Moodle - Host Ourselves or Use Hosting Service

[gopackgo]

We used a web host last year that had a Moodle package available using softalicous. It worked fine for our two classes that used it. This year, we are planning on our whole school using it. I'm concerned about the number of simultaneous sessions that our web host says they support. That has me thinking about hosting ourselves. Our whole school is 300+ students.

 

The nice thing about someone else hosting is we don't have to worry about providing access from the outside world, backups, security, etc.

 

So, do most basic hosts like hostgator, godaddy, dreamhost have the ability to handle that many users? Or, do we need to look elsewhere or just bite the bullet and host our own?

[rob_coles]

We host our own, original reason was our Internet was rubbish. However having direct control has its benefits.

 

Our moodle is using 10+ gig now which is a lot of hosting.

 

Also can use ldap on site. Also useful having a Web server on site for your own site and many other open sourced packages like WordPress etc

[bobt]

At my previous job, the sheer volume of traffic hitting our moodle meant realistically hosting it internally was our only option. That was 1300+ students with at least 100 concurrent at any one time in school hours. If you are only 300, external could probably work for you.

[bobt]

Would avoid cPanel hosts such as Godaddy, Hostgator as they limit CPU + RAM which moodle can be quite hungry for.

[unixman_again]

We host it ourselves too. It's very handy to be able to clone your setup and practice an upgrade before you do it on the live moodle. Moodle is a great system but upgrades can be a pain, especially if you have a lot of plugins (which we do).

[ozydave]

We host ours internally on a VM. Cloning before an upgrade is a must

[wiseoldowl]

Beyond hosts like Hostgator, etc. you can use a dedicated hosting service which is run by experienced people used to running Moodle. The problem with the hosts you mention is that it is always shared space and resources will be minimal to run Moodle will be minimal. I'm not sure why these hosts still offer a service because Moodle can be resource-hungry if well used. If you expect your Moodle to be used extensively then your choice is between a dedicated host or host internally. Bear in mind that a dedicated host will be relatively expensive which for 300 students may be too costly.

[DaveMurphy]

We have Moodle hosted externally; they manage everything server side and if we get stuck we can raise a fault request for them to fix parts of the site. However they're on an old stable version 2.1? And refuse to upgrade to the latest 2.6/2.7 stable version which is bugging me now to say the least.

 

Only had downtime once this year so far (one monday evening) however if I could I'd bring it back on site (personal preference)

[FN-GM]

2.1 is no longer supported and has unfixed security flaws. So it should be upgraded ASAP.