.

Does Rapyd Cloud migrate sites for you, and how much downtime should you expect?

Rapyd Cloud offers 100% white-glove migration at no extra cost. The team copies your site into a test server first, tunes it, and lets you verify on a vanity URL. When you approve, they lock the old site to admin only, transfer just the delta, move the database, and switch the domain through Cloudflare. Average total downtime is two to four minutes.

What backup and malware protection does Rapyd Cloud include by default?

Every site gets daily incremental backups of files and database, stored offsite in a different region on S3-style replicated storage. Malware protection runs at the server level, not as a WordPress plugin, and monitors every part of the site in real time. Advanced Site Shield virtual patching is available per site as an add-on for customers who want additional protection.

Is Rapyd Cloud HIPAA compliant, and does that make my LifterLMS site HIPAA compliant?

Rapyd Cloud is about ninety-five percent of the way through HIPAA certification, alongside SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR work. That certifies the hosting layer. Your WordPress site, plugins, admin device policies, and encryption at rest for stored health data all sit above the host. HIPAA compliance is a team effort between the host, the platform, and the site owner.

Full Webinar Transcript

Why LifterLMS And BuddyBoss Sites Push Hosting Harder Than A Blog

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to this complimentary webinar. I’m Chris Badgett with Wes Tatters from Rapyd Cloud Hosting. That is at rapyd cloud, spelled R-A-P-Y-D. Wes has been on the podcast before. Michael from Rapyd Cloud has been here before. We are going to get into how to upgrade your WordPress LMS hosting to remove problems. We are going to dive in a little bit on what the common problems are in the WordPress LMS hosting industry. But first, welcome, Wes. Thank you so much for being here.

Wes Tatters: Hey Chris, good day. How are you doing today?

Chris Badgett: I am doing great. Hosting is essential for any WordPress site, but LMS sites are particularly taxing. They require a lot of resources. Tools like LifterLMS also have e-commerce components. E-commerce is also taxing. Some people are doing social learning with BuddyBoss or LifterLMS social learning or bbPress or some kind of forum, which is also taxing. Yet the secret of the hosting industry is that traditionally it has really been built around the original WordPress, which was not so much a web application but a publishing platform. Time has moved on. Innovation has moved on. We are not just building websites, we are building web applications. Tell us about Rapyd Cloud, particularly around the problem you saw and the angle Rapyd focused on to create a new paradigm for more advanced WordPress hosting.

The Traffic Pattern Blog Hosts Were Never Built For

Wes Tatters: The thing to understand is that when we say LifterLMS is heavy on servers, or WooCommerce is heavy on servers, it is not really that they are heavy on servers. It is more that they get more traffic than what I would call a traditional blogging site. If you think about a normal blog site, you have set it up, you have decided to put photos of your cat, or your business marketing site, or your business landing site. The reality is that most people that have built a site like that are absolutely over the moon when they start getting a hundred visitors a week.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. For many, that can take a considerable amount of time to have that sort of consistent, reliable traffic, and that is the standard experience for a blogging site. Fifty, a hundred visitors a week, that is good traffic.

Wes Tatters: When they reach the point where they are at a hundred visitors a day, they are saying, this is real. Oh hang on, my WooCommerce site is actually getting a hundred checkouts a day. It feels incredible, because it is validating their business. They are selling their products, a hundred visitors a day.

Why Course Learners Stay All Day And Blog Visitors Do Not

Wes Tatters: But when we talk about those visitors, traditionally someone who comes to a site is not there for very long. If you talk to Google, or SEO experts, they will tell you that the average time on site is under two minutes. Why? Because most sites are treated like a sales funnel. If it is a sales funnel, that is what we want. We want them in, down the funnel, hit the engage-to-buy button, load their credit card up, hit okay, and then we want them gone. Thank you very much, and I will send you an email and your product will be in the mail on Monday. That is the traditional journey.

Wes Tatters: Now let us talk about LifterLMS, or any of those dynamic platforms. They are the reverse. LifterLMS wants people on their platform for an extended amount of time.

Chris Badgett: All day.

