Moodle in English: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

Hi,

I have come across siteground.com as a Moodle host and was wondering what others thought of them? Are they as easy to use as they claim to be? Any problems with them? If you had a choice between them and a Moodle partner which would you choose and why?

Thanks,

Jeff

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Ken Gibson - Thursday, 28 June 2007, 4:04 AM

Jeff,

I came across siteground as a Moodle host via these forums. At that time, I managed about a dozen Moodle installations (for various purposes) across various hosting providers. i have since moved 100% over to siteground. They are by FAR the best host I have ever dealt with.

Technical support issues are handled in minutes (24/7) and they have seamlessly moved many of my shared hosted Moodle installations over to my own VPS. They host over 100,000 sites (not all Moodle ;>)

I wouldn't go anywhere else - as I have been very happy with their service.

Ken

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Jeff Mehring - Thursday, 28 June 2007, 5:28 AM

Ken,

Thanks for the input! It makes choosing siteground much easier. Siteground said they only have 8M of PHP, is this adequate for you or did you sign up for more with them?

Thanks again,

Jeff Mehring

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Ken Gibson - Thursday, 28 June 2007, 6:30 AM

Jeff,

Initially I signed up for the shared hosting (~$4.95/month) that provided the 8M. This is/was sufficient for my supported sites that had smallish traffic (say ~50 students who were not logging in each day). Rarely did the site slow down with performance issues.

For my larger sites (say with 100+ students who login each day with large bandwidth requirements - video), this wasn't enough. For that we upgraded to the professional VIPS package http://www.siteground.com/vps.htm @ $129/month. With the VPS we could easily support 500+ students w/o issue.

Site ground migrated all the $4.95 (shared hosted) accounts for free - once I realized we needed the horsepower of the VPS. They even waived the VPS setup fee.

I would recommend starting with the shared plan (as they recently significantly upgraded the hardware for the shared support) , see how it runs and then upgrade to the VPS if needed.

Ken

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Jeff Mehring - Thursday, 28 June 2007, 7:39 AM

Ken,

Thanks for the info. I was planning on starting small since I only have 3 classes of between 13 and 20 students each. So it shouldn't put too much of a strain on the system if the students are on at the same time. Siteground does seem to be very customer orientated because when I talked to them they answered a lot of my questions too and explained how they could upgrade things for me.

Again, thanks for your help. Getting an outsider's opinion helps in making the decision.

Jeff

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Ken Gibson - Friday, 29 June 2007, 2:06 AM

Jeff,

For what you need to support, I am 99% sure that their $4.95/month shared hosting plan will work. Best of luck.

Ken

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Barbara Jean Walsh - Saturday, 7 July 2007, 5:07 AM

I have a terrible time with SiteGround tech support. It just seems to go around and around. I cannot begin to navigate their so-called HelpDesk. I must be missing something. I file a ticket -- for which I am immediately charged, by the way -- and then a few days later I get an email saying the ticket has been closed due to no response (on my part), but I had no way of knowing that THEY ever responded to my ticket. At this point, I am trying to resolve a problem with the BOOK MODULE and Moodle 1.8 and I am completely frustrated with SiteGround and their total lack of support. If you know a way to get help from them, please let me know.

Barbara Jean Walsh

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Colin G. - Friday, 24 August 2007, 3:22 PM

Be wary of Siteground if you do not wish to pay the extra bucks per month for VPS.
I have private sites with siteground and it's all good but my option to choose them for our moodle site was a disastrous one.

Here's why:

We have one IP going out on the WWW and at any one time we will have 20, 30 or much much more connecting to that. Siteground does not allow that and they will not change their policies on it and only recommend you go for VPS hosting option.

So here I am backing up all our data and moving everything to our own server.
Nightmare!

Just a heads up if you have a more a handful of different IPS going out from your school then it should be fine I think.

Colin.

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Barbara Jean Walsh - Saturday, 14 July 2007, 9:45 PM

How were you able to actually talk to someone at Siteground? The only number I can find is for sales. I did join their forum, and found out there how to post a ticket by claiming my site was down -- even when it wasn't. I find their help desk to be very convoluted. Once I made contact I was able to get help, but it was a long difficult journey. Also, they did not post my original request for help on the forum, but contacted me by email saying it wasn't necessary. Which helps to explain why so many of their forum posts are very, very positive. They cull out the negative ones.

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Brenda McFarlane - Tuesday, 6 May 2008, 3:18 AM

I've signed up for siteground May 2008. It's pretty horrible. I go around and around and around. On the front end it looks like they have lots of support but it all goes to the same one or two incomprehenesible little notes. Argh! As for getting charged for a Service Ticket I remain unaware if they do this. It hasn't gone through on my Visa yet ( Service Ticket Started on Thursday and closed sometime on the week-end, it's Monday. I guess they count week-ends hours as part of the timeline you've got before they close a ticket.) I will be looking around a more easily navigated host.

