Hosting for Moodle 1.9.x, 100 - 3000 users: Advice on specification and pricing

Hosting for Moodle 1.9.x, 100 - 3000 users: Advice on specification and pricing

by Simon S -
Number of replies: 4

Greetings. I am having a related issue so I hope this is an appropriate place to post my query.

I am using moodle 1.9.x on a shared hosting (hostgator).

We have not launched to our users yet. All of the courses are lesson based with 10 minute videos. On our tests so far, the videos and pages in general are sometimes very slow to load. There have even been times where I have to reload the page. Hostgator says the speeds are fine.

I am not sure of the best and most economical solution. Please advise.

Once we launch to our clients, I am expecting anywhere from 100 to 3000 users. There is no way to determine how many will be concurrent.

I am looking at other options such as moodle partner or just going to a dedicated server or a VPS with hostgator. If anyone has advice I would really appreciate it.

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In reply to Simon S

Re: Hosting for Moodle 1.9.x, 100 - 3000 users: Advice on specification and pricing

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Your main performance issue will be delivering the video which will be independent of Moodle. The performance issues will be about network bandwidth demand and server speed rather than that PHP code execution or database speed.  Shared hosting is generally not suitable for serving large amounts of video, you need something dedicated. Then you will need to test with multiple people accessing without any cache effect.

Other issues to consider are the size and amount of compression used on your files. For example I create animations based on powerpoint slides. I have two tools I can use. One creates files with sizes that can be tens of megabytes, the other are more like single digits of megabytes due to different approaches to file creation.

 

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In reply to Marcus Green

Re: Hosting for Moodle 1.9.x, 100 - 3000 users: Advice on specification and pricing

by Simon S -

Thank you Marcus.

I wonder if a solution like having the videos hosted on wistia.com would do?

I also wonder if VPS would be a short term solution? From what you wrote below however, probably not?

Thanks again.

Simon

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In reply to Simon S

Re: Hosting for Moodle 1.9.x, 100 - 3000 users: Advice on specification and pricing

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

From my 14 seconds of research Wistia looks like exactly what you should use for the video hosting. Note that a Virtual Private Server will share CPU cycles with other web sites. So even if there are only a few other users on the machine, if one of them gets a surge of visitors it could adversley affect the performance of your site.  If you want to be confident of performance then you need to be serving from a mchine dedicated to your requirements, but of course that will cost more.

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In reply to Marcus Green

Re: Hosting for Moodle 1.9.x, 100 - 3000 users: Advice on specification and pricing

by Glenys Hanson -

Hi Simon,

Unless your videos contain extremely private and sensitive information, you might simple put the the videos on YouTube and integrate them into your course through YouTube filter. They don't necessarily have to be open to the whole world. See: How To Host Unlimited Unlisted Content On YouTube.  I haven't actually tested it though.

Cheers,

Glenys

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