About MemberHost
Meeting the unique needs of WordPress membership and eLearning websites.
Our founding team brings together membership site work going back to 2011 and years of server architecture. Through our sister company, MemberFix, we kept meeting the same problems on membership sites that general-purpose hosting plans weren't built for: growing without slowing down, handling many logged-in members at once, and running plugin heavy sites and communities without speed issues, errors and downtime.
MemberHost gives membership entrepreneurs fast, stable and secure hosting, backed by a99.9% uptime SLA, set up to hold up when it matters. Our team is uniquely positioned to address these niche concerns, stemming from a deep, "in the trenches" understanding of the technical demands in this space as well as the need for a non-techie, easy to use solution that just works.
Why we built this, and how we work
We started it reluctantly
We did not set out to run servers. We ran a membership site agency, and we kept hitting the same wall: hosting that did not understand how these sites work, what they need, and what happens to them on launch day. When something broke, the host would stop at the edge of WordPress, the developer would point at the server, and the site owner sat in the middle losing money. We built the hosting we kept wishing our clients had.
You get the same people
Tiered support is common in hosting, with issues passed between teams before they reach someone who works on the servers. Here the people who answer you are the people who run them and know how your site is set up, and we get on a call when a thread is the wrong place to solve something.
Everyone here works in WordPress
Our team has spent years in WordPress development, on the same kinds of sites we host: memberships, courses and communities, with the plugins that run them. So when a checkout hangs or a course page crawls, we look at the server and the WordPress side of the same request, rather than handing you back a ticket saying the server is fine.
Bootstrapped and self-owned
MemberHost is bootstrapped and self-owned, with no venture capital or private equity backing and no acquisition behind it. Staying that way is also how we stay small enough for the first three things on this page to keep being true.
One segment, on purpose
We focus on the premium segment: membership, course and community sites that are past the experimental stage and cannot afford to be down or slow. We are not trying to be the cheapest or to be right for everyone, because a one size fits all plan tends to fit nobody in particular. For a small, quiet site, a general hosting plan may be the better fit, and we will say so.
Radical transparency
Radical transparency is one of our core values, and hosting is an area where it is easy to be vague. So we would rather tell you what we do not do. We are not a 24 hour support desk. Failover runs on clustered setups, not every plan. We aim to reply within 12 hours. Ask us what your site runs on and we will tell you.
Meet our team
Vic Dorfman
Co-founder
Vic Dorfman is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and author. Vic founded MemberHost's sister company, MemberFix, in 2011, and it has built and supported WordPress membership sites ever since. Through Vic's work with hundreds of membership customers over a decade, it became clear that general-purpose WordPress hosting wasn't set up for what membership and eLearning sites need. Together with co-founders Denny Cave and Risto Karaivanov, Vic is building MemberHost into the hosting company he wanted for those clients.
Denny Cave
Co-founder
Denny is a co-founder of MemberHost and has worked on the bleeding edge of the hosting industry for almost a decade.
Risto Karaivanov
Co-founder
Risto is a co-founder of MemberHost and leads its technical work.
Ultra performant WordPress hosting for your membership site
Your site has unique technical needs: lots of heavy plugins, hundreds of concurrent users, traffic spikes. Big box hosting companies do not even know about these needs, let alone how to address them properly. But we do.