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Matt Schafer - Friday, 28 November 2008, 10:12 AM

I use ihostmoodle.com and I have seemed to have good luck with it.

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Jeffrey Curwen - Thursday, 19 February 2009, 7:13 AM

I host a moodle site with siteground and now as of Feb. 2009, I can't seem to find any kind of support for moodle.
Does anyone know why?

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Mary Cooch - Thursday, 19 February 2009, 8:58 AM

I wasn't aware they DID give support for Moodle?

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Jeffrey Curwen - Thursday, 19 February 2009, 2:29 PM

They used to have tutorials and other how-to's but I noticed the links are not active....and it's difficult to ask a general question...

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Hamish Harron - Friday, 6 March 2009, 9:05 AM

There is no support for Moodle on Siteground.

I have had a moodle site for my after school GCSE Astronomy and 3 or 4 other classes for 2 years with Siteground. They were great because I'm a complete novice, I wanted to press a button and start Moodle - more interested in the getting on with using Moodle rather than setting it all up etc. It worked VERY well for 2yrs.

All went well with older Moodle versions but have just upgraded to Moodle 1.9.4 and there is a huge problem, I can't install any non-standard modules or blocks (e.g. feedback or questionnaire). I just keep getting "Detected unexpected problem in handling of PHP float numbers" error. No one on the forums seems to know why this happens but the hint is that its the Fantastico installation process or precision in PHP calculations being reduced from 14 digits. This is Sitegrounds issue, several Moodle sites hosted there have the same problem.

If you have resolved this problem or have moodle on siteground and can install your own modules please let me know.

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Jeffrey Curwen - Friday, 6 March 2009, 12:33 PM

I just had the upgrade to 1.9.4. I'm getting the same "php float numbers" error now.

I think I'll run a basic site for my courses this spring and fall until my term with siteground runs out.

Have you heard of any good reviews of bluehost?

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Eric Evans - Friday, 6 March 2009, 10:50 PM

I am currently running two difference Moodle sites on Bluehost and having no problems with them.

However, I did NOT use the Fantastico auto-installer. I manually set up the databases through cPanel and then transferred Moodle to the desired directories via FTP.

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Roger Kenner - Friday, 12 June 2009, 5:02 AM

For what it's worth, I have been using Siteground for several different Moodle sites since 2007 and have not encountered any major problems. I have run workshops with 15 or more people accessing the same items at the same time and did not run into any blockages. I must admit that the service end is a little lacking, but the price is good.

Recently I used Fantastico to install Moodle 1.9.4 for a client on Siteground. After the install, I got the PHP float numbers error in the notification panel (preventing me from going any further.) I made a ticket and got a pretty fast response.

They had added to my config.php the following line
ini-set('precision',14);

The problem was resolved.

Now, of course, I am trying to figure out their mailer problems. At first, I could not use the native php method, but had to create a Siteground mail accound and put in the smtp address and my user authentication. Now, several upgrades later, as I was about to show this to someone, it no longer worked. I've had to go back to the native method, which now amazingly works. I am not sure if the problem is at the Moodle end or the Siteground end.

Average of ratings: Useful (1)

Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Ken Gibson - Friday, 19 June 2009, 4:35 AM

Roger,

You stated....

"Now, of course, I am trying to figure out their mailer problems. At first, I could not use the native php method, but had to create a Siteground mail accound and put in the smtp address and my user authentication. Now, several upgrades later, as I was about to show this to someone, it no longer worked. I've had to go back to the native method, which now amazingly works. I am not sure if the problem is at the Moodle end or the Siteground end."

Had the same issue on my siteground shared account - took a bit to fix.

For phpmailer issues - look at your php error log in /admin folder from running crons. Had this error many times from phpmailer trying to run:

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/[17-Jun-2009usr/local/php52/lib/php/extensions/ldap.so' - libldap-2.2.so.7: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

A php upgrade a few weeks ago broke support for the "default" moodle php mailer. Siteground fixed this issue last night for me. Then - go here and apply this hack: http://oscarvalles.wordpress.com/2008/08/31/moodle-error-could-not-instantiate-mail-function/

For smtp issues - siteground is running port 2525 for SMTp outgoing for me. So make sure that your first field (mail server) is something like mail.mysitename.com:2525

Good luck.

Ken

Average of ratings: Useful (1)

Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Bronwen Campbell - Friday, 17 July 2009, 3:52 PM

Ken,

You commented that Siteground fixed this issue - what did you ask them and what did they do? I tried to implement the hack you suggested, but while it got rid of the error message on running the cron, no e-mails were being sent! So I have reverted to what I had, which is that the messages and account e-mails are working fine, but still no forum e-mails.

