My school is about to embark on using Moodle, I am unsure as to what hosting package to opt for and would like some advice. My school has approximately 1700 pupils, can anyone tell me what size of hosting web space we should be looking at.
Thanks.
There's not an easy answer - it depends on what materials you will be storing in your Moodle site. What you want to worry about is huge PowerPoints and multimedia files - these eat up disk space. The number of pupils hasn't got much to do with it, and 1700 isn't a big number in the scheme of things.
I suspect it doesn't matter much though. Even the smallest hosting services will come with enough space to get you quite a long way. I would make sure you have the option to easily increase your quota if you need it.
BTW - this should really be in the servers forum, not here
I suspect it doesn't matter much though. Even the smallest hosting services will come with enough space to get you quite a long way. I would make sure you have the option to easily increase your quota if you need it.
BTW - this should really be in the servers forum, not here
Discussion moved to the Servers and Performance forum, as suggested. 
Thanks Howard,
Sorry it was in the wrong forum area, put it down to me being new to Moodling.
I would be interested to hear if you have any comments on the hosting service offered by SiteGround. They appear to specialise in hosting Moodle sites and with the support they provide, do you think this would be a better proposition than hosting Moodle on our own school servers?
Regards,
Tony
Perhaps it isnt necessarily the ammount of students that you need to factor, but the number of courses you plan to do. Students don't really take up all that much data space, it's the courses that really eat that up. What I would recommend is to maybe ask one of your teachers how much data they would put on it, and then maybe multiply that by your number of expected courses. However, never sell your server/hosting choice short. We ended up housing our own server and got 5x300GB in RAID5, this will let us expand immensely, I guess it all depends on what you want to do NOW and where you want to go LATER.
Best of luck!
--Richie Foreman
Mesa Public Schools, Mesa Arizona.
You could do the calculation yourself:
During the first semester:
You conduct N courses.
Average amount of course material per course V MB
Per course there are M students on average
Average amount of data a student supposed to upload W MB
At the end of the semester your course material will take up N(V + M*W) MB.
Additionally there are the Moodle PHP files, thay don't take up much space.
Then there are the MySQL-data. Can somebody give an estimation?
Logfiles, tmpfiles they should be cleared periodically. Have no figures either.
Continue the calculation for the 2nd semester. Think how many courses will be deleted, how many kept. and so on.
Anyway, always multiply the results by 20, at todays HD prices there's simply no reason to count pennys hier.
During the first semester:
You conduct N courses.
Average amount of course material per course V MB
Per course there are M students on average
Average amount of data a student supposed to upload W MB
At the end of the semester your course material will take up N(V + M*W) MB.
Additionally there are the Moodle PHP files, thay don't take up much space.
Then there are the MySQL-data. Can somebody give an estimation?
Logfiles, tmpfiles they should be cleared periodically. Have no figures either.
Continue the calculation for the 2nd semester. Think how many courses will be deleted, how many kept. and so on.
Anyway, always multiply the results by 20, at todays HD prices there's simply no reason to count pennys hier.