Important Moodle Web Hosting Elements That You Should Consider

A website is the face of your business and it is the most cost effective means to promote your services or products of your organization. And if you are the owner of an educational or training institute, then you will have to select an LMS to build your site so that it can offer a collaborative environment online. Moodle is one of the most popular LMS used by the educators to create their site as it helps to achieve impressive business outcomes. Online course management has become easy with this popular tool and not only this, it provides a platform where the students and teachers can easily interact with each other and study.

Now that you have already decided to develop your website using a Moodle LMS, it’s time to search for a reliable Moodle hosting service provider, so that your site can run at optimum performance. There are many site owners who are unhappy with their performance and are not clear about the reasons behind this.

Here in this blog, I will help you to understand few important elements of Moodle hosting, so that you can carefully choose the settings within the hosting provider’s platform.

Technical requirements:

To accommodate your Moodle hosting needs, you need to keep few essential things in mind. Gaining some technical knowledge will make things easier in the long run. The platform is developers within Linux, using Apache, MySQL/ PostgreSQL/MariaDB and PHP, which is also known as the LAMP platform. If you have plans to install it on a Windows server, then you will need the installation of Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012.

There are varied hardware requirements for the installation of Moodle. A minimum processor of 1GHz is needed, but the more, it is better and when it is about memory, 512 MB is the minimum requirement and we recommend over 1 GB.

Choosing your server for Moodle hosting is also a crucial thing. It depends on the requirements as your server can be anything from a desktop PC that is used for testing or evaluating to a clustered or a rack mounted solution. No matter whatever your choice, it is important to understand how to configure the different parts of the software stack. Your hosting provider should provide all the settings including the PHP version.

Important security elements: 

When you are prepared with your Moodle installation, keep security as your top priority and ensure that your web hosting service provider offers appropriate security measures from the beginning throughout the process and also prevents any problems that may crop up. So, check that your host provider offers a good and effective backup, so that you get the best restoration procedures. Load software or services that you are going to use and perform regular updates and also consider the security in terms of layers.

Keep your Moodle updated with every release and use strong passwords for both the users and administrators and set up a password policy that can help you to maintain the overall security. A password that consists of upper case, lower case, non-alphanumeric characters or any other combination are preferred. Remember to use firewalls, though they don’t guarantee protection, but they are certainly not going to cause any harm.

Some other elements: 

Compression of files: 

You should ensure that your control panel enables you to compress files that are larger than 20 megabytes. This is important because if you need to change your hosting service provider, then you will have to do it by SSH and this requires expertise in Linux.

Location of the Moodledata folder:

You should check that the location of the Moodledata folder should not be in the public folder, but is should be outside the public folder. This may create problem if ever in the future you choose to migrate your site to a different server.

With the above tips, it will now be easy for you to understand the basic elements that you need to successfully host your Moodle website and keep it running.