I think it was the PHP upgrade as all my sites have the same forum mail error, even those on a completely different siteground account, so can't have been anything I did on the site itself. Since siteground won't help with application issues (and fair enough too since they provide such a low cost service), I'd really like to know what question to ask them regarding PHP and see if that fixes it.

I'm on Moodle 1.9.4 and the only options at Siteground for PHP versions are 5 and above, so other suggestions to go back to a 4.xx version won't work.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards,

Bronwen

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Ken Gibson - Tuesday, 21 July 2009, 4:25 AM

Hey Bronwen,

>>>You commented that Siteground fixed this issue - what did you ask them and what did they do?

Here is the trouble ticket dialog (note they don't tell me what they did - just that they fixed it):

Description:

Troubleshooting a phpmailer issue with our Moodle install.

looks like this is the error message causing the issue:

18:01:01] PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/[17-Jun-2009usr/local/php52/lib/php/extensions/ldap.so' - libldap-2.2.so.7: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

been going on since May 1st - php error log in:
/public_html/admin

Thanks!

2009-06-17 06:51pm/b> by Kiril.I -

Hello,

Thank you for contacting our Help Desk.

I would like to inform you that we have managed to resolve the issue correctly.

We have monitored your admin/php_errorlog file for a while and no error message was received on our end. Please check the results on your end.

If you need further assistance please do not hesitate to contact us again by opening a new ticket.

Best Regards,
Kiril I.
Support Team

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>>> I think it was the PHP upgrade as all my sites have the same forum mail error, >>> even those on a completely different siteground account,

Yes - it is a PHP issue for sure, and not isolated to site ground. Having said that, using the hack I posted above and the siteground support "tweak" (whatever they did) - did fix the issue for using the phpmailer for all emails.

BUT - shortly thereafter I moved everything over to the SMTP settings (as future php upgrades by siteground could/would? break the phpmailer again). The SMTP settings would therefore remain static.

>>>I'm on Moodle 1.9.4 and the only options at Siteground for PHP versions are 5 >>>and above, so other suggestions to go back to a 4.xx version won't work.

Yes. I assume you have seen this:

http://kb.siteground.com/article/How_to_have_different_Php__MySQL_versions.html

this indicates only being able to rollback to php 5.X.

Ken

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Bronwen Campbell - Tuesday, 21 July 2009, 9:49 AM

Thanks for your help Ken,

Have decided to take your advice and use SMTP. So far it's working just fine (not sure why I had difficulty previously when I had tried SMTP, as I thought I had used the same settings).

So it looks like key thing with Siteground is to use SMTP with port 2525. Note that their current conditions for shared hosting are maximum 40 recipients per e-mail and 400 e-mails per hour. So I've set the maximum number of e-mails per SMTP session to 40. I have yet to test what happens when the number of recipients exceeds 40 - I hope that it splits it into multiple sessions and does send out all e-mails. We'll see!

Thanks and regards,

Bronwen

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Ken Gibson - Wednesday, 22 July 2009, 6:09 AM

Hey Bronwen,

Good to hear that you are back up. Thanks for the SMTP mail limit on the shared siteground set-up (was not aware of this before). Had not run into that yet, but we are well below the posted limits.

Ken

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Roger Kenner - Saturday, 12 September 2009, 3:39 AM

I have found the solution to the email problem, with a little help from the Siteground technical support. It is not all that obvious at first, but makes sense in the end.

One must set up at least one bonafide email account on the site, so as to be able to authenticate with Siteground's SMTP. (The native php method does not work, as cron.php does not have a sufficient level of permission to run it).

Assume a domain abc.com
an email account xx@abc.com
with password yyy

Here are the Email settings that matter:
SMTP hosts: abc.com
SMTP Username: xx@abc.com
SMTP password: yyy

(Now here's the tricky part!)
No-replay address: xx@abc.com ( I am not certain it must be the same, but it must be a bonafide email address on your domain.)
Support name: xx@abc.com ( I am not certain this field figures in the outcome)
Support email: xx@abc.com

Why these two other fields? Apparently the info from these fields (Default being: no-reply@domain.com and admin@admin.com) finds its way into the FROM: field of the mailer. But Siteground does not allow its SMTP to send out mail whose FROM: address is not a bonafide Siteground email address (I am not 100% certain it has to be from the same domain, but I would guess so.). Such a policy probably prevents people from using their SMTP to spoof other people's email.

This policy may have been somewhat recent. I seem to recall my Moodle on Siteground could and did sent out forum mail in the past. I did a workshop for beginners and came home to find tons of email messages from their forums. My support email address was one not on siteground. That is probably what killed it.

I hope this will help others.

