Support Start > Web Hosting Technical Information > Recommended Software and Scripts > Moodle

Our servers meet the requirements for Moodle. You should be able to install and run Moodle following their standard instructions.

You should make sure your account uses FastCGI for PHP, otherwise Moodle will be very slow and won't be able to support more than a small handful of simultaneous visitors.

Making the Moodle database use Unicode

Some versions of Moodle tell you that "It is required that you store all your data in Unicode format". If you see this error, you need to run this command on your database using either phpMyAdmin or the "mysql" command-line tool:

ALTER DATABASE db_name DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;

Replace "db_name" with the actual name of your MySQL database.

Installing via the command line

After the Moodle installation verifies that all of its requirements are met, it will run a step which creates all of the necessary tables and indices in the database. This step can take a very long time. If your browser times out waiting for a reply before this step is done, you may need to run the installation via the command line, as described on the Moodle site. You will need a shell connection to do this.

Moodle Course Backups

When you configure Moodle, be sure to disable "course backups".

According to the creators of Moodle, "course backups" are not the preferred way to make regular backups. The preferred method is "site backups", and we already make site backups of your Moodle files and database every day, automatically.

Turning on unnecessary "course backups" will slow down your site and cause extremely high disk and CPU usage. If your site is accidentally set to make course backups, we will disable that by adding this line to your Moodle "config.php" file:

$CFG->disablescheduledbackups = true;

(We'll notify you if we do this, of course.)