Wes Tatters: All day, all week sometimes. It is a ninety-six-hour course that they have built to build someone’s knowledge. And we know from the experience of building courses that you build a course, and the idea is it is going to be, let us say, an hour-long course. Most people do not complete it in an hour. They switch on, they switch off, they engage, they come back, they go, oh, I have not done that yet. Or they get interrupted; the cat knocks over their cup, they are gone. The engagement time, the amount of time that the person is on your site, is going to be much longer. Even if there is only one person a day on your site, they could be on there for eight hours clicking, checking boxes, answering quizzes, watching videos. Then let us add social learning on top of it. A group chat, a live chat, a group forum, somewhere where they can upload their own media or their own comments. Even small numbers of people are on these sites for a long time now.

How PHP Workers Actually Draw A Page

Wes Tatters: That WordPress blogging platform was built for small numbers of visits, saying hi, and moving on. All of a sudden, you have added, I am here all day, I am clicking, I am doing lots of actions. Then we come to the underlying problem. Not so much WordPress itself, but the language that we use, PHP. WordPress is built in PHP. PHP has something that pretty much everyone has heard of, a PHP worker. Very few people understand what it does. The best way to describe it is: every time you draw a page or you click a link, and that page from a WordPress site is rendered while you are logged on, it cannot be cached. It cannot be stored in the cloud. It cannot be delivered from an edge platform. Cloudflare cannot get any benefits from it. It takes a PHP worker to draw that page. Every time. PHP worker draws that page. PHP worker draws that page.

Why RAM Is The Real Ceiling On A Busy WordPress Site

Wes Tatters: That PHP worker uses two things. It uses server memory and it uses server CPU. On an average blogging site, a PHP worker might only use sixty-four megabytes of RAM. Tiny. But on an average LifterLMS, BuddyBoss, or WooCommerce site (and we have added gamification, and we have added WP Fusion, and we have added automation flows, and a CRM), these sites are vibrating. They are using two to three hundred megabytes of RAM per PHP worker request.

Wes Tatters: So that little WordPress site that you originally hosted, something has to give. What tends to give is the amount of available RAM. Some sites will say, unlimited PHP workers. You cannot really have unlimited unless you have got unlimited RAM. We know you cannot buy unlimited RAM. In the server space, in reality, it is actually much less. Your little server has just enough memory for maybe five or ten PHP workers. Remember, one of those workers has to run every time you do a page draw. If you have got ten people and you have got ten PHP workers, you can only do ten page draws at the same time. On a blogging site, not a problem.

What A Monday Morning Cohort Launch Does To The Server

Wes Tatters: On LifterLMS or BuddyBoss, it is: answer question, answer question, answer question, next page, load the video, one after the other. And we have only been talking about one person. The thing that is really in vogue right now, especially in learning platforms, is cohort learning.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Wes Tatters: Let us start a new cohort on Monday morning at nine a.m. A hundred people, all going answer question, answer question, all at the same time, all on the same little server. That is when you get problems. You start to see 502 errors. You start to see 503 errors. You start to see out of memory errors. You start to see sites that get slower and slower and slower, because these servers still try and help you. They go, sure, I will queue up all the PHP worker requests and I will get to you soon. The more requests, the longer the queue gets. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When WordPress sites become successful, the shared hosting that you originally tried to run them on is no longer practical.

How Rapyd Cloud Redesigned The Stack Around Concurrency

Wes Tatters: At Rapyd, we looked at a way to fix that.

Chris Badgett: How did you fix that if many of the other hosts are set up for blogging and not dynamic, high-traffic, concurrent user sites?

Wes Tatters: We took a different position. Our sites are going to be busy. Our sites are going to have multiple concurrent users. Our sites need to be the highest performance possible. We started with extremely high performance web servers. These are fourth and fifth generation AMD and Intel CPUs. These are not boxes that are ten or fifteen years old. A lot of the serving business is running boxes that old. They are expensive, honestly. Not cheap servers. But they can run up to ten times faster than older legacy shared hosting servers.

Wes Tatters: We then said, people need memory, people need CPU power, and people need high performance disk space. So we built servers that matched all those needs. We paired it with LiteSpeed web servers, which were specifically custom-designed for concurrent usage. Primarily the opposite of Apache, which was never really designed for a lot of concurrent usage.

