Hardware and performance

'teacher training courses' is key ... but you've already culled your own option list (2,3,and 4) if you read what you wrote.

So have you already tried to provide a 'teacher training course"?  or are you anticipating issues in advance?  Or is your site with only 30 students now slow?

Not surprising ... shared hosting is limited ... many things you cannot do to tweak performance of the server.

How many teachers?  In what settings ... by that I mean all teachers in a room with laptops connecting to the Moodle at a given time ... like from 9:00 AM til 12:00 Noon.  And what will the training for teachers contain?   videos/audios, pages, H5P content, etc..

Sometimes it's better if you know 'the devil ' rather than 'the devil you don't know'.  This to mean it might be easiest (path of least resistance for now) to go with VPS.

Some information you probably need to gather about current setup that might help in deciding which VPS package.   For example, how large is your moodledata directory? and how much free space do you have left for more files?

Comment about internal support (your option 3) ... maybe it's time for your school to review internal support and training those folks might need to take on a more robust Moodle server? 

An option you've not mentioned ... host internally, but find remote support for it - which probably won't be free but might be more affordable than other options.

'spirit of sharing', Ken

Upgrading to a VPS and hosting internally are pretty much going to take the same amount of expertise but there is a lot of help out there.  I had never used command line, never used linux and yet I managed to set up a virtual linux server and have moodle up and running within a day - and most of that was googling for instructions and getting the courage up to jump in and try it!

But Ken is right, you can always hire remote support for a local server and it is much cheaper.  Also, it would not take much to get a local server with way more resources than your vps option.  AWS might be an option too.

Hi Darren, I suggest the cost discussion might be framed like this:

1. We want to provide an online learning environment for our students/teachers.

2. OLE  should have: course enrollment controls, forums, a Quiz tool, a gradebook by course, ____  insert features required here.

3. The main choices that match our requirements are: Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, _____ (other LMS).

4. Here is the cost range for each OLE that matches our requirements: (insert cost range here). Costs may have to estimated for commercial (BB/Canvas) systems, least expensive last I checked was ~$30k)

To compare Apples to Apples, if you want support and hosting, you should probably compare a Partner's (or equivalent hosting/support) prices to Blackboard, Canvas, etc. or factor in the cost of supporting yourself.

Generally at this point there is a go/no go decision made by the school - the cost of any OLE is too much for now, or yay the cost of Moodle is much less than the alternatives, lets gets started.

Other possibilities include working with other schools, if each course is small you might get 3-4 local or regional schools together to share the cost, and then you may also be able to share courses, etc. (likely the other schools have similar training needs).

Of course you can host it, manage it, and run Moodle yourself as others have mentioned, but in my experience it helps to report to the school what the cost range of commercial options are, so they understand the value/time commitment of your contribution if you end up being the SysAdmin/Trainer/Help Desk, etc. .