The HostCrafter Stack: What Your WordPress Site Runs On

Last updated September 6, 2026

Every WordPress site on HostCrafter runs on the same stack, on every plan. We call it the HostCrafter Stack. This is what it is made of.

Web server

LiteSpeed

PHP

8.1 – 8.5, per site

Database

MariaDB

Object cache

Redis

The HostCrafter Stack

LiteSpeed

The web server is LiteSpeed. Two things follow from that, and they are the only two most people need.

• Caching is fast and is already set up. A new site serves cached pages from the first visitor with nothing for you to configure.
• .htaccess works. Redirects, rules and anything a plugin writes behave the way the guides on the internet say they will, which is not true of every fast server.

You are free to run whichever cache plugin you prefer. See WordPress Caching: How It Works Here, and Which Plugins to Use.

PHP

PHP 8.1 to 8.5, and you choose. The version applies to the whole account by default and any single website can be pinned to its own, which is how you test an upgrade without moving everything at once. See How to Change Your PHP Version.

Databases

MariaDB, with a separate database and its own login for every website. You can create more for your own scripts, and phpMyAdmin opens them from the panel without a password to type. See How to Create a MySQL Database.

Caching

Two caches, doing different jobs:

• A page cache, which stores the finished page and serves it to the next visitor. This is the one that matters for almost every site, and it is on by default.
• An object cache on Redis, which helps the pages a page cache cannot serve: carts, checkouts, logged-in dashboards. A switch per website, included from WP Pro upwards. See Redis Object Cache: When to Turn It On.

Storage

NVMe throughout. The fastest storage in general use, and a large part of why an uncached page still comes back quickly.

Security and Isolation

Your account is separated from every other account on the server, and each of your websites has its own space, its own database and its own resources. A busy site of yours cannot slow down a quiet one, and nothing outside your account can reach inside it.

Sensible protections are on from the day a site is created rather than being something you switch on later, and per-website attack blocking is in the panel for you to control. Malware scanning runs on a schedule, and anything it finds is quarantined rather than deleted, so nothing disappears without you seeing it first.

What Is Included

• Email, with mailboxes and webmail on your own domain. See How to Create a Professional Email Address.
• DNS, on our own nameservers, so a domain pointed here needs no third-party account.
• SSL, free on every plan and every domain, renewed automatically.
• Backups, nightly and free. See Automatic Backups.

Questions