Optimizing For Concurrency Without Relying On Page Cache

Wes Tatters: We made one final decision. We said, this has to work without caching (page caching in particular). Sure, you can use object caching, PHP worker caching, Redis caching, and OPcache. We optimized and configured all these tools to be specifically focused on highly concurrent workspaces, and made that available to everybody. It does not matter if you buy our starter plan, our business plans, our performance plans, or our enterprise plans, you are getting the same server environment. You are getting the same performance levels. Instead of, oh, you buy a cheap plan, you get a slower server, everyone gets the same server. What we do is vary the number of concurrent workers. That is primarily what changes as our plan tiers step up. Basically adding more concurrent users and allowing you to handle more requests in real time on the same server space.

The Race To The Bottom In Shared WordPress Hosting

Chris Badgett: From a pricing standpoint, Rapyd Cloud needs to be a profitable business. You mentioned shared hosting, but even managed WordPress hosts that have more resources have to figure out a way to add all this value. What is going on in the traditional hosting industry from a pricing perspective, and how did Rapyd figure out how to deliver this affordably? Because when I look at your pricing, it is very competitive with other managed WordPress hosts.

Wes Tatters: There is a term called race to the bottom. It was coined by a couple of the bigger and well-known shared hosting companies. They have been in a quite aggressive race to the bottom in terms of the cheapest WordPress hosting. Maybe we can give it away for free. The way they have achieved that is three things. Firstly, not upgrading their servers and their data centers. The box was built ten years ago. No upgrades. Just run a hair dryer over it and blow out the dust. I met a guy at CloudFest this year from Lithuania and I said, what do you do for a living? He said, I recycle server boxes. I said, is much business in that? He said, I have semi-trailers arriving every day, and they are coming from data centers. He gives them a blow, replaces the memory, maybe swaps out a bit of RAM, puts them in plastic wrapper and sends them back. He is making a really tidy living out of refurbishing and updating and just keeping these old data servers running.

Overcommitting A Thousand Sites Onto One Old Rack

Wes Tatters: They might have bought those servers ten years ago and a lot has changed in ten years, but they have amortized them to zero. They will still quite happily run a WordPress blogging site. Then what they do is they backload those servers with lots and lots of websites. We call it overcommit. They might put a thousand websites on a server rack, sometimes more. They overcommit the resources on the basis that ninety-five percent of the people who are paying two dollars fifty are in the be-excited-if-they-got-one-visitor-a-day category, or are still building their site.

Wes Tatters: The third thing they do is basically drop support. Support becomes an outsourced set of scripts in a call center overseas. It is often just ticket support. My server is down. Wait for somebody to get back to you a day later. That has become the model.

Building Rapyd On AWS Without The AWS Bill

Wes Tatters: When we looked at how we price Rapyd and how we make it price competitive, we said, let us partner with AWS. Well-known company. Let us get the right boxes. Let us get the right performance and then work out a platform model, our secret sauce, that runs around that and can dynamically give customers the processes they need in real time. In traditional hosting, you might be on a shared server with a thousand people. We went, let us think about this differently. Let us think about every customer having a VPS, a virtual private server of their own. It is their own web server. It has got its own database, its own Redis, its own web server.

Wes Tatters: Traditionally, if I was building a BuddyBoss site and I went to AWS, I would have to buy an eight core, sixteen gigabyte of RAM server, because that is what BuddyBoss recommends. Similar to what LifterLMS needs. Maybe you could get away with four cores and eight gigabytes of RAM. But optimally, eight cores, sixteen gigabytes of RAM. That costs real money, two hundred fifty to three hundred dollars a month from AWS. You effectively pay for that server whether you use it or not.

Dynamic Boost: A VPS That Scales Only When You Need It

Wes Tatters: So we said, let us work out a way to load-manage our customers. Let us give them a VPS and work out a way that says, if you are not using those CPU cores, we will load manage that for you. That is what we call our Dynamic Boost technology. It basically allows us to give a customer a full server of their own. It is a VPS running in the cloud, a containerized platform. If they are not busy, they might only be consuming one CPU core, half a gigabyte of RAM. As they get busy, they get more resources added to them in real time, dynamically.

