Hello Lourdes,

We are a Moodle Partner in Japan and areas in the Far East not covered by a Moodle Partner. If you contact me directly, I would be happy to discuss your needs with you.

Regards,

Bill

Hi Lourdes,

Being in a situation where I both host my own site on a dedicated server and have found it necessary to occasionally use a moodle partner (Bill Burgos, as I am based in Japan) I thought I might offer my opionion.

If your site is small scale with a small number of users (I would say less than one hundred) and only likely to be in one language, then you will probably progress reasonably by hosting it yourself. However, with a site of the scale you are suggesting I think you would find that your life would be much more straightforward if you used a moodle partner. You may find that as your site grows in complexity and term of use that the kind of problems (although likely to be very few) may often not always be the kind you can fix in a straightforward manner yourself as they will also tend to grow in complexity as the site grows. The use of unicode and mixing of languages can also throw up some interesting situations that you may need to resolve. The moodle partner, as well as being highly skilled themselves, also has the ear of the developers (including the founder) and this can be extremely helpful. I had a problem recently to do with converting the mix of encodings I had ended up with on my site which has been running since a much earlier version of moodle over to unicode, and I was amazed at the lengths of time that the partner went to to ensure that the problem was dealt with in a timely manner, especially considering that I thought the fee for this task was extremely reasonable. My only regret is that I didn't start using a partner a long time ago, as it would have saved me a large amount of misdirected effort and time that could have been better spent on things I have a bit more of a talent for . . .

Best regards,

James Phillips

http://www.horsefrog.com

> If I have my own installation could somebody advice which will be the best technical architecture?. #of servers, memory size, ect...

For "personal" installations, the so called PC-architecture 1) gives you the maximum power for your money.

As the plattform Linux or Windows, depending on your knowhow. In the web-server arena million times tested LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) dominates, and all Open Source!

The other two questions are specific to China, I have no idea.

But as a fourth alternative, did you consider the possibility of somebody remotely maintaining your server in your premises? If your school is already networked and has fixed IP addressed, that could make sense.

1) the family x86 and x86-64 of Intel compatibles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86