Your membership site is not a blog. So why is it hosted like one?

Most managed WordPress hosting is built for content sites. Pages, posts, media, maybe a contact form. The metrics they compete on reflect that: uptime percentages, monthly visit limits, concurrent users.

But if you’re running a membership site with recurring payments, gated content, member directories, and logged-in user sessions, those metrics don’t tell you much about how your host will actually perform when it matters.

In this post, I break down the most common managed hosting claims, explain why they fall short for membership sites, and give you a set of better questions to ask your current or future host.

The Uptime Arms Race

99.9%. 99.99%. 99.999%.

Uptime percentages are the most common thing hosts compete on, and in 2026, they are mostly meaningless as a differentiator. If a managed host can’t keep a WordPress site online in a modern cloud infrastructure environment, that’s not a premium feature. That’s basic competence.

The more important question for membership sites is: what happens under real load?

Not load from a million anonymous visitors hitting your homepage. That’s the easy part. We’re talking about:

• Subscription renewal batches when hundreds of recurring payments process within the same window
• Logged-in member sessions of dynamic, uncached content served to authenticated users
• Member directory searches, course progress tracking, community activity all generating real database queries

These are the workloads that stress a membership site. And most hosting benchmarks don’t test for them.

The “Concurrent Users” Myth

Here’s the part that frustrates me most.

Many managed hosts price their plans based on “monthly visits” or “concurrent users,” as if every visitor creates the same server load.

They don’t.

With Cloudflare or any serious CDN in front of your WordPress site, a million logged-out visitors can hit a cached page and barely touch your origin server. The HTML is served from an edge node. Your server doesn’t even know it happened.

Static traffic is cheap. Cached traffic is cheap.

What’s actually resource-intensive is:

• Dynamic, uncached requests from logged-in members
• Ecommerce transactions and payment gateway callbacks
• Personalized content like dashboards, course progress, or account pages
• Search, filters, and real-time queries against your database

But that’s not how most hosting plans are structured. They charge you for raw traffic volume — even when the majority of that traffic never meaningfully touches your server.

That’s not infrastructure cost. That’s pricing psychology.

If you’re running a membership site with 500 active members and 50,000 monthly visitors, the visitors aren’t your bottleneck. Your logged-in members are. And your hosting plan should reflect that.

What “Managed” Actually Means (and Doesn’t)

The word “managed” gets stretched pretty far in WordPress hosting. At its best, it means the host takes care of server configuration, security patching, backups, and performance optimization so you can focus on your business.

At its worst, “managed” means managed in the ways it benefits them (and everyone else they slapped on your server).

Here are a few things I’ve seen marketed as “managed” that are actually problems:

• Locking customers out of updating their own plugins. You literally cannot click the update button in your WordPress dashboard.
• Forcing automatic plugin updates that break customizations, without your knowledge or consent. You wake up to a broken site because a plugin was updated overnight.
• Disabling plugins the host deems “vulnerable” sometimes including your ecommerce or membership plugin… without asking.
• Restricting access to server-level tools like WP-CLI or making .htaccess modifications that power users and developers rely on.

For a brochure site, some of these restrictions are reasonable tradeoffs. For a membership site that processes real revenue, they can be devastating.

When your host auto-updates a plugin and it conflicts with a custom integration you built for your onboarding flow, that’s not a security improvement. That’s an unscheduled outage on your revenue system.

The Plugin Control Problem

This deserves its own section because it’s one of the most common pain points I hear from membership site owners.

The cycle looks like this:

1. Host locks you out of managing your own plugin updates
2. Host pushes an automatic update to a plugin you depend on
3. The update conflicts with your theme, custom code, or another plugin
4. Your site breaks. Checkout stops working, members can’t log in, content isn’t gated properly
5. You contact support
6. Support tells you to deactivate all plugins and reactivate them one by one

Let’s pause on that last step.

If your website runs your business (members are paying you monthly, transactions are processing right now, people are logged in and using your site) “turn everything off and on again” is not practical advice.

It’s a help desk script. And it doesn’t work for operational websites.

