Because of the massive advancement in education technology, organizations have started focusing on e-learning solutions to train and teach employees and students of this digital generation. The market size for e-learning surpassed $200 billion the previous year and is expected to grow more with 8% CAGR during 2020-2026, says a report. And why not! The advent of technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud computing, coupled with enormous internet usage worldwide, is probably why the market is booming. It has become almost effortless to share, store, and access content for both learners and content providers. Not to mention, the coronavirus pandemic has driven the e-learning demand more than ever as schools and universities are shut down due to the global lockdown. So, if you want to set up your e-learning website, Moodle is the top choice to host your website. Why? Let’s unravel the mystery!
What’s Moodle, after all?
Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (Moodle) is an open-source learning management system or platform for online learners, administrators, and teachers. Over the years, it has become the forerunner in the electronic learning ecosystem, which simplifies creating an online learning platform in minutes. It provides such a platform in which students can easily study and interact, and educators can create their online courses and track students’ progress. For example, if you want to develop a course to help students learn PHP, you can try Moodle to make it live on the internet without any trouble. The platform can be translated into over 120 languages, so a vast majority of people could benefit from your course worldwide. Create your website to offer online courses and customize it based on your requirements using Moodle plugins for multiple applications. You can manage all your educational resources on the website in addition to sharing your materials online with a school or university. Your website becomes a platform where students and tutors can communicate with each other effectively. But,
Why is Moodle so famous?
In this digital age, you can avail of lots of options for everything, including an e-learning platform at your fingertips. Despite multiple players offering great services, Moodle has managed to be the best e-learning platform even today which people largely prefer. It offers unmatched scalability and versatility due to its impressive core architecture. So, let’s find out what the secret sauce behind its popularity is and why it is still the number one choice.
Mobile app quality
Moodle has a mobile application that people can use to browse courses even if they are offline. They can also receive instant messages and other notifications, track their learning progress, etc. The quality and features of its mobile app are also commendable, with easy customization options, just like the desktop versions.
Great customization
Moodle offers many customization features, allowing you to timeline your posts, filter timelines, integration with resources and activities of learners, and more. It can also include things popular in social tools such as likes, comments, or votes, which becomes a cool way of learning online.
Adaptive learning
To deliver customized learning and resources that can address a learner’s unique needs is what you can call adaptive learning. The courses must be designed in such a way that they can adapt according to the ability of a learner. Thankfully, Moodle incorporates instructional design for achieving adaptive learning in addition to state-of-the-art technology. It allows you to create flexible courses, including activity access limitations, conditions for course completion, lesson activity through quiz adaptability, etc.
Microlearning
Microlearning allows learners to choose courses that are most relevant to them using any device handy at their disposal. It is a swift learning approach that lets you customize courses easily and reuse them to save your publishing time. Moodle gives access to lots of reusable and interactive content types. In addition to this, it provides an easy-breezy content creation capability, which is its core feature. Hence, you will be able to create short courses online minus wasting time unnecessarily.
Analytics
Through Moodle analytics, you can track course completions, competencies, and compliance. You can also track course progress, and learning engagement and predict the success of the courses. In this way, you can modify or improve your courses tailored to the needs of your learners and increase success rates.
Gamification
Gamification is a creative way to motivate and engage learners through games and gamification mechanics. You can include both of these things in your courses using Moodle. For games, you can include Crossword, Hangman, Cryptex, The Hidden Picture, Millionaire, Snakes & Ladders, and more. Infuse gamification mechanics like badges, challenges, points, achievements, levels, leaderboards, stories, timers, etc., through Moodle plugins. Now, I hope things are clear on your side as to why people choose Moodle. And if you are convinced and have decided to go with it, then the next thing you need is reliable hosting for your e-learning website. It’s because Moodle can demand high server resources, which means you will require a robust hosting provider to take care of all your website needs. But why is it essential to host on the best platform, and how can hosting affect your business? Let’s discuss it next!
Choosing a dedicated platform for Moodle is preferred. It’s because they will provide a suitable environment for your e-learning website configured specifically to your unique business needs.They can provide good quality servers and the capacity to meet your storage needs and speed so that your learners never have to encounter speed issues.A potential Moodle hosting runs best on LAMP infrastructure – Linux, Apache, MySQL, & PHP and updates their versions periodically for better performance.They can provide optimum security and customer support when things go wrong. They will mention everything concisely in the service agreement regarding security features like encryption, SSL certificates, passwords, privacy aspects like compliance, location of Moodle data folder, etc., and how quickly they can fix issues.
Hence, choosing the best platform certainly affects your business, and therefore, you will have to think strategically before choosing the host. Now, given the myriad of choices available, it becomes confusing to find which hosting will work the best. And that’s what I’ll be discussing next by introducing you to some of the best Moodle hosting providers.
ScalaHosting
Since its inception in 2007, ScalaHosting has been a pioneer in the web hosting industry. As your Moodle site requires reliable, fast, and secure hosting, ScalaHosting can be a good option for your needs. Use its 1-click installer to install Moodle and never worry about updates, as they provide automatic updates for the software. It provides migration of as many sites as you want at no extra cost and without any downtime. ScalaHosting guarantees 99.9% server uptime since they constantly monitor and maintain their servers for a better user experience. To secure your website, it provides SShield protection that can block 99.998% of online attacks. It can monitor your site 24/7 and notifies you instantly in case of any vulnerability it registers. Your data is secure with automatic backups daily from their remote server. If you want, you can restore your data easily with a single click. ScalaHosting has an award-winning hosting support team through live chat and tickets. Get ScalaHosting at a minimum price of $3.95/month for 1 site.