Wes Tatters: That enabled us to price our platform to spread that load. We can basically say, we can give you higher performance, better specs, more CPU workers, more RAM, more PHP workers, and we will do a deal with you. You spread that load across a month, and providing you can stay within reasonable acceptable usage, you can do that. We know that most BuddyBoss and LifterLMS sites are like that. It goes up and down and up and down. Providing the downs and the ups balance out, they get extra resources inside their plan. It can cover those viral events. It can cover: on Monday morning, I am starting a new cohort, and I only really need sixteen CPU cores for the first two hours. After the first two hours, everyone disappears, and they are going to complete the course during the rest of the week. But during that hour on Monday morning where the entire cohort is logging on and trying to do their first ten quizzes, that is when I need the resources. Rapyd lets you have a lot of resources, then it scales down and settles down again.

Real World Bursts: Language Teachers, Stock Alerts, And National Cohorts

Chris Badgett: I love that Dynamic Boost technology. That is really cool. I know a language teacher whose in-person students are all in the classroom with their iPads. They are really busy for that one hour, but the site is essentially dead on the weekend, dead at night. She only has four sections a day. It is all over the place.

Wes Tatters: We have an old customer site of mine that provides stock tips. The market is only open at certain times.

Chris Badgett: They literally provide them at six a.m. every morning.

Wes Tatters: Every one of their customers is on between six a.m. and seven a.m., to look at the notes and discuss the trading plan for the day. Crazy busy. Then nothing. Literally, there is no one there. That is the sort of model, and that is the way Rapyd was built to allow that sort of capability.

Wes Tatters: I have got a Māori learning experience. Māori is a New Zealand indigenous language. It is no longer taught effectively in schools. A lady who was passionate about teaching Māori built a website. She had five or ten people on it. She was happy, until the New Zealand government said, we love this, could we have all of our students log on once a day? Thirty or forty thousand students logging on once a day. Ninety-five percent of them want to log on at nine a.m. for an hour, and then there is no one there. There is no one there on weekends. There is no one there after three p.m. She has got a server that literally for the better part of four hours a day needs to handle thirty thousand users, and for the rest of the day, crickets. In the traditional hosting world, she would have had to buy the biggest plan.

A Walkthrough Of The Rapyd Cloud Dashboard

Wes Tatters: There is a subset of our customers that want to build data centers and load balancers and servers. Our customers just want a website. They want to click one button on the dashboard. Let me show you one of our sites.

Wes Tatters: We built an incredibly user-friendly dashboard. Underneath what we are seeing here is a VPS. It is Amazon, but you are completely disconnected. You do not need to know how to sign up for Amazon, or navigate through the three and a half million buttons and menus. If you want a website, one click, type a couple of values, away you go.

Wes Tatters: This one we set up earlier. It just looks like a simple, well-laid-out dashboard. It is focused on WordPress. The first thing on our dashboard is our WordPress button, which tells us information about our themes, tells us the current version of WordPress, and allows us to turn on debugging if something goes horribly wrong.

One Click Rollback For Themes, Plugins, And WordPress Core

Wes Tatters: Importantly, we let people do things like rolling back. This is not inside your WordPress site. It is inside the dashboard. One of the most common support tickets that any hosting company gets is: my website has crashed.

Chris Badgett: Yes.

Wes Tatters: We have observed that WordPress, or plugin X, or plugin Y, has updated overnight and crashed your server. In traditional hosting, they tell you that you have to roll back to a backup or restore. In reality, it would be as simple as opening the plugin panel here and rolling back the plugin one version. It comes back up. In traditional hosting, they have had to have a support ticket to address the problem. The host has probably told them to roll back from a backup, which means they are going back to the last time the platform was looked at (if they even have a backup, and lots of hosts do not). And they have lost data. On LifterLMS, we cannot roll you back. BuddyBoss, we cannot roll you back, because someone was on the site for seven hours lovingly completing that course. We cannot roll back their data. What we can do is roll back their plugins, or their themes, or WordPress on its own.

Server Level Malware Protection And Advanced Site Shield

Wes Tatters: The second thing that was important is security. Unfortunately, WordPress, with forty-three or forty-four percent of the world’s web hosting business, is a massive big red target. If your site has not been hit by malware, get ready, because it is going to happen soon. We natively protect and secure every site at the server level. Not a plugin that you add in. It is installed at the server level. It monitors and tracks every part of the WordPress site in real time. We also have another product, Site Shield. It is optional but something we recommend for customers.

