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Hosting for Moodle Language Learning Classroom
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Hosting for Moodle Language Learning Classroom

MantisMantis Member
edited March 2013 in Providers

I am looking for some advice and recommendations on hosting to build a moodle site designed for language learning. I will have about 70 students and 8-10 teachers. I want to have their lessons and course work up as well as project assignments and classroom/conference services. I know other CMS such as Joomla and Xoops and am learning Moodle but I am not well versed with the hosting part. I contacted a few places that offered moodle shared hosting but they said for my purposes I should get VPS. I won't be ready to go live for another two months so if I can build and test until then that would be great. Hopefully some folks here can help me out as I found this site by looking for more information and it seems to be the go to place. Thanks so much in advance.

Comments

  • You need a dedicated server, and a good sys admin. Moodle is a beast and does not scale well at all, you could check the moodle forums for similar builds for specs.

  • JacobJacob Member

    Any location prefferences, as recommended above a dedicated server would be best.

  • ztecztec Member

    Is Moodle really that big of a beast?
    70 student doesn't seem like a lot to me, what specs would you recommend for the dedicated server?

  • eastoncheastonch Member
    edited March 2013

    Not a fan of moodle, but I'm sure some people around here would know of better places :)

    http://gyazo.com/1335ab3bad7f7566fb20051601bb4c32
    http://gyazo.com/ee313b1a8717e04b720f2ff74e20e3cd

  • concerto49concerto49 Member
    edited March 2013

    @ztec said: 70 student doesn't seem like a lot to me, what specs would you recommend for the dedicated server?

    Not really, assuming they they don't use it all at the same time (concurrently). You can probably get away with a 2-4GB VPS or so depending on how you've configured it.

  • TaylorTaylor Member
    edited March 2013

    I don't think moodle is a beast, I will check at college today when its busy but I have never seen it use more then 40mb ram and about 50 active. Hears its status now but its peak ram is not high at all.

    .0.898541 secs
    RAM: 33.6MB
    RAM peak: 52.6MB
    Included 430 files
    Contexts for which filters were loaded: 1
    Filters created: 1
    Pieces of content filtered: 3
    Strings filtered: 0
    get_string calls: 292
    strings mem cache hits: 258
    strings disk cache hits: 34
    DB reads/writes: 65/5
    Session: 8KB
  • HassanHassan Member, Patron Provider

    @Mantis said: I am looking for some advice and recommendations on hosting to build a moodle site designed for language learning. I will have about 70 students and 8-10 teachers. I want to have their lessons and course work up as well as project assignments and classroom/conference services. I know other CMS such as Joomla and Xoops and am learning Moodle but I am not well versed with the hosting part. I contacted a few places that offered moodle shared hosting but they said for my purposes I should get VPS. I won't be ready to go live for another two months so if I can build and test until then that would be great. Hopefully some folks here can help me out as I found this site by looking for more information and it seems to be the go to place. Thanks so much in advance.

    70 students isn't a lot. If you want reliability then I would go for a dedicated server, otherwise any KVM LEB over maybe 512MB RAM would probably work out for you. If I was in your position I would get a cheap dedi that way I have full control of the server.

  • qpsqps Member, Host Rep

    @Jack said: Recommend @qps for a dedi!

    Thanks for the mention. If we can be of assistance, please let us know!

  • I have installed a test moodle running for few months for 50 students at OPENITC 1G KVM server. No problem at all. I use it for demo and presentation.

    You may PM me for URL.

    I will keep it till end of this month, since my dedicated production server will be online next few days.

  • trewqtrewq Administrator, Patron Provider
    edited March 2013

    That's a very good student to teacher ratio.

    I have only seen moodle in production once with 600-2000 users concurrently. It was on a beast of a server.

  • shovenoseshovenose Member, Host Rep
    edited March 2013

    Well, I'm sure a good VPS would be more than enough ;) [email protected] and we can find the perfect solution for your needs at the best possible price.

  • I thought moodle can be installed on shared webhosting

  • @jcaleb said: I thought moodle can be installed on shared webhosting

    Me too thought the same seeing it under Softaculous on shared hosting. Now surprised when people are suggesting that it is a resource hungry application.

  • I can set you up with a reseller package so you can partition out a couple of VM's, I have several teachers with private reseller plans so they can do custom setups within their resource allocations.

  • @vanarp said: Me too thought the same seeing it under Softaculous on shared hosting. Now surprised when people are suggesting that it is a resource hungry application.

    In a lot of cases, yes.

  • @concerto49 said: In a lot of cases, yes.

    Sorry, did not get you. Is the YES for it can run fine on shared hosting OR it is resource hungry and so better not be run on shared hosting?

  • @vanarp said: Sorry, did not get you. Is the YES for it can run fine on shared hosting OR it is resource hungry and so better not be run on shared hosting?

    That yes it may run on shared hosting like web sites do. I know people that host SolusVM and WHMCS on shared hosting. Probably a lot of tweaks and hacks though.

    For Moodle it depends on the plugins and how many concurrent users etc.

  • Thanks for all the replies thus far, this site is great I never expected so much feedback so quickly.

    While I won't have that many students I would like to use it as a platform for virtual classroom. I was looking at Live-School which is a free unified communication tools platform dedicated for live e-teaching and realtime live education tools. (https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=block_livemood)

    As for location I am currently in NYC with the program here on the East Coast. I will also be working with Students in China.

  • If you'd like to test your idea on a 1gb KVM VPS, drop me a PM. We're happy to donate one for a while to help you get this project moving. If you are not experienced installing a LAMP stack and Moodle, we can probably manage this for you. All free of charge of course.

  • I have been talking with another professor who recommended the following to me:

    for about 100 students and 5/10 teachers
    with moodle and joomla maybe a quadxeon server
    with centos, fedora, ubunto installed and postgres/mysql server
    should be ok. no need a lot of bandwidth, 100MB unlimited or 20TB /month.

    Does anyone have any suggestions or point me in the right direction? I worry setting up a VPS might prove difficult for myself since I have no experience.

  • jhjh Member
    edited April 2013

    I think something like the following would probably be more than enough...
    4 CPUs
    4GB RAM
    30GB SSD RAID10
    1TB Bandwidth

    Fully managed (so I'll do the setup etc. to make sure it all works) for £45/month

    Let me know if this interests you.

  • You probably won't need a dedi.

    I think a good LEB (like Ramnode) would be more than enough to take care of that.

    People can actually host WordPress sites with less than 256 Mb of RAM.

  • NightNight Member

    @Mantis if you're still thinking about a LMS, check out https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

    My college uses this, but I'm not sure about system resources it would require and/or if it is more than you need.

  • Use this server you will have no problems:

    Intel Core I7 3770 Starting from
    $149.95 USD
    Monthly
    Intel Core I7 3770
    4 Cores/8 Threads
    3.4GHz/3.9GHz Turbo
    8GB DDR3
    500 GB
    20TB Monthly Transfer
    Linux/Windows OS
    5 usable IPv4 Address
    /64 IPv6 Address Block
    Remote Reboot Access
    $149.95/month

  • @BypassCensorship said: People can actually host WordPress sites with less than 256 Mb of RAM.

    64mb

  • @Mantis said: maybe a quadxeon server

    Thats a super uber ultra mega overkill

  • wilbowilbo Member

    http://www.turnkeylinux.org/moodle

    Template for a container all made up with Moodle installed, just import and install in your control panel.

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