MoodleCloud
While Moodle is robust with many options available, it could be a bit complex to set up, run, and maintain, especially for someone not-so-tech-savvy. This is the reason why MoodleCloud was released. Create and market courses online using Moodle’s platform, which makes everything easy and fast. You can build your website in minutes without using your credit card. It has powerful tools to choose from its catalog of vast resources, collaborative tools, and activities to create engaging online courses. You can even add custom certificates and assessments to verify the progress of learners. MoodleCloud lets you customize the learning environment using your company’s name, brand colors, and logo. Don’t worry about security and data protection as they provide periodic security patches, software updates, and data backups. You can also add audio, video, whiteboards and enable desktop sharing and online conferencing. MoodleCloud is also cost-efficient because its pricing starts from $56.21/year for 50 users and 200 MB storage with unlimited activities and courses. Besides, they never charge hidden fees.
TMDHosting
TMDHosting is one of the leading names in this list, as it provides fully managed hosting for Moodle along with many exciting features up its sleeves. Not to mention, it has been providing reliable services consistently for 10+ years. If you are new to Moodle, they can do all the heavy lifting by installing new software for you. In case you already have a Moodle website, they can migrate it to TMDHosting for FREE. Add some new functionalities and extend the features by installing Moodle plugins for free. Just make a request, and they will install plugins for OAuth2 Authentication, Progress bar, Level Up, configurable reports, completion progress, attendance, custom certificates, and more. Give your website a catchy and professional look by installing free Moodle themes such as Essential, Evolve-D, Academy, Klass, Educacionbe, Moove, and more. That’s not all; they also provide free updates for Moodle for better performance and security. Enjoy 16x faster page loading through premium SSD-based storage having three layers of cache – APC, opCache, and Varnish. They use best practices for Moodle in pre-configuring the web hosting so you can have a trouble-free experience. Moodle 3.3.2 is instantly provided with PHP7 and opCache enabled. Your site stays secure with an advanced web-based firewall by BitNinja to safeguard it from malware and other online threats. They provide daily and weekly backups free of cost. The hosting is developer-friendly, and you get standard SSH access. TMDHosting’s pricing starts at $2.95/month along with an SSL certificate issued by Let’s Encrypt and includes a 60-day money-back guarantee.
Cloudways
Experience the best performance and flexibility by hosting your Moodle website on Cloudways. Getting started is easy in three simple steps:
Choosing the PHP applicationLaunching the serverAnd installing Moodle on the server.
All are done through an easy-to-use control panel. Boost your website speed with Cloudways CDN, SSDs, and optimized tech stack with tools such as Nginx, MariaDB, Apache, and PHP-FPM. Enhance site response times using pre-configured caching tools such as Varnish, Redis, and Memcached. It also supports HTTP/2 and offers PHP7-based servers for solid performance. Your site is secure with dedicated firewalls, auto-healing servers, two-factor authentication, IP whitelisting to prevent unauthorized access, and free SSL. You have the flexibility to host your website on the following underline IaaS platform.
Google Cloud PlatformDigitalOceanLinodeVultrAWS
Cloudways offers an auto-scaling feature based on your resource needs, multiple PHP versions to choose from, and a quick application launch. You have the option for site staging, application and server cloning, and Git integrations. Add team members, use one account for multiple teams, and use SFTP and SSH to access your servers securely. The minimum pricing of Cloudways hosting is $10/month.
Krystal
A host of striking features, an award-winning support team, and unlimited bandwidth, Krystal stands tall among one of the best providers for Moodle hosting. Not only is Krystal doing great in its service offerings, but also in conserving the environment. Their services function on 100% renewable energy directly supplied by Ecotricity. They perform managed migrations from start to finish, ensuring a safe and seamless transition without losing any content. All their Moodle hosting plans use blazing-fast memory cache – LiteSpeed to speed up your website, which you can manage from the control panel. In addition to this, they offer 100% SSD storage for your files and database. Both these technologies combine to produce 16x faster website speed. Krystal offers a FREE SSL certificate for all its plans, including secure 256-bit encryption, and performs regular security scans and data backups. Their award-winning in-house team can assist you through 3 modes – tickets, live chat, and calls. Krystal’s starting plan is Amethyst, which is available at $6.36 for 2 sites and 10 GB storage. Their data centers are located in the UK, which makes the perfect choice for European-based users.
Google Cloud
You can launch Bitnami-certified Moodle from Google Cloud. The same is because Bitnami packages all the applications using best practices prevailing in the industry. It also certifies that everything is up-to-date in the application, so you can trust it completely. They closely monitor the applications for vulnerabilities, check outdated libraries and components, and update applications as and when needed. In case they spot any issue, they immediately patch it and release it within a few days.
KeyToSchool
Managing Moodle websites since 2008, KeyToSchool is a certified Moodle partner and is great to provide a rewarding learning experience to your students. They always keep their application infrastructure and operating systems fine-tuned for optimal performance so you can use all the features provided without any trouble. Their servers run on secure and stable PHP versions along with other backend technologies to offer maximum flexibility and easy deployment. All their plans are designed, keeping in mind you don’t run out of disk space based on your site requirements. And if you want to upgrade, they provide a smoother transition at competitive pricing. KeyToSchool’s minimum pricing starts from $15/month for 100 active users and 20 GB disk space with no custom plugins or themes. If you want them, the cost starts at $20/month. You can see the recommendation page to plan your hosting package.
Conclusion
E-learning is flourishing. The good news is it’s likely to continue in the upcoming days, given how much flexibility it provides while making the overall learning process engaging and fun. So, if you plan to create a course and sell it online, now’s the time. The competition is already here, and it’s better not to lose more time. Thus, choose a Moodle hosting you like from this list based on your needs and budget. And… start your journey today!