Multi Site Plans And Per Site Virtual Patching

Wes Tatters: Advanced Site Shield has to be registered at the site level. When we first built our platform, we were very heavily containerized. Every plan had one CPU core or multiple CPU cores and one WordPress site. A lot of our customers said, that is great for our BuddyBoss sites, but we just need two or three other small sites to do some marketing or sales funnels. We spent a lot of time early this year upgrading our platform. We now have the ability to have multiple sites in the same customer plan. The smaller plans support a couple of sites. Business plans support five to ten. Performance plans support twenty. Enterprise supports thirty plus. All in the same container.

Wes Tatters: Because our Advanced Site Shield virtual patching technology requires a license per site, it would effectively make the cost of a plan thirty times more prohibitive if you had to buy them up front. What we do is say, platforms are multi-site, but we suggest that you add on Advanced Site Shield per site. Customers can do that as an add-on in their dashboard.

Daily Incremental Offsite Backups On S3 Style Storage

Wes Tatters: We think WordPress first. Backups run natively on the platform. Backups run every day for customers. We back up the database and files every day, incrementally, and we back them up offsite. The worst place you can store a backup is on your WordPress site.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Wes Tatters: I see an awful lot of, oh, but I have installed really good products like UpdraftPlus or Duplicator. Great backup products, but they are stored on your site. You get hit by malware or your site crashes, and you have got nothing. We store all of our data in a separate data center, effectively in a different region. If you are in Dublin, Ireland, we actually store your data in Frankfurt. If you are in Northern Virginia, we store your data in Ohio. If you are in Oregon, we store your data in North Carolina. Entirely separate data centers, entirely distributed. We also store them using S3-style bucket technology (pioneered by AWS), where the data is multiply replicated around the world. Incredibly secure backup storage.

Native File Manager And WP Config Editing In The Browser

Wes Tatters: Sites also have all the standard stuff hidden under here that a VPS would give you. Access to domain management, access to databases, SSH and SFTP access. Even a full file manager that points straight into your WordPress site, so that you can very quickly do those silly little things like, I just needed to edit my wp-config.php file. Which would again potentially involve a deal of complexity. Here, there is a wp-config file that we could go in and edit. Hit save. Done. All these things are done for a reason. Simplicity, and to enable the customer to manage their own site.

Chris Badgett: One of the things I am seeing here looking at this dashboard is the simplicity, but also the focus on the user. Some web hosts do not just do WordPress. They do lots of different things. And then there is cPanel and Plesk. This is a custom dashboard, I believe.

Wes Tatters: It is fully built. We built our dashboard to manage AWS. Big complex data centers, AWS infrastructure, all that technology that gives us the performance and power we need, but in a dashboard which is incredibly user friendly and designed for the task the customer needs.

Why WooCommerce Sites Can Actually Page Cache Intelligently

Wes Tatters: Depending on your WordPress site, if you are a WooCommerce customer and you are on one of our performance plans, you have the option to enable a heap of WooCommerce features, including Elasticsearch. It is a high performance search technology that turns those slow product searches on WooCommerce sites with fifty thousand products (where people are trying to match them to groups) from quite slow experiences into instant searches.

Wes Tatters: We also have a heap of smart caching technology. While we say that a lot of what you do in dynamic sites cannot be cached, there is an edge cache and it is for WooCommerce. If you treat WooCommerce intelligently like we do, you can actually page cache an entire WooCommerce site. What you have got to be able to do is have an underlying server that knows when to invalidate pages. It has got to know that: oh, that product’s price just updated. Oh, that product is no longer available because quantity is now zero. Oh, we just applied a discount to that product. We use WooCommerce-aware dynamic technology. It watches every product in WooCommerce, and if it sees a product change, it flushes the cache for that product. If it sees a group of products change, it flushes that group. The next person that visits the site reloads the cache.

Instant Wp Admin Login From The Dashboard

Wes Tatters: Everything we do makes life easier for the customer. Silly things. Everyone forgets their passwords. So there is a WP Admin button right on the dashboard. If you can get into your hosting, you can get into your WordPress. We know from experience that I have a lot to do with the cPanel community, and I was talking to a cPanel engineer, and they were saying, yeah, average time of visit on a cPanel is about a minute, and you are lucky if they are there once every six months. Because it is too scary, and they do not know what to do when they get there. With Rapyd, we know testing will do site maintenance, and the dashboard might be down for five minutes because we are doing maintenance, and we publish a note, but we will still get ten tickets. I cannot access.

