TCExam
Hosