Cheap hosting for Moodle?

Cheap hosting for Moodle?

by Juan Jose de la Mora -
Number of replies: 30

I went through the hosting section of Moodle, and apparently there are not many options available right now. I have 3 servers in a World Class data center being managed, which generate a tremendous (at least for Mexico) costs load of 1,000 USD a month. If any of you need a place to host Moodle, and classes, I would be glad to support you with a "pay what you can" plan.. I definitely need to close a bit on my costs!!!!

Are there any guidelines for these kind of offerings? Pls, this is not a "cheap sales speech", I only need to level a bit my income vs my costs.

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In reply to Juan Jose de la Mora

Re: Cheap hosting for Moodle?

by Bryan Williams -

I'm not sure this is an appropriate posting for the Open Social Forum, as it is a solicitation for Moodle business. Perhaps you should consider making this post in the Moodle For Business Uses course, or better yet, why not join the Moodle Partners program where you can solicit your hosting services directly to other Moodle businesses. 

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In reply to Bryan Williams

Re: Cheap hosting for Moodle?

by Juan Jose de la Mora -

I am kind of new in Moodle, I agree, probably those forums are better. I will check those options...

Regards,

JJM

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In reply to Juan Jose de la Mora

Re: Cheap hosting for Moodle?

by Juan Martinez -

Hi Juan,

I would like to check you offer, please send me an email will cost about it. Also take the below advice about business partner. Thanks,

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In reply to Juan Jose de la Mora

Re: Cheap hosting for Moodle?

by Max Zúñiga -
I needed cheap hosting for moodle and got a tip from a teacher in Vancouver,Canada,
pointing me to: http://www.netmondo.com
I checked them out ,is $2.00 a month plus moodle hosting included .and a free domain
my new moodle is there now.:zuniga.ca
Servers are in Louisiana ,USA


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In reply to Max Zúñiga

Re: Cheap hosting for Moodle?

by Juan Jose de la Mora -

Thanks for the tip!!!!! I will check what they are implementing... By the way, you pay 24 usd for a domain and hosting for a year? Is it a www.yourname.com domain? is it shared? I find those prices astonishing!

Regards,

Juan Jose

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In reply to Juan Jose de la Mora

Re: Cheap hosting for Moodle?

by Art Lader -
FYI: I have several accounts with Netmondo and can't complain.

-- Art
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In reply to Art Lader

COMPLAIN ABOUT NETMONDO

by Pio Garcia -

I have a SERIOUS complain about NETMONDO. I have 3 accounts with moodle. Two of them are courses in the University of Cordoba (Argentina) with several students.

Last Saturday I had an exam with moodle (1800 students..) and the account was suspended, I dont know why. My account is www.psicounc.org

I send SEVERAL messages to Netmondo, and I still wait for an answer. I try to use "online help", but I dont receive any answer.

Most of this course is online, so my students dont have any other place to get information.

Pio Garcia

University of Cordoba, Argentina

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In reply to Pio Garcia

Re: COMPLAIN ABOUT NETMONDO

by W Page -
Hi Pio!

It sure enough is suspended.

I was going to use NetMondo for a Moodle site that would involve High School science courses.  I sent 2  e-mails asking about streaming video.  I have not heard back from them for over 3 - 4 months.  I also believe that I saw some postings at Moodle regarding either termination or suspension (I cannot remember which) of sites because of what Netmondo felt was excessive bandwidth use.  Soooo, I paused a bit about using them.

If I am incorrect about this, I request correction from another Moodler who uses them or remembers the posts.

I do not know what type of Moodle plan you have with them.  They may have thought you were using excessive bandwidth on your site.  Also, I cannot believe or understand why they did not contact you about  a problem before taking such drastic action.

Did you have to copy 1800 exams and then hand them out to the students or delay the exam?  Gosh!!!

WP1
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In reply to Pio Garcia

Re: COMPLAIN ABOUT NETMONDO

by Don Quixote -
Hi Pio,

I don't know why your account has been suspended one day before the exam, but do I understand it correctly, that you intended 1800 students to take an online exam?

If so, I believe that this would simply have killed the server, because at the start of the exam 1800 students would almost instantly request pages. Also I am sure that during the exam a netmondo account couldn't handle 1800 students working on your website.

Netmondo is the cheapest hosting provider I've ever seen. That means that they pack many sites (probably hundreds) on one server. Even if you had a fast dedicated server for you alone, I doubt that it could handle it.

It's a pity that many hosting providers only talk about how many NNN GByte bandwidth and NNN GByte disc space you get, because this is only one performance aspect. In fact the bandwidth is a network performance aspect and doesn't say anything about what the server (the CPU) can perform.