Ticketing And The Finn AI Support Assistant

Wes Tatters: Ticketing is a first class feature of our platform. And a full knowledge base is built in. We have a native AI product built into the platform, Finn. It allows me to ask a question like: how can I add a domain? Finn will go out and start a very intelligent conversation. It will find information, pull in the data, give you the steps from our knowledge base. I can ask follow-ups just like I was using ChatGPT. For a number of our customers, I have discovered that they play with Finn. They come in and start asking questions. On our weekly support call, we go through and say, what is our Finn load this week? We had a hundred fifty tickets that were served by Finn. They never bothered to talk to the customer support team.

Chris Badgett: Which shows a good implementation of AI. It works, it is instant, and if you can just get the right answer from AI really fast, it is awesome.

Wes Tatters: It is pulling in real information. It also links out to articles. We have a very large knowledge base of information on our platform that people can search. There are articles about website management, account management, referral programs, guides about XML-RPC, cron, Linux, all the things we see in a WordPress space. Customer focused throughout. WordPress sites and WooCommerce sites get extra tabs. BuddyBoss sites get a BuddyBoss app tab that lets you rebuild your app, redeploy a new build, do test versions, and share tests natively in our dashboard.

Developer Tooling: Logs, Redis, MariaDB, And Server Access

Wes Tatters: We are also developer focused. We offer logging technology with access logs, site error logs, PHP error logs. You can download them natively here. You do not have to dig through folders in servers to find your logs. You can look at any site errors on the platform. You can look at PHP error logs. We are running on a multi-site setup here. We still have the ability to manage the server, not just the site. We can manage the Linux server, start and stop it. We can manage LiteSpeed, MariaDB. We use KeyDB, a highly concurrent Redis-compatible technology. All those things a person at the site level wants to do. We still give the customer access to all of that data inside the platform.

Compliance Work Toward SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, And HIPAA

Wes Tatters: We also have platform logs. There are Redis logs and database logs and error logs. We do focus on making those things easy. One of the things we are focused on at the moment is compliance work for SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA.

Chris Badgett: We get the HIPAA request at LifterLMS a lot.

Wes Tatters: HIPAA is a challenge. We are about ninety-five percent of the way through our certification for HIPAA. HIPAA is interesting. You will see here we are actually logging every time the server has been touched. The host service was started, someone connected as root to perform an action. That is when you get into HIPAA. We do not currently log the WordPress side. Even though we will be HIPAA compliant, that still does not mean that your website will be HIPAA compliant. Our server will be, but a person that wanted to be HIPAA compliant would still have to do their own compliance work.

Chris Badgett: It is a team effort.

Wes Tatters: It is more complicated than that. It is not just Rapyd and LifterLMS. The customer has to be HIPAA compliant. They have to ensure that the laptop they access their site from as an admin user is an encrypted laptop. The hard drive has to be encrypted. It has to have the ability to automatically log itself out after five minutes. All the things we cannot control, LifterLMS cannot control.

What Encryption At Rest Actually Means For LMS Data

Wes Tatters: The scary thing about HIPAA is something called encryption at rest. When someone enters health data into your website, that data has to be encrypted in a way that cannot be accessed. Not: yes, my hard disk is encrypted. The physical bit of health data has to be encrypted in such a way that only a person with the appropriate level of permission can decrypt it. It is a complex system.

Watching Dynamic Boost In Real Time On A Live Server

Wes Tatters: This is an example. We will talk about how our platform works with boost. This is obviously a small test server, but you can see that we actually track in real time the amount of CPU and RAM the site consumes. That little bar in this area is the resource limit for a very small plan. If your site was busy and the blue bar and the red bar were at exactly the same level twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you would still be within our resource limits. In reality, that red bar can boost right up here, and then come back down again. The same thing goes on for RAM. To a certain extent we also manage traffic.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate the tour of the dashboard. I love seeing something built from first principles. That first principles approach is all about the customer, the community, the course, the ecommerce site. What do they need? Let us make the customer happy. Let us make the developers happy. It shows that this is well thought out, which is amazing.

