What Hosting is Right for Your LMS Website? Shared, Dedicated, Managed? What’s the Difference?

Join Will Middleton from LifterLMS and Christos Paloukas from Pressidium on this stream about the differences between shared, dedicated, and managed hosting and what the implications are for your LifterLMS website.

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Choosing the Right Hosting for Your LMS Website

Will from LifterLMS sits down with Christos, a Performance Engineer at Pressidium, to break down the real differences between shared, dedicated, and managed WordPress hosting for course creators. You will learn where each type fits, why shared hosting struggles with LifterLMS and WooCommerce, how content delivery networks and caching actually work, and how to choose a host that keeps your LMS website fast, secure, and easy to run.

What You’ll Learn

• How shared, dedicated, and managed WordPress hosting differ under the hood
• Why LifterLMS and WooCommerce push a shared host past its limits fast
• What managed WordPress hosting does for you that dedicated hosting does not
• How a CDN speeds up your site without breaking dynamic LMS features
• Why caching is the reason your edits sometimes do not show up

Key Takeaways

• Default to managed WordPress hosting for any real LifterLMS site with logged-in users
• Reserve shared hosting for static brochure pages, portfolios, and hobby sites
• Let a managed host handle the migration when you upgrade off shared or dedicated
• Offload video and static assets to a CDN so your server can focus on the LMS
• Trust the “clear cache” button when a change on the back end does not appear on the front

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Meet Christos, Pressidium’s Performance Engineer

Will: Thanks everyone for joining. I’m going to bring on my Greek twin, Christos from Pressidium. Christos is a hosting expert who does a lot of back-end performance work with Pressidium, a web hosting company that supports LifterLMS and WordPress websites. If you are looking for a website host, check out Pressidium. We will have a link in the description and live here too.

What we are diving into today is the considerations between a shared website host, a dedicated website host, and a managed website host. When we go to a hosting company’s pricing page, sometimes they say dedicated or shared or managed as different options. Different packages, different prices, different services. There is a lot of confusion in the market about what the differences actually are, and what you need to consider when you are creating an LMS website in WordPress. Which one is best for you, for performance, for speed, and all that.

Thanks so much for joining me, Christos.

Christos: It is always a pleasure, Will.

Will: We have done some webinars with Pressidium before, so if you are interested in the deep end of LifterLMS stress testing or the performance side of hosting an LMS site, there is other content out there with Christos and the Pressidium team. Let’s get into it. Can you give us a high-level overview of what shared, dedicated, and managed hosting are, and how they are different?

What Shared Hosting Actually Is

Christos: Shared hosting is literally what it sounds like. There are a lot of people using it. In our previous webinar we talked about what hosting is at a really low level, demystifying it so people better understand what they are paying for. There is some sort of application running on some sort of computer, a server on the internet, that is always available.

In shared hosting that computer, that server, is used by multiple tenants. You have various restrictions in place so that one tenant will not steal resources from another, and we call the effect noisy neighbors. Shared hosting is relatively cheap. It is highly configurable from the hosting provider’s side, with the restrictions I just mentioned. There can be concerns around privacy and certification and maintenance.

Shared hosting is not a bad tool. Every tool is for its own application, and shared hosting has its place. That is why it exists. It is always going to be the cheapest option, or at least it always should be.

Understanding Dedicated Hosting

Christos: Dedicated hosting is going to be more expensive. If you have an IT person, and they set up the server themselves and maintain it, you can end up at a decent price, but it is still going to cost more than shared. It also depends on what resources you allocate to the server, or the cluster of servers, that you use to host your website. That depends on what kind of website it is, how heavy it is, how much traffic it has, and how many visitors come through over a given period of time.

Will: So to clear that up, on shared hosting we are on a server with other people, and the resources get split between us as we need them. On dedicated hosting we have specific server resources set aside for our website specifically. That is going to be a bit more premium, but the resources are not going to be compromised or shared with neighbors. Is that right?

Christos: That is right. Let’s introduce managed WordPress hosting.

What Managed WordPress Hosting Handles For You

Christos: Managed WordPress hosting is by far the best option you can pick. I do not want to be biased, because I work in a managed hosting business, but managed WordPress hosting takes things out of the way for you. You do not have to worry about updates, about important plugin installations, about potential vulnerabilities in plugins. You will be notified of all these things, and you should always have a team of DevOps engineers there for you when you need them, whether by support ticket or live chat.

