Yes - the site is hosted so I’ve got in touch with the provider to find out how they can help. This has really knocked me for six - any idea why/how it happened? Everything was ticking along nicely till this evening when suddenly the error message started up. Haven’t changed any settings in the meantime.
Yeh - the setting is unsuitable for Moodle (cutting a long story short). You've got lucky up until now.
OK - thanks everyone.
Moving forward, I've been thinking I have two main options open to me at the moment.
1. The Moodle is very new and therefore only has a few courses uploaded. If I make manual backups of these, then rebuild the site from scratch using MySQL instead of MariaDB, would this help prevent the problem happening again in future?
2. Upgrade my hosting package to VPS so that I have access to such files. My service provider has given me a choice of options at https://www.ecowebhosting.co.uk/?page=vps. I'm speaking to a technician on Monday about it, but would appreciate any advice users here might have in the meantime. Do the prices look reasonable against comparable packages elsewhere? Which package do you think would be most suitable for a Moodle platform that is likely to have a maximum of around 200 visitors per month? I would imagine there will be a maximum of forty users logged in at any one time, and even this on exceptionally busy times.
As a teacher, I am paying all the costs of my Moodle for around 350 students. At times I have asked a whole class of around 60 students to log on simultaneously and peak loads some evening is maybe 10-20 students, mostly doing quizzes.
I started of with around a $2 a month hosted service and upgraded to a VPS this semester with 4G of Ram. Backups ( now small because the semester is young) run at under 30% of CPU and in class it is always under 10% CPU. The service has run without downtime for over a month now.
I am paying considerably less than the prices in your link but I would not like to make a recommendation. I don't know how big a risk I am taking in selecting such a low cost service and I back up every night and still have my hosted service ready to go. Support, reliability and consequences of having to rebuild Moodle and loss of student's work all have to be considered.
I started of with around a $2 a month hosted service and upgraded to a VPS this semester with 4G of Ram. Backups ( now small because the semester is young) run at under 30% of CPU and in class it is always under 10% CPU. The service has run without downtime for over a month now.
I am paying considerably less than the prices in your link but I would not like to make a recommendation. I don't know how big a risk I am taking in selecting such a low cost service and I back up every night and still have my hosted service ready to go. Support, reliability and consequences of having to rebuild Moodle and loss of student's work all have to be considered.
Thanks James that is really helpful. I need to make sure that the servers remain in the UK to comply with data protection, so I’ll have a look around to see what I can find. I know you are hesitant about making a recommendation, by could you point me to your providers website so I can have a look?
Thanks once again, James. That is incredibly useful. The site looks interesting.
Point 1 - the MariaDb is a community-developed fork of MySql. Seems to be standard on installs and nothing to be concerned about.
OK thanks. That's good to know and will save me a lot of wasted time trying a fresh install. I'm not quite sure why my provider says that it offers Moodle if the default db configurations prevent users from posting resources. Anyway, I'm going to shop around different providers to see what they might offer.