Unfortunately sales and marketing are always very dangerous areas, which disappoint customers very often when they realize what they haven't been told. sad



Greetings
Andreas
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In reply to Don Quixote

Re: COMPLAIN ABOUT NETMONDO

by Brett Drinkwater -

I agree with the previous post, 1800 students using the one moodle account on a normal web hosting service is doomed to fail.

I know there are a variety of good hosting operators out there, however, I'd like to recommend a good provider based in Texas, Atjeu Hosting.  They provide Virtual Private Server accounts starting at US$35 per month, with no setup fees, and auto installation of Moodle using Fantastico.

I have been using them for over 12 months and not just for Moodle, but a varitey of other php/mysql open source applications.  The network performance is brilliant. Service is timely and very efficient.

Can't praise them enough.

Cheers

Brett Drinkwater
Tasmania, Australia

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In reply to Don Quixote

Re: COMPLAIN ABOUT NETMONDO

by Pio Garcia -

My complain is about the silence of Netmondo since Friday.

We have a place with 80 machines, and the students have 30 minutes to take the exam. We have to spend the complete day to take the exam to all the students....

I dont know why Netmondo suspend my site. It is the SECOND exam. The first one was with the same students a moth ago (1800 students). So, if we spend too many resources now, it was the same situation a month ago. Also the suspension was a day before the exam.

May be you are right about cheap hosting, but until now I was very happy with Netmondoand I repeat it, we have using this hosting very hard in the past, I dont know what change now.

Greetings

Pio

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In reply to Pio Garcia

Re: COMPLAIN ABOUT NETMONDO

by W Page -
Hi Pio!

Have you sent a message via their "Help Desk" on their home page,
http://netmondo.com

It is now 9.53 p.m. in New York and I see on their site that the Help Desk is "online".

Try to reach them by using that. It looks like an online help chat program.

Hope this helps,

WP1
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In reply to Pio Garcia

Re: COMPLAIN ABOUT NETMONDO

by W Page -
Hi Pio!

I clicked on your site link today.  The browser indicated the site could not be found at all.

Again, I suggest you try the "Help Desk"  on the HomePage of the site.  It is 10 am in New York right now and the Help Desk is saying "online" again.  Looks like you may be able to make direct contact with someone if you use this.

WP1
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In reply to W Page

Re: COMPLAIN ABOUT NETMONDO

by Pio Garcia -

Hi, WP1

Yes, I try several times to use online help, but nothing happened.

Thanks for your help and concern.

 

Pio

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In reply to Pio Garcia

Netmondo is best for small classes

by Don Hinkelman -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers
Hi Pio,
I understand your problem very well. I have four Netmondo sites and their response has been sporadic recently. However, that is OK for me because all my sites are for small classes and teacher associations. I think Netmondo is perfect for that.

For production servers with large classes, I have never recommended Netmondo, and I think no one has on these forums. For $29/year, do not expect so much. For large classes you need your own server or a hosting service with a lot of capacity and service. That kind of service costs money. Moodle.com offers the best service and at $2400/year it is a bargain.

Now you said you gave an exam for 1800 students. Absolutely, to do that you need your own servers. Netmondo did not suspend your service, you totally overloaded it. I did the same kind of exam on my server and the whole system shut down.

If you gave say, a 50 question exam to even 80 students simultaneously, you will need a minumun of one very high performance dedicated server machine from my experience. I could use a 1.2ghz Mac as a server for up to 80 students simultaneously. Now I have a 3.2ghz Linux with 2gb memory and can do 100-150 students simultaneously. Quizzes are a very heavy load, and simultaneous testing is extremely heavy. I recommend you purchase 1-2 servers or consider doing the test with fewer students at the same time. Please feel free to ask more questions about this and good luck smile

P.S. Netmondo recently purchased two other hosting companies and have not been able to cope with handling the service load despite hiring 4 more service technicians. I agree with Martin, that moodlers should go to Moodle Partners (or don't complain when things go bad with inexpensive providers wink ).
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In reply to Don Hinkelman

Re: Netmondo is best for small classes

by Joe Baud -

I don't have any experienc ewith Netmondo, but when something is 10% of the cost of it's competitor there is a reason, and it's not just because it's better.  Where one thing is different a second thing will be different.  In this case , I suspect that Netmondo is looking for average customers, uder utilizers.   That doesn't mean they are not a good host for a lot of us. 

However, if you have 1800 studends you can afford and should buy the best service you can get and that may be in your own data center.  You should also make a substabtial contribution to moodle.org to support all the great developers who have contibuted to this great product.

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In reply to Joe Baud

Re: Netmondo is best for small classes

by Pio Garcia -

, the public University is free. We dont receive any money for the amount of students, and our salaries are around 150 dollars per month (we are in the 3er world..). So it is a little difficult for us to make a substantial contribution to Moodle.