Depending on the quality of the support, they might go a little further than they should. That is good for the customer. There is always a demarcation point, though. You typically have first-level support engineers, and you might have to wait for an escalation to get a DevOps engineer involved. Managed WordPress hosting takes the technical issues off the plate and handles what you would otherwise be maintaining yourself.

Why WordPress-Specific Hosting Matters

Will: So managed WordPress hosting takes into consideration the fact that we are going to be working with WordPress on this site. We have to pay attention to what plugins are activated, what plugin updates are coming out, and the frequency of updates in the WordPress ecosystem. You could build a website with a custom PHP application, or a Joomla install, or something else that does not update as often. WordPress core is going to update, plugins are going to update, and the PHP version is going to update. There are a lot of moving parts. Is that the benefit of managed WordPress hosting over dedicated, that we get a mindset geared toward WordPress on top of the dedicated resources?

Christos: That is right. Managed WordPress hosting takes the guesswork out of the way. You mentioned the PHP version. On a managed host you push a couple of buttons to switch your PHP version. You are not opening some sort of control panel like cPanel. There should be a friendly dashboard where you select your version, push install, and it is done. A lot more goes into managed WordPress hosting, which is why, depending on the resources you are looking for, it can be the most expensive of the three.

Pricing Trade-Offs Across the Three Tiers

Christos: I would generally sort them as shared, then dedicated, then managed, going from cheapest up. Again, depending on the resources.

Will: That makes sense. Shared is our cheapest option, dedicated is in the middle, and managed is the best option for making sure we have reliability and compatibility with WordPress and everything we are trying to do with the website. Is that a fair general comparison?

Christos: That is right.

Why LifterLMS and WooCommerce Break Shared Hosting Fast

Will: I have had this come up a lot with customer questions and client questions. On a shared website host, I see a lot of issues with performance optimization, with caching, with basic site load speed. Shared hosting is the cheapest option, but it also feels like the wild west. For someone in our audience using LifterLMS, creating online courses, memberships, quizzes, and so on, do you have any guidance? It sounds like managed hosting is the preferred way to go, but are there considerations for someone getting started on shared or dedicated, or should we try to jump to managed as quickly as possible?

Christos: It depends on the project. Shared hosting is going to give you a very low ceiling on performance, and that is not going to change. You can optimize your site as much as possible, but after a while, without knowing what resources are allocated to the shared plan, you are going to have a problem. You might have a problem from the beginning.

LifterLMS is one thing. Then there is the WooCommerce piece of LifterLMS, because you are probably going to sell your course unless you are doing it for free. All of a sudden you think, “I do not have any major plugins on my website.” Do not get me wrong, you can have thousands of plugins that each do one small job and not have a problem. But LifterLMS is a powerhouse. WooCommerce is probably the most popular ecommerce platform on the internet, and it is full of extra plugins and features right out of the box. It is not going to work very well on shared hosting.

When Shared Hosting Is Still the Right Call

Christos: I do not want to be mean to shared hosting providers, but shared hosting is not what you should pick for your WordPress site unless it is something like a simple personal page. “Hi, my name is Lucas, and these are my certifications.” No login, no dynamic anything, and you do not generally have traffic.

Will: That makes sense. When I recommend things to clients, I put static websites in that bucket, like blog-post websites, restaurant sites, portfolio sites. Sites that are not storing login information, not trying to be too dynamic, not sending frequent emails to users. Those are resources that live on the public web without much interaction. Shared hosting can be a perfectly good solution for those. It becomes a problem once you try to support a more complex application on a shared plan.

Scalability Limits and Traffic Spikes

Christos: That covers the site-complexity side. There is also actual traffic. If your site is something simple, like a restaurant menu, or a hobby site, and you get low-to-moderate traffic, shared hosting is fine. You could try it, most hosting plans go monthly. But scalability is basically zero with shared hosting. You are locked into a container of resources. You change the plan and you get a slightly bigger container, but the ceiling is very low.

