School Management Platform
Applications

For state-funded schools that need to file census returns and exchange data with the DfE, no. State schools are effectively required to use an approved MIS (Arbor, Bromcom, ScholarPack, SIMS). For independent training providers, language schools, after-school programmes, faith schools, and small private colleges that do not have those statutory requirements, self-hosted is a genuine option. The cost saving versus per-pupil SaaS can be substantial at the right scale, and you retain control of your own data.

You are the data controller for pupil and staff data on a self-hosted install. Our UK data centres keep the data inside the UK by default, which satisfies the residency expectation most schools and parents have. You will need a privacy notice, a record of processing activities, and appropriate access controls in the application itself (which most of these platforms support). We will provide a UK data processing agreement on request as the hosting provider. Schools without an in-house DPO may want a school-sector consultant to review the setup.

For up to around 300 active users (students plus staff plus parents) our standard web hosting from £5.99/mo handles a typical install comfortably. For 300 to 1,000 users, our larger shared plans give more PHP memory and database resources. Above that, or where the system runs alongside a busy public site, we recommend a small managed cloud server from £9.99/mo for dedicated CPU and RAM. Daily backups are included on every plan, which matters more for school data than almost anything else.

Yes, but configure it properly. The PHP applications in this category can send notification email via SMTP or via a transactional email provider (SendGrid, Mailgun, Brevo, Postmark). For anything beyond very small volumes, we strongly recommend a transactional provider rather than the shared mail server, because parent notification email is high-volume and deliverability-sensitive. We will help you configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on your domain so messages reach inboxes rather than spam folders.

Every hosting plan includes daily backups with one-click restore from the My365i control panel. The standard plan keeps 14 days of restore points; Business and Agency tiers keep 60 days of database backups via Timeline Backup Pro. For school management data we always recommend a second independent backup, either downloading periodic database dumps locally, or pointing a third-party backup service at the application. Data loss in this context is a much bigger problem than data loss for a marketing website.

Yes, free with our migration service when you move to 365i. We will handle the file and database move, retest the application, set up SSL, and cut DNS once you are happy. Migrating from a SaaS platform to self-hosted is more involved and typically requires data export from the SaaS provider in a format the self-hosted application can import. We can advise on whether the migration is feasible based on what data export options your current platform offers.