Anyway, my point is about communication with servers providers. I still havent any clue about what happened with my site or how to resolve this problem and my students are still waiting

 

Pio

Greetings

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In reply to Pio Garcia

Re: Netmondo is best for small classes

by Don Hinkelman -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers
I still havent any clue about what happened with my site or how to resolve this problem and my students are still waiting

Pio, I am afraid you will not hear from Netmondo for a long time, maybe weeks. As I mentioned, they are overloaded and cannot handle their committments. Also your requirement is far too large. If your need is urgent, I would be happy to host your exam on my server and I am sure some other Moodlers could help. My server could probably handle about 200 more users--unfortunately 1800 would be too much. Just send me your zipped backup of the course to my school email <hinkel@sgu.ac.jp> I know the situation in Argentina and admire you for pushing ahead with few resources. smile

P.S.  I just noticed Andreas has set up a service that might help you.  Go to...
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=9276
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In reply to Don Hinkelman

Re: Netmondo is best for small classes

by Pio Garcia -

Don:

Thank for your offer. We are now trying to move back to the servers of the university and evaluate again our strategy. Right now our concern is communication with students (they are trying to reach www.psicounc.org and nothing). Yes, the service of Andreas could be a great solution.

Thanks again for your concern.

Pio

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In reply to Pio Garcia

Re: Netmondo is best for small classes

by Rudy Scott -

One thing I've found useful is to register my domain name with a seperate comapny (I use dotster.com) rather than have the hosting company register it.  That way if something does go wrong with the hosting, I can always redirect my domain somewhere else (propagation does take a couple of days, but it's better than having no recourse).  Of course, this doesn't help now, after the fact.  sad

--Rudy

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In reply to Pio Garcia

Re: Netmondo is best for small classes

by elearning edu -
Hi Pio,
I do have an account with netmondo.  I had the problem in the starting of the service itself.  They made me to wait and work on the temp arrangement for more than three weeks for a simple task of DNS name resolving.  However I was able to succeed through the support ticket route.  One person from webhosting services finally acknowledged the error and assured that the days will be compensated.  I have used the https sever based support to draw the attention of  netdmondo webservices to sort out your problem.  They claim that the trouble shooting will be done within a day.  However keep your fingers crossed and wait for thier response to my appeal.
In the meanwhile you have the responsibity for disaster management.  The attitude of netmondo is such that they leave everything to the users to self manage and survive.  They have too much work and less support staff. 
My suggestion is that first of all check you FTP and cpanel services.  If they are working FTP your webspace rename the index.htm and upload an urgent message in the form of a index.html page stating the cancellation and reschduling of the exam with a mail box for them to send a mail to you for further information.  Cpanel is to check the status of your server.  There is a provision for you to check the status of your server.
If the FTP and cpanel also frozen then you have to get a mailer list from your university administration to send individual email message.
In the meanwhile we moodlers will brain storm to identify a strategy to manage the high peak load management in moodle webhosting since this problem will be a common and recurring one.
Pro.V.Nagarajan.
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In reply to elearning edu

Re: Netmondo is best for small classes

by Pio Garcia -

I hope that the site will be online soon. I will follow your advice.

 Thank you very much for your help!!.

Pio

 

 

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In reply to Pio Garcia

Re: Netmondo is best for small classes

by Brett Drinkwater -
Hi Pio,
 
Your server is pinging, so is online, and the cpanel login box comes up via http://www.psicounc.org/cpanel , so one would assume that you should be able to get into your Cpanel. You should be able to then go into the Tools menu and create a full backup file to download.
 
Also, go into your account settings in Cpanel and take a look at your services to make sure the DNS and Apache etc are up and giving a green light. If any of the services are down, you can then email netmondo with the exact outage (meaning they will not have to fault find) and they should be able to quickly restart the service for you.  
 
Regards,
 
Brett Drinkwater
Tasmania, Australia
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In reply to Brett Drinkwater

Re: Netmondo is best for small classes

by Pio Garcia -
Thanks Brett!, I will check the account now.

Pio
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In reply to Juan Jose de la Mora

Re: Cheap hosting for Moodle?

by Juan Martinez -

Hi Juan Jose,

I would like to know you offer, where can I see you or do you send a contract to check it, also do you offer support, and how much does its cost it. I request you to my thesis that may be can implement it.If this contract, do you have in spanish language i would like so.

Gracias anticipadas,

Thanks Juan Jose, 

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In reply to Juan Jose de la Mora

Re: Cheap hosting for Moodle?

by Noel Roberts -

Hi Juan,

I am with you on managing upfront costs.  I am interested in your hosting offer.  please send me an email at jah_managod@yahoo.com.

Thanks,

Noel

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In reply to Juan Jose de la Mora

Re: Cheap hosting for Moodle?

by daniel mahoney -
hello how much can you host a moodle for our high school and how much will this cost please reply.
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