Maintaining the website from the administrative side, not WP Admin but the back end of the hosting, is going to be more complicated than managed WordPress hosting. You will have something like cPanel, or webmin, which I actually like, but it is going to be a little confusing. You will click phpMyAdmin, it takes you into phpMyAdmin, you manage the database through a web browser. It works, but it is not as friendly.

Technical skills are not really required in the sense that maintenance is handled by the hosting provider to a point. Backups are usually configurable. You will be limited by general resources: allocated CPU cores, RAM, and disk space.

Will: If we did have a spike in traffic, or a lot of requests hitting the server at once, maybe we are running an LMS for a school and we have students logging in on a specific date and time to start a course, and we are expecting one hundred students to jump in on that date, shared hosting becomes a limiting factor pretty quickly.

Migrating From Shared to Managed Hosting

Will: Do you have advice on migrating from one type of host to another? Maybe I started my project on a shared host because I was learning how to set up a domain and a WordPress site, and now I am facing limitations, having to contact support because of frequent bugs, or trying to upgrade after I have built my LifterLMS courses and my whole site. I am struggling with performance and I want to upgrade. Do you have insights on doing that migration smoothly?

Christos: The first thing I would think about is the technical skills of the site owner. I would use a plugin. At the end of the day, if you have a small site, a little shop or a small brochure site, you would probably use something like Duplicator and move from one host to another.

Lots of strange things happen in migrations. Really weird things sometimes. Generally speaking, if you follow the instructions for whatever WordPress plugin you use, you will be fine. You can always take your files and your database and import them into the other hosting provider yourself, but when you are working with a dedicated or shared setup, there might be issues you have to solve yourself or hire someone to solve. On managed hosting, migrations should be handled well by the provider. At Pressidium, they are handled by our team.

Reliability and Peace of Mind for WordPress LMS Sites

Will: I have had that experience. I started building WordPress websites about eight or nine years ago on the cheapest shared plan, because I was not sure I was going to stay interested. I was on my own for setting up and migrating. As I have done more migrations over the years, I have really valued having assisted migration, or a host that handles the migration entirely.

The user-experience and peace-of-mind side of hosting matters. I had a conversation with a client yesterday about reliability. In WordPress we are building our own applications, our own WooCommerce stores, our own courses, our own memberships, instead of using a managed platform like Kajabi or Udemy where they handle everything. We are a little bit in the wild west with WordPress. We choose our host, we configure our domain, we build the application. There are a lot of moving parts. Reliability and uptime matter a lot, and I really value the peace of mind that comes with managed hosting, without having to pay a freelancer three hundred a month to patch a shared setup that cannot handle a complicated application.

Security, Compliance, and Shared Tenancy

Will: Security is a question that comes up a lot too. Is it all right if we touch on security?

Christos: Very much. If you need a certain certification, or you have to follow a specific regulation, you cannot do it on shared hosting. It is not allowed. You cannot have your patient’s data, or similar sensitive data, on a device shared with anyone else. Certifications or regulations that require certain security and privacy standards are not going to happen on shared hosting.

It is not that your site is inherently insecure on shared hosting. There is just way more room for things to go wrong. Think of it like an apartment building. Privacy and security should always be in the back of your mind, but it depends on what kind of website you are hosting.

Data Handling for LMS Websites

Will: Data handling is an interesting point. On LMS websites we take in first name, last name, address, phone number, and other sensitive information that we want stored properly. If you are concerned about compliance, or you have industry regulations, hosting matters. Do you have any lessons or insights from your work at Pressidium on data handling?

Christos: LMS sites are big, generally speaking, and they are getting bigger. You should always try to offload as much as you can. Videos, for example. You should not be hosting videos on your actual site. Use a third party, or at least a CDN. The same goes for other assets that a CDN can serve.

CDNs are important. Not as much as they used to be, but still important. The first thing customers hit is storage. “I do not fit on this plan, I have to upgrade.” Then it is the kind of storage. Is it NVMe? Is it SSD? Everything has gotten complicated. It is like fast charging on phones: fast charging, super-fast charging, turbo charging. It is all a bit much.

Reliability Through Replication and Backups

Christos: Then there is reliability. If your site is really important, and you are using some VPS from a friend hosting five or six websites, there is one server, one disk, a couple of CPU cores, some RAM. If something happens to that disk, the data is gone. What you want is replication. You want to fail horizontally, as a hosting provider or as the person taking care of your data. When one disk dies, and disks die eventually because all of these machines break, another one is there.

