DH is Dreamhost. 5 nines means that your server is up and running 99.999% of the time, which is important if you have thousands of real time students and you can't afford to have service interruptions. I would suggest that using, for example, a shared DH account for a Moodle supporting thousands of realtime students would be just irresponsible, but using it for a couple of dozen concurrent students where downtime every now and then is not critical is a great way to get your feet wet, especially as to creating multiple Moodle and copying contentsd back and forth, cloning Moodles, etc. There are also quite a few Moodlers who have used DH and can offer suggestions on everything from tools like tunnelier to configuration of gmail....
I am not telling you NOT to try and roll your own from bare metal.... just that based on your description of your background this will be time consuming and hugely frustrating. As I said, read the moodle doc on FInding a Web Host which will give you some ideas on what rollling your own means. I mentioned DH because panel installs are notorious for being problematic, but DH's one-clicks have been excellent and provide for upgrade as well, though a caveat is in order in that if you start fiddling away on hacking or adding modules to Moodle, upgrades can be tricky no matter how you are doing them.....
Once you hav e your feet wet with one-clicks you can easily transition to a
CVS install and upgrade. I guess my point is that you are facing 4 major learning curves: Moodle usage, Moodle administration, system administration and curriculum design and construction. DO you want to engage on four fronts at once?
Re: Richard's suggestions.... (and this underlines my concerns) ExE and hotpotatoes for example are "free" work station based clients for developing curriculum (though the Moodle tools will work well also). Moodle might be "free" software, but you have to install it somewhere, and Richard was suggesting a place where the hosting is "free", While Moodle is open, there is quite a diff between the concept of free hosting and the concept of open software.... remember the law of tanstaafl.
Actually based on what you are describing I would look at developing a
lesson template (eXe might be a good idea if you want more granluar control of multimedia) that you can manipulate and then look at broader manipulation of files outside the gui (e.g. via
xml) For language a consideration of SMIL usage so that you can easily integrate multimedia into your lessons might be advisable. You also of course may want to look at ways to make changing keyboards easy (for example if you plan on using windows via the language bar) so that students can respond in ivrit using hebrew characters and vice-versa.....
If you have some cash, the Adobe e-leaarning suite at I think $300 US for education purchasers is an incredible buy.
