E-learning and course management platforms for creating, delivering, and tracking online training and educational content. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
FormaLMS is a free, open-source Learning Management System (LMS) tailored for corporate training and...
Moodle is a widely used, open-source learning management system (LMS) designed to provide educators,...
Xerte is a free, open-source toolkit designed to help educators and content creators build rich, int...
A learning management system is where courses live: enrolments, lessons, quizzes, assignment submission, grading and a record of who completed what. Moodle is the reference implementation for the whole idea and has been for two decades, running everything from single-tutor course sites to national university deployments. The commercial alternatives split into two camps that are worth telling apart. Canvas, Blackboard and MoodleCloud sell managed platforms to institutions. Thinkific, Teachable and Kajabi sell course-selling platforms to individuals, priced monthly and often with a transaction cut on lower tiers.
Self-hosting a learning platform buys you three things those cannot: no per-learner or per-seat pricing as you grow, full control over where student data lives, and the ability to modify the thing. Moodle's plugin directory is enormous, and being GPL software you can change what a plugin does rather than filing a feature request. For a training provider adding two hundred learners a year, per-seat pricing and one hosting plan diverge quickly.
Read the category listing carefully though, because these three applications do different jobs. Moodle is a full LMS. FormaLMS is a corporate-training LMS descended from the last open source release of Docebo. Xerte is not an LMS at all: it is an authoring tool for building interactive HTML5 learning content that you then export as SCORM and drop into an LMS. Treating Xerte as a Moodle alternative is a category error, and a common one.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
Cohorts of twenty to fifty, several intakes a year, with certificates and completion records that have to survive an audit years later. Per-learner SaaS pricing scales badly against that pattern, while a self-hosted Moodle keeps the whole historical record in one database the provider can back up and query.
Every employee must complete the same modules annually and HR needs a report proving it, which is precisely what FormaLMS was designed around. Keeping it in-house means the completion evidence sits on the company's own infrastructure rather than a vendor's, which matters when the auditor asks where the data is held.
The institution already runs a central LMS, so the missing piece is a way for academics to build interactive content without learning an authoring suite. Xerte on a departmental server does exactly that, exporting SCORM packages into whatever platform the university has standardised on.
A few hundred learners, self-paced video and quizzes, and a monthly platform fee that eats the margin on every sale. Self-hosted Moodle with a payment plugin removes both the per-seat cost and the transaction percentage, at the price of owning the upgrades.
Do not skip setting up the cron process on your server for your Moodle. Your site will not work properly without it.
This is the single most common reason a self-hosted Moodle appears broken. Cron drives notifications, scheduled enrolments, gradebook recalculation, backups and search indexing, so without it the site loads perfectly and quietly stops doing half its work. Ask any prospective host whether cron can run every minute before you install anything.
Choosing the GPLv3 license has meant that Moodle can be shared in a very human way, for the benefit of all kinds of learners globally. It means the software is long-lasting, its security is more certain, and customers own their own data.
The claim worth testing is the last one. Owning your data only becomes real when you can act on it, which means having database access, a backup you can restore somewhere else, and a licence that permits moving. Self-hosting delivers all three. A managed Moodle service still gives you the licence but hands the other two back to a vendor.
Learning management systems are the heaviest "ordinary" web app most schools and trainers run. Bulk enrolments, video uploads, gradebook calculations, and concurrent quiz attempts all push parts of the stack. We size PHP memory at 512MB minimum, raise upload limits to handle SCORM packages and video, and recommend a managed cloud server with Redis for object caching once active learner count crosses a few hundred. Cron is mandatory and we set it up at install rather than expecting administrators to do it themselves.
Moodle is the heaviest ordinary web application most organisations will ever run, and its requirements keep climbing. Moodle 5.2 asks for a minimum of PHP 8.3 with 8.4 supported, 64-bit PHP only, the sodium extension present and max_input_vars at 5000 or above. The database floor moved too: PostgreSQL 16, MySQL 8.4, MariaDB 10.11. Check that last one on any shared platform before you plan an upgrade, because a database server one minor version behind is a hard stop rather than a slow site.
Cron is not optional and web cron is deprecated, so command-line cron every minute is the only sensible setup. The load pattern is the other thing to understand. Moodle idles cheaply then spikes hard, and the spike is almost always a quiz: thirty learners starting a timed assessment together will do more to a server than a thousand people reading course pages across an afternoon.
FormaLMS is alive but conservative, and its own documentation still specifies PHP 8.0 to 8.1, both past end of life. Confirm current compatibility before committing. Xerte is actively developed and undemanding, which follows from it being an authoring tool rather than a platform under load.
Not for you if you run timed high-stakes exams for hundreds of simultaneous candidates. That needs dedicated resources, and shared hosting is the wrong shape for it whatever the plan says.
Common questions we hear from people running learning management systems applications on 365i hosting.
Moodle 5.2 needs PHP 8.3 or 8.4 in a 64-bit build, the sodium extension, max_input_vars set to at least 5000, and a database at PostgreSQL 16, MySQL 8.4 or MariaDB 10.11 or above. It also needs command-line cron running every minute; the web-based alternative is deprecated and Moodle advises against it. Check the database version first, because it is the requirement most likely to be the blocker on a shared platform and the one you cannot work around from inside the application.
No, they solve different problems and are frequently used together. Xerte Online Toolkits is an authoring tool: teaching staff build interactive HTML5 learning objects in the browser using templates, then export them as SCORM packages or as standalone zip files. It has no enrolment, no gradebook and no course management. Moodle is the platform those packages get delivered through. The project started at the University of Nottingham in 2004 and has been part of the Apereo Foundation since 2015.
The pricing shapes differ more than the headline numbers. Institutional platforms such as Canvas are quoted per student per year, MoodleCloud sells tiers by user count, and course platforms like Thinkific and Teachable charge a monthly fee with transaction percentages on their cheaper plans. All three grow with your success. Self-hosting is a flat hosting cost regardless of learner numbers, plus your time for upgrades and backups. The crossover point comes fast, usually inside the first few hundred learners.
You are, and this is the real cost of self-hosting rather than the hosting bill. Moodle ships major versions roughly twice a year with a defined support window, and running a version past its security support end is a real risk on a system holding student records. Test the upgrade on a copy first, take a full backup of the database and the moodledata directory together, and read the release notes for plugin compatibility. Our daily backups with 30 days of restore points give you a way back if it goes wrong.
On a self-hosted install you are the data controller and the data sits in your database on your hosting package. Our data centres are in the UK, the US and Asia, with the UK as the default, so UK residency is the standard outcome for a UK customer. That answers the residency question but not the whole obligation: you still need a privacy notice, a lawful basis, sensible retention periods and proper access controls inside Moodle itself. We provide a UK data processing agreement as hosting provider on request.
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All 3 learning management systems applications available with one-click installation on our fast UK web hosting.
