basic questions about hosting and choose the company

basic questions about hosting and choose the company

by alain madec -
Number of replies: 5

Hello,

I live in Thailand and am setting up a programme to provide online courses to Burmese people living here. I want to use Moodle and have basic but necessary questions about hosting Moodle…I first plan to have 15 students for a pilot-project and after, maybe 100 would access. I will use Moodle only for Forum, Chat, and for testing students and obviously get the content online.

- do I need to have a hosting company near Thailand , or even in Europe or USA , it would be OK ?

- I have Windows XP and many students have older Windows versions on their computer, I guess I can’t get a recent Moodle version, which one would be OK for Windows 2000 and to use Moodle for mainly Forum and Chat ?

- hosting in a normal company (not a Moodle partner) causes also limit when there are more than 15 students ( see Moodel Hosting Sites http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=41713) or some people reported problems to contact maintenance team (Siteground.com as a Moodle Host http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=74874 ), so is there a solution between that and a Moodle partner ? Did anyone are satisfied of a cheap and good solution for 15-30 students ?

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In reply to alain madec

Re: basic questions about hosting and choose the company

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Hi again

Just answered your other question http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=97980 and came here, planning to keep me busy for some time? smile

> I first plan to have 15 students for a pilot-project and after, maybe 100 would access.

Very small for a whole site, may be what you have is a single course.

> I will use Moodle only for Forum, Chat, and for testing students

Are you sure? Features tend to wake up needs. wink

> and obviously get the content online.

Any idea of the volume, intensity?

> do I need to have a hosting company near Thailand , or even in Europe or USA , it would be OK?

Depends on the connectivity. I've come across "islands" in the net. (Connectivity within the country OK, but the overseas lines saturated.)

> I have Windows XP and many students have older Windows versions on their computer, I guess I can’t get a recent Moodle version, which one would be OK for Windows 2000 and to use Moodle for mainly Forum and Chat ?

Is it about hosting Moodle on your (Windows) machine? Is it in the public internet, with a fixed IP address, for example?

> Did anyone are satisfied of a cheap and good solution for 15-30 students ?

You have to go through the discussions in this forum. There were various reports about cheap hosting providers, good and bad.
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: basic questions about hosting and choose the company

by alain madec -

Dear Visvanath and all,

Thanks a lot for your answer, here are some more details to help you to help me…

The pilot-project (15 students) is to teach language and computer skills. It is a 3 month programme, that may give you an idea about the density of content. After testing the process, there will be additional subjects available for more students (50 first and hopefully 100 in the future…). We are facing different problems (access to Internet, availability of students, english and computer skills…) so we need to be realistic…

Does anybody know if having a hosting company in USA in Europe would mean many problems for Bandwith, saturation, … and how to solve this ? Would a Moodle Partner could be a solution for that ?

My question about Windows versions…

“I have Windows XP and many students have older Windows versions on their computer, I guess I can’t get a recent Moodle version, which one would be OK for Windows 2000 and to use Moodle for mainly Forum and Chat ?”

…Having Moodle hosted by a company (not on my computer), will the students be able to use properly every options, plug-ins of Moodle 1.9 or only those provided on “older” Moodle versions ?

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In reply to alain madec

Re: basic questions about hosting and choose the company

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
> Does anybody know if having a hosting company in USA in Europe would mean many problems for Bandwith, saturation, … and how to solve this?

Only you can answer that question. Try to visualize networking as a maze of pipe lines place your users under their respective ISPs, place the server in its proper place try to figure out the available bandwidth between the server an each client.

For example, in another south asian country a couple of years ago, the only way to connect to the internet was using dial-up. Depending on the line quality you'll get anything between 10-40 kbit/s.

Then the connectivity amoung the local ISPs. Not all of them were interconnected directly. Traffic between two ISPs who are not interconnected were routed through US or Japan! And those overseas lines are chronically conjested!

In other words, there are two bottlenecks: 1. the last mile b) overseas line.

If overseas, whether US, Japan or Europe wouldn't make a difference!

I hope others here from south eash asia could tell more about the Thai situation.

> I have Windows XP and many students have older Windows versions on their computer, I guess I can’t get a recent Moodle version, which one would be OK for Windows 2000 and to use Moodle for mainly Forum and Chat?

I don't use Windows, so can't answer that. My guess is if you know Windows, you'll get a decent system running on Windows 2000, especially for 15-200 users like in your case. From your questions I guess you'll have more problems in making your server available on the Internet.

> …Having Moodle hosted by a company (not on my computer), will the students be able to use properly every options, plug-ins of Moodle 1.9 or only those provided on “older” Moodle versions ?

Depends on the installation of course! As you know Moodle comes with a set of standard plug-ins, most of which you can disable if you want, and dozens of additinal plug-ins which the administrator has to install separately. That does not depend on Moodle-Parner or Non-Moodle-Partern rather the administrator doing it.

As I mentioned earlier, your Moodle requirements are low. There are many Moodle sites which offer space for testing free or very cheap. Your problems are more about Internet connectivity and user awareness.

BTW, here in moodle.org people with real identity get more responeses wink
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In reply to alain madec

Re: basic questions about hosting and choose the company

by Steve PSU -

I just returned from Thailand after teaching several years at universities and hosting courses online. Thailand does have limited bandwidth and it’s tough to find good technical support there. When considering where your host should be it’s not an issue of physical distance, but available bandwidth between you and your host. I ended up using a company called hostgator in the states and for about eight dollars a month hosted courses in Moodle. Some classes had 140 students and I had very good luck with stability and not painfully slow access times. I am in no way associated with hostgator and maybe other companies provide equal or better service. But I enjoyed much greater success than going through Thai university I.T. departments. Sawat dee

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In reply to alain madec

Re: basic questions about hosting and choose the company

by gerard manvu -

Hello, you should better use linux!approve

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