A membership site inverts the usual hosting assumption. Most of your traffic is signed in, personalised and uncacheable, which changes what actually has to be quick.
The parts that decide whether a member stays are the parts a generic host does not think about.
Files served through your membership plugin's access checks rather than sitting on a guessable URL in the uploads directory. A cancelled member loses access to the file, not just to the page linking it.
Billing webhooks and renewal cron arrive together at the start of a cycle. PHP workers are sized for that burst, so a retry storm from your payment provider does not become downtime for everyone else.
Every membership plugin stores levels and expiries in usermeta, read on every request. Those reads come from memory, so query time does not climb as the member list grows.
Public pages come from the edge cache. Anything behind a login is generated per request, so no member is ever served a page rendered for somebody else.
Membership configuration is where the expensive mistakes happen. Daily backups mean a rule that locked everyone out is a restore, not a support queue.
Members rarely complain about page speed. They complain about being locked out, charged twice, or unable to download what they paid for — and all three are infrastructure as much as configuration.
A brochure site is mostly cache hits. A membership site is mostly cache misses by design, so speed is decided by the layers underneath the cache.
Every row here follows from one fact: the pages that matter are the ones a cache is not allowed to serve.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Full-page cache | Public pages only; every logged-in request bypasses | Serving one member the page rendered for another is the single failure a paywall cannot survive. |
| PHP workers | Sized from the plan's CPU allocation | Renewal runs and payment-provider retries arrive as a burst at the start of a billing cycle. |
| Uploads | Delivered through the plugin's access rules | A file URL that works without a session means the paywall is decorative. |
| Object cache | On by default | Membership level and expiry are read from usermeta on every single request a member makes. |
| Backups | Daily, restorable from the dashboard | Access rules are configuration, and configuration mistakes are how members lose what they paid for. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Start in minutes, or hand us the migration — free on every plan, no card required.