How many times have you had an external drive, an HDD or an SSD, that you plug into your computer one day and nothing works, all your pictures are gone? That is what happens on a single-disk VPS hosting five or six sites too. Managed hosting is architected so that does not take you down.

How to Compare Managed Hosting Providers

Will: What should our customers look at when they are thinking about hosting a complex LMS website, comparing one managed host to another? There are a bunch of managed WordPress hosts, Pressidium being one of them.

Christos: They would depend on what each managed host has to offer. If I opened WP Engine and Pressidium in two tabs, I would compare the pricing plans, storage space, features, security, and caching. When they talk about caching, I would ask what kind of caching is going on. That does sound like a buzzword, but at Pressidium we use a multi-layer adaptive cache. It is real. One layer is served off RAM, which is very fast. Another layer is served off SSD. Most sites will fit inside the RAM layer.

For picking the best plan, look at traffic. How much does your site get, and how complex is it. LMS sites tend to have big databases, so you probably want to go a little higher on resources and lean into optimization.

Multi-Layer Caching in Managed Hosting

Christos: With managed WordPress hosting you are going to get more out of your LMS website, because LMS sites have a lot of maintenance themselves. You have to keep the site updated. You have to keep students relatively happy. They have to be able to access their content and quizzes. Some information is time-sensitive, so you cannot have downtime. You do not want to worry about updating WordPress, keeping everything working well, or backups. Managed WordPress hosting handles that.

Backups and Staging Environments You Actually Use

Christos: At Pressidium we handle backups in a variety of ways. Instant backups are quick and helpful. There are longer, older backups, and even off-site backups. A staging environment is usually provided in managed WordPress hosting, so you can have two sites, do development on staging, and push a couple of buttons to move changes to production. If something goes wrong, there is a revert button.

On a shared or dedicated environment with a control panel, you would have to configure a pipeline yourself to push changes out and test them. On managed hosting, you push a button and it is done.

Will: That makes a lot of sense. Comparing features, presidium sounds like a really solid solution for an LMS. In my experience, the sites I have with the fewest problems are on a managed host like Pressidium.

What a CDN Actually Does

Will: Let’s talk about CDNs. My understanding is that our website content is served from places closer to where our audience is calling in from. If I have a user in Texas, and my CDN has a node in Texas, they get files delivered from Texas, and the website loads faster. On LifterLMS, we are talking to the database a lot, sending quiz data and enrollment data, so we still need to reach the original database, which might be in Europe or New York. Do you have advice for our users about implementing caching or CDNs to speed up their site without sacrificing the LMS features?

Christos: A CDN is for serving assets that do not have to come from the actual site. When you visit a web page, it pulls a lot of things: Google Analytics JavaScript, third-party scripts, Recaptcha, animations. Those are things you can offload. Offloading means the hosting provider does not have to serve them.

Which Assets a CDN Serves From the Edge

Christos: What is a CDN? It is a network of servers around the world that keep copies of your static assets closer to your visitors. I am in Greece. If someone in Greece visits your site, and it is hosted in the United States, there is a bit of a difference in distance. The CDN closes that gap.

For the technical people, there is a traditional CDN, and there are more advanced options with caching CDNs or platforms like Cloudflare. I am not going deep into that today, because we have a lot of non-technical people in the audience.

When you use a CDN and someone visits your site, they get the HTML from the hosting provider, and all the other assets come from CDN nodes closer to their location. Serving content closer to the visitor is huge for performance. It is easier to go to your neighbor’s house than to a friend’s house that lives across town, unless of course your neighbor is your friend.

Will: When you say assets, I want to make sure I understand. That would be image files, PDFs, video assets, audio files, and the text of our lessons? Or just the page files?

Christos: In a real-world case, custom CSS and other static assets can be offloaded to a CDN. Your WordPress site generates a CSS file based on the blocks you put together in the back end. The CSS file is a great example. It is a stylesheet that tells the web page what should be bigger or smaller, and where things appear. Those files can be served from the CDN.

Offloading Analytics Scripts for Speed

Christos: Take Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics. Normally your browser makes a request to Google’s URL to fetch those scripts. You can take a copy of the script, put it on your server, and push it to the CDN. Then it is not served from your hosting provider, and it is not requested directly from Google either. It is one or two little scripts, but each one is a small performance boost. Combine enough of them and you get a real gain.

