Will Benecaster put extra load on my WordPress server?

Question

Accepted Answer

Some, yes — and it’s worth understanding before you choose a hosting plan. Here’s the honest picture.
Feed requests are cheaper than they look. Benecaster’s feed cache is per tier, not per subscriber. If you have 500 subscribers across 3 tiers, there are 3 cached RSS documents — not 500. A subscriber’s podcast app polling their private feed URL hits token validation (one database query), then the cache. With a warm cache, the entire request resolves in a handful of milliseconds and never touches the feed compilation logic. This is substantially lighter than a typical WordPress page load.
Object caching makes a big difference. If your host provides Redis or Memcached (most managed WordPress hosts do), the cache lives in memory rather than the database. At that point, feed requests at scale are close to negligible — token validation plus a memory read.
The download proxy is where load actually compounds. If you enable the optional download proxy for analytics, every time a subscriber downloads an episode, the request passes through WordPress before redirecting to your hosted audio file. For a show with frequent releases and a large active subscriber base, this can add up. The proxy is opt-in — if server load is a concern, you can get full feed analytics without it. See Download Tracking → for a full explanation of what the proxy does and when to enable it.
Hosting guidance by plan:

Free and Starter (up to 50 subscribers): shared hosting is generally fine.
Growth (up to 250 subscribers): a VPS or entry-level managed WordPress host (Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround) is worth the investment.
Pro and above: managed WordPress hosting with Redis and PHP-FPM is the right baseline. Most hosts at this tier include Redis as standard.

Podcast app polling is not as aggressive as it sounds. Apps typically poll feeds when the user opens the app, not on a fixed interval. A subscriber who checks their app once a day generates one feed request per day. 500 subscribers does not mean 500 requests per hour.