Why Cheap Hosting Is Not A Bargain For A Real Business

Wes Tatters: The other comment I would make is about pricing. People will say, oh, but I can get XYZ for five dollars. I go, why would you? Your core business, which you need up a hundred percent of the time, needs to be the same performance experience for every customer that arrives. If you were building a fashion brand and you were putting a shop on the high street, unless you were extremely avant-garde, you would make sure the shop was in the right position. The lighting, the dressing, the floors, the shelving. You would be paying up to twenty-five percent of your profits for the privilege of being on that high street.

Wes Tatters: For some reason, in the WordPress space, we go, oh, I earned ten thousand dollars last month. Why should I pay more than one hundred fifty dollars for my website?

Chris Badgett: It does not make sense. In your fashion example, it is like a school that has real real estate, but sometimes the doors will not open. That is not a good thing. How much do you pay for your real estate, whether you are renting or owning it or mortgaging it? The web gives you the ability to have that school open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Wes Tatters: Regardless of whether one person or tens of thousands are coming in the door. Why do people discount the value? People say, oh, you are just trying to make money. I said, well, I am in business like anyone else, but I have built Rapyd in such a way that it is designed to ensure your site is always up. Experience is the same for every customer. If one customer or a thousand or ten thousand log on, we can work out a way to handle it inside our platform. Importantly, you as the customer do not need to know about any of that technology. You can go on with your core business. And what is that? Selling courses, selling products, running community, making new courses. That is your business. We will focus on the technology for you. We will ensure that your sites are backed up, up to date, and reliable. You focus on your core business, and we will partner with you.

The White Glove Migration Process With Two Minute Downtime

Chris Badgett: As we land the plane here, if somebody is experiencing challenges with their current hosting situation (site speed, load, memory issues, timing out), it can feel challenging to switch hosts, particularly for do-it-yourselfers who have been doing it for a while. How could somebody think about migrating to Rapyd, and what would that look like?

Wes Tatters: We offer one hundred percent white glove migrations. Our migration team on average can migrate a site in about an hour and a half from the time they get the request, and the average downtime is about two to four minutes.

Chris Badgett: Just to be clear, what do you mean by white label? Or white glove?

Wes Tatters: White glove. Part of putting the customer first. Yes, it is a pressure point. Oh, it is so hot. I am really concerned. What if my site goes down? What if my domain name does not migrate? What if I am offline for hours? We have developed workflows and protocols. We actually migrate the site twice. We migrate the site into a test server first. Our migration specialists analyze the site. They do performance analysis and make recommendations to the customer. The customer can test their site and run everything. It is on a vanity URL. We have now done the heavy lifting. We have got the data. We have got what might be sometimes fifty or a hundred terabytes of files and media moved. Then when the customer says go, all we are really going to be doing is putting their old site into maintenance mode, which means no one else can log on. We transfer the difference. We already have most the files. We just get the last fifty files. That is almost instant. We do the same thing with the database. Then we switch the domain name. We have planned ahead. We make sure we are on a platform like Cloudflare that allows us to instantly switch IP addresses for domain names. That allows us to do the domain name switch effectively instantly. The user experience downtime is almost zero. In almost every case, clients say, oh, and it is faster and it feels great. We haven’t been on for a few days and everything is zippy. I am not getting those 502 errors. I am not getting that scrolling thing every time I click.

Where To Start With Rapyd Cloud

Chris Badgett: I highly recommend Rapyd Cloud. That is rapyd.cloud. Check it out. You guys have a chat on your website. What is the best way for people to get in touch with questions about migration, getting started, or which plan is right for me?

Wes Tatters: If they go to rapyd.cloud, that same support chat that is on our dashboard is available to new customers as well. They can ask a bunch of questions. Finn will give them some answers, but you can also say, hey, I need to talk to a human, and you can talk to our support team. They will provide a lot of information about plans and products. For bigger sites, we can also escalate that to our customer success team. If someone wants to organize a call with their CTO and their CFO and the alphabet of letters, we are happy to do those sort of things as well and help people plan strategies for what it looks like to be on the Rapyd platform.

Chris Badgett: Wes, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it. First and foremost, thank you for putting the customer first at the center, because that is how great businesses are built. As soon as I learned about Rapyd Cloud, I said, oh, this is a company that married a problem. They are going to find a solution. They are putting the customer at the center of the business, not the product, which is awesome. My hats off to you. Keep up the amazing work, and thank you for coming on and taking us on a tour and showcasing what you do at Rapyd Cloud.

Wes Tatters: Cheers, Chris.