Will: For a WordPress user who uses Google Analytics through a plugin like MonsterInsights, how might they think about optimizing that? Is it a conversation with the host or a freelancer, or is there something we can do in WordPress ourselves?

Christos: There are performance-oriented plugins that offer this exact service. There is a button that says something like, “I want my Google Tag Manager script served from my own website.” The plugin makes the request, saves a copy on the website, and if your site is behind a CDN, the CDN serves it. The request to Google’s servers is no longer made at all.

Watching a CDN Work in Browser Dev Tools

Christos: Browsers have developer tools. If you press F12 in most browsers, you get a panel with tabs like Inspector, Console, Debugger, and Network. When you visit a site, the Network tab shows what is being requested and what is being received. You can see response times and load times for each request. It is a great place to start when you want to understand a website’s performance.

I will visit lifterlms.com. The first request, the HTML for the page, comes from your server. The other requests, the stylesheets, the JavaScript, the images, are coming from the CDN. If I filter by the lifterlms.com domain, I only see the page itself. If I filter by the CDN domain, I see all the assets. Your HTML for the web page is served in a little over half a second, and the CDN assets are consistent around one second each. That is what CDNs do. They make sure the heavy static content is not being served from your server itself.

When Caching Causes Confusing Changes

Will: Can a CDN cause problems by serving a file that is not supposed to be sent from the edge, or a file that should change dynamically based on whether the user is logged in?

Christos: Problems can happen with both CDNs and caching. If you change a CSS file, edit an element, adjust a margin, whichever, the browser has to fetch the new version of the file. Same with the cache. Some people around here have changed something on their WordPress site, seen the change while logged into WP Admin, and then a friend logged in from another browser and said, “Nothing moved, what’s wrong with this site?” That is caching. The plugin cache is serving the old version, or the CDN has the old copy.

On a dedicated or shared setup, you configure that yourself. On managed WordPress hosting, you push one button that says clear cache. If you are using a caching plugin alongside managed hosting, most managed hosts try to integrate a two-way cache purge. Purge the cache on the plugin, and it also purges on the hosting provider’s side.

Understanding Browser Caching

Christos: Browser caching is another layer. Separate from the caching that happens on the server, browser caching is when you visit a site and your browser saves a copy of certain files so that next time you visit, it loads faster. It is configurable. You can tell the browser to re-request a page after a certain amount of time. Maybe after an hour, maybe after a day. That way the browser knows not to trust its old copy forever, and re-requests the version from the server, whether that version is coming from the server’s cache or not. Browser caching should be updated regularly, or at least easy to configure through a plugin. You should not have to learn how all these layers work yourself.

Final Recommendations for LMS Site Owners

Will: Coming to the end of the webinar, do you have any final thoughts? I have on the screen that lifterlms.com/pressidium is how you can get to Pressidium’s website. Managed website hosting for WordPress sounds like the smoothest way, in my experience, to host a LifterLMS site where you are collecting information, serving information dynamically, and dealing with a lot of custom considerations. Managed hosting is usually our recommendation. Christos, any final words for the audience?

Christos: Shared hosting is for simple stuff. Dedicated hosting is for really big, heavy sites, or for cases where you need more security, but it still will not have more of the end-user features, the friendly buttons, that shared hosting has, unless of course you do it yourself. Managed WordPress hosting takes all of that off the table for you. It is the most expensive, but the price difference is something you get back by not having to find someone on Fiverr or Upwork to fix things for a couple hundred dollars, when you could have paid twenty, thirty, fifty a month more and never had the problem.

Will: That makes sense. The people who can dive in and help are usually seventy-five to five hundred an hour at the minimum. Three to five hours of their time and you have already spent more than the monthly difference for managed hosting. Managed hosting is usually the way to go. Thanks so much for joining, Christos. Let us know in the comments what content you want to see from us in the future. LifterLMS and Pressidium have been making a lot of content lately. Drop a like, share the post, and let us know if you would like to see more technical stuff like we did here today, to help you and me understand the back end of hosting and how it affects an LMS website. Thanks very much for joining, and we will see you next time.