Which Platform Should I Host a Course or Membership On?
When you’re creating a course or digital subscription, one of the tougher choices you’ll face is where to host it.
Finding the perfect platform that:
has all the features you need
looks great
is easy to use for both you and your members/students
and doesn’t cost a fortune
takes a fair bit of research.
I recently had to research hosting platforms for our own courses and to make things a bit easier for you I’m sharing the results with you here.
Hosting an online program on your own website
The first choice you need to make is whether you should host your course on your own website or have a third party host it for you. If you’re going with self-hosted, there may be several options on how to do this, depending on the platform your site is built with.
Hosting a course or membership with WordPress
Hosting a course or membership with WordPress can be done in so many different ways.
In most cases, you’d host the course on a subdomain - so your main website can stay speedy and clean, but also for different other reasons we’re not going to dive into right here.
We’ve often worked with a combination of MemberPress and LearnDash, as well as Wishlist Member (as the name says, that one’s more for memberships than courses).
Our very favourite one is AccessAlly as that allows for different types of products (courses, memberships, digital products), has a great learning management system and membership options, and (most important of all) it includes a bunch of “extras” like multiple currencies, tax tracking, an affiliate plugin, gamification and quizzes - most of which you’d need to pay extra for on most other platforms.
But as with everything, choosing what you’re going to use to host your course with WordPress really depends on what you’re used to working with, and what features are most important to you.
Hosting an online program with SquareSpace
SquareSpace is another excellent option. Possibly not as robust as using some of the WordPress plugins, and not as hands-off as going with third-party hosting platforms, Squarespace is offering a built-in membership option - and there are multiple workaround to set up a course (for free) on a Squarespace website. Read more about this on Kerstin Martin’s blog! Kerstin is my go-to person for everything SquareSpace.
Hosting a course on your own platform requires you to have great attention to detail, and you’ll need to set everything up yourself; from the sales process to onboarding, right through to the payment processing and flow of the course. If you choose this route, you might want to seek help or advice from someone who’s done it before.
Hosting your course or membership with a third-party platform
A third-party hosting platform takes all the hassle out of your hands.
It makes it easy for you to upload videos and resources, quickly set up sales pages, and will also collect the money for you (if that’s what you want.)
They will handle affiliate sales: so if someone buys your course through a dedicated “affiliate link”, the platform will pay out the affiliates directly. Talking about hands-off!
If this is your first course or online program, I ALWAYS recommend starting with a third-party platform.
I’ve seen client spend months (or thousands of dollars) on setting up their course directly on WordPress, only to come to the realisation that they now want a different type of training, or it’s a lot of hassle managing signups and payments (and errors and complaints) personally, or (the most common one) it just doesn’t look as nice as if you had just put it on a third-party platform!
Switching from one platform to the other is not a huge thing as it mostly requires re-uploading videos and learning materials, and copy-pasting the copy… but it is a pity if you spent your full budget and brainspace on setting something up that’s completely customised, but not what you need.
When I looked into suitable third parties to host our courses on, I researched at least a dozen of them. Some of them didn’t seem very trustworthy, professional or robust, while others didn’t offer all the elements that I needed.
In the past years, we’ve worked with dozens of third-party hosting platforms for courses, memberships, other types of online programs and even digital products. Some only briefly (just enough time to collect the information and move it to a different platform), others at length.
Our findings are that (depending on the price of your program/products and your profit margin!) if you have a few dozen to a few hundred people signed up, it’s probably not worth setting it all up on your website - you’re better off with a third-party hosting platform that integrates with your existing website nicely.
These are the three platforms that I recommend to clients:
Not every platform is perfect for every type of business or online program though - there are a lot of extra factors to take into account.
So… which platforms do we recommend for hosting courses?
Choosing the perfect third-party hosting platform is TOUGH, believe me. Most of the time, the people who are happy with their first choice initially went with Teachable or MemberVault - which are both pretty user-friendly and not overly expensive, and allow your platform to grow as you get more students or members.
If this is not your first rodeo (maybe you already have an online program, and you’re looking to switch), there’s no one-size-fits-all-perfect choice.
Schedule a call with us if you’d like to brainstorm your options and see how we can help you level up your online business. It’s free and there are no strings attached: don’t like what we offer, at least you’ll come away with a couple of great ideas.
So what are you waiting for?
This blog post was published on The Farmish Collective, we moved the post here as the website is no longer active.