Real troubleshooting for a membership site looks like this:

• When was it last working? Establish a timeline.
• What changed since then? Check the update log, deployment history, or recent code changes.
• Can we recreate the issue? Use a staging environment to isolate the problem.
• Is there an audit trail? Review server logs, error logs, and transaction records.
• Is this environment-specific? Compare staging vs. production behavior.

This is the standard I hold my team to at Paid Memberships Pro when supporting our customers. Don’t ask people to shut down their business to help them debug it.

What About Agencies?

Some membership site owners don’t choose their own hosting. They’re on hosting managed by an agency or development partner, often bundled with ongoing maintenance, design, and development services.

This is a legitimate setup, and I’m not here to say otherwise.

But it’s worth understanding what you’re actually getting. Specifically:

• Is the hosting itself optimized for your workload? Or is it a generic environment the agency uses for all their clients?
• Do you have direct access to your hosting dashboard, backups, and server settings if you need them?
• Who controls plugin updates and deployments? And what’s the process when something breaks?
• Could you move to a different host without disrupting your relationship with the agency?

The best agencies are transparent about this. They’ll tell you what hosting they use, why, and how they manage it. If you ask these questions and get vague answers, that’s worth paying attention to.

Agencies and specialized hosting aren’t mutually exclusive. An agency can handle design, development, and strategy while your site runs on hosting built for your specific workload. In fact, that separation often makes both relationships stronger.

Also: please own your own domain name.

Better Questions to Ask Your Host

If you run a membership site, here’s a checklist of questions that will tell you more than any uptime badge or visit counter:

Performance:

• How do you handle logged-in traffic vs. anonymous traffic?
• What caching layers are in place, and what gets excluded from cache?
• How do you handle renewal spikes or batch payment processing?

Control:

• Can I manage my own plugin updates?
• What’s your automatic update policy, and can I opt out?
• Do I have access to WP-CLI and server logs?

Support:

• What’s your troubleshooting process for live, revenue-generating sites?
• Do you have experience supporting membership or ecommerce workloads?
• Will you ever disable a plugin without notifying me first?

Portability:

• Can I export a full backup (files + database) at any time?
• Are there proprietary dependencies that make migration difficult?
• Do you support staging environments for testing before deployment?

If your host can answer these questions clearly and confidently, you’re probably in good hands. If they can’t, or if they redirect you to a pricing page, it might be time to look around.

Why I’m Writing This

Hosting is the number one support issue we see at Paid Memberships Pro. Not our plugin. Not WordPress. Hosting.

People come to us with broken checkouts, failed renewals, member login issues, and slow dashboards. And more often than not, the root cause is a hosting environment that was never built for what their site actually does.

After eighteen years of building membership software and supporting the people who use it, I got tired of telling customers “talk to your host” and watching them get nowhere. So we built hosting for it.

Not because the world needs another WordPress host. It doesn’t. But because nobody else is building specifically for this workload, and the people who are charging premium prices for it are often selling you a $50 DigitalOcean droplet with a $500 price tag and a support team that doesn’t understand your stack.

And let’s be honest about the landscape.

WordPress VIP wants the multi-million dollar enterprise projects. WooCommerce’s managed hosting is optimized for shops, not subscriptions. And MemberPress? They’re part of the Awesome Motive family. The same company that brings you MonsterInsights, AIOSEO, OptinMonster, WPForms, and a whole portfolio of plugins that come preinstalled on the hosting platforms you already know. Those aren’t neutral recommendations. Those are business relationships.

None of that is inherently wrong. But it means the average membership site owner (the person running a $10k-$50k/year membership on WordPress) is nobody’s priority. You’re too small for VIP, too dynamic for the budget hosts, and too niche for the big managed platforms that are optimizing for content sites and ecommerce stores.

That’s the gap. And that’s why I’m ranting about it on my personal blog instead of writing a polished product announcement.

You deserve hosting that understands what your site does. That treats logged-in traffic as the primary workload, not an edge case. That doesn’t break your site overnight and then tell you to turn everything off and on again.

That’s what we’re building. And I think it’s long overdue.