Roger Kenner

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Vincent Hermosilla - Wednesday, 28 July 2010, 12:06 PM

Hey Roger,

I'm having the same issue with the mailer. If I use the native (leaving the smtp field blank) my forum post won't email to subscriber. If I use my smtp server, I get the wrong reply-to email address.

I've been using the smtp account, but I would love if the reply-to would work.

Do you have any tips. I'm running the latest built.

Thanks,

Vincent

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by natalie_n_nellsson boijacks - Sunday, 5 June 2011, 7:55 AM

@font-face

Moodle 1.9.12+ Build: 20110525

Recently I used SiteGround’s cPanel to install Moodle on Siteground. After the install, I get the error message “we could not connect to the database you specified… please check your database settings” in the notification panel, preventing me from continuing the installation.

Can you help me with this matter?

Nat

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Hamish Harron - Friday, 6 March 2009, 9:10 AM

There is no support for Moodle on Siteground.

If you have resolved this problem or have moodle on siteground and can install your own modules please let me know.

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Ken Gibson - Thursday, 19 March 2009, 6:17 AM

Harish,

Sorry for the slow reply:

Running Moodle - Moodle 1.9.3+ (Build: 20081210) on a VPS setup with siteground using PHP Version 5.1.6 and have no issues.
Running Moodle - Moodle 1.9.2 (Build: 20080711) on a shared hosting account with siteground - PHP Version 5.2.5 and have no issues.

Although I am running Moodle versions older than yours, I would point out that your Moodle 1.94 issues may be realted to the PHP version that is running. In my VPS account I have the option of which version of PHP to run, but that is NOT the case with the shared hosting account.

The fix for you is also posted at the bottom of this thread:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=114945

Ken

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Jeff Forssell - Saturday, 25 April 2009, 12:48 AM

When I was trying to upgrade my Moodle on Siteground, it wasn't working on account of old PHP. I contacted support and they said that they couldn't change it on the server (because other users might get complications in their uses) but they could move my account and content to another server with a later PHP which they did in an hour or so. I don't think they even docked me a service ticket.

I think you have 6-7 free tickets per year.

But finding how to get there is very frustrating. You follow various trails that lead you to what they hope are already written answers. I also found that I had to answer "my site is broken/down" or something like that before I got to a support form.

Otherwise they have functioned well for me. But I have a light load.

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Jason Hollowell - Saturday, 2 May 2009, 9:21 PM

I realize this thread started a long time ago but since there are recent posts I thought I'd add my 2 cents worth. I used Siteground after Globat and wasn't satisfied with either. Siteground was admittedly much better than Globat but they put a serious limitation on how much service I could get in terms of tech support without trying to charge me extra. That, coupled with a few other issues, (cron support wasn't frequent enough) encouraged me to switch again. I searched around at the time and settled with Bluehost. I have been very very pleased with their service and have been using them now for almost three years.

I no longer host my Moodle site with them only because I'm hosting it myself but they have been extremely helpful in getting it set up so my domain sends all web traffic to my IP but they still host my e-mail. I would pay more than what they charge for the friendly and very efficient support.

Jason

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Ivo Antoniazzi - Friday, 5 June 2009, 11:51 AM

I don't have words to describe my frustration with this company. There is no way to start a tech support ticket and their Q&A and KB sections are just a waist of time. Right now, Moodle is not sending emails out and I am at a total loss but start the process of moving my Moodle site out of there.

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Barbara Schroeder - Friday, 5 June 2009, 1:50 PM

I recently switched my hosting from GoDaddy (their support is very limited and I cannot believe they can survive on such a confusing, poorly designed website/interface) to SiteGround and really would recommend Siteground's hosting. They are very responsive and include the necessary requirements for a dynamic site, such as drupal and Moodle.

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Jeff Forssell - Monday, 6 July 2009, 3:11 PM

I found that getting to Sitegrounds support was (I quote from a previous post in this thread):

But finding how to get there is very frustrating. You follow various trails that lead you to what they hope are already written answers. I also found that I had to answer "my site is broken/down" or something like that before I got to a support form.

Once I got THERE the support was pretty good.

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by Barbara Schroeder - Friday, 12 June 2009, 6:42 AM

We are using Moodlerooms as our hosting service for a pilot we are conducting with Moodle for our department. All is going pretty well, the service is good and the price is right . . . only $5 per student PER YEAR for their premier package. Of course you cannot access the source files and do any kind of modification, but for us, it saves time, money (no extra server hardware), and the updates/cron/course backups are handled easily.

We have seen our little site grow from a few users to almost 400 right now.

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Re: Siteground.com as a Moodle host

by miguel quintero - Sunday, 23 August 2015, 12:19 AM

long I'm using SiteGround and have not had any problems does and I could adapt smoothly moodle

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