Helpful suggestions wanted for New Moodler!

Helpful suggestions wanted for New Moodler!

by Luis Martinez -
Number of replies: 2

I am completely new to moodle and so I have a few questions for the hardware set-up/hosting recommendations/requirements. I have been reading through a lot of different forum post and found that first setup seems to be the most challenging as far as gauging the right specs for a moodle environment go. My org. is looking to startup a moodle with 50 users and 3 courses. The 50 users would not be using the moodle concurrently but they would all be remote users. It's possible that we would be looking at as many as 20 "concurrent" users due to webinars.

That is where my first question lies: If we use something like bigbluebutton for online conferencing will that affect our over moodle environment or will the traffic be on the bigbluebutton server?

Secondly, the thought of having a dedicated server sounds great but for only 50 users it seems like overkill. There are thoughts of expansion to 100-500 users in 2 years. I am thinking that for starters shared hosting may be a viable option if not a virtual dedicated server. Any suggestions?

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In reply to Luis Martinez

Re: Helpful suggestions wanted for New Moodler!

by Marcus Green -
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Shared hosting is generally fine for 20 concurrent users running just moodle. Well that is what I have been doing for several years. However when you add in video/audio you get into a whole different set of performance issues. I recommend you go with climbing the plain moodle learning curve via shared hosting to start off with and then start looking into the webinar side of things.

In reply to Luis Martinez

Re: Helpful suggestions wanted for New Moodler!

by Grant Mucha -

Hi Luis, glad to see you are considering Moodle for your organization.

Shared hosting will work provided they meet the requirements for PHP and MySQL. Otherwise you may want to consider a small VPS or Dedicated server.

Shared providers typically do not take advantage of software like memcached / apc and are generally Apache based.

BBB is typically installed/setup on your own server. Therefore it will definitely affect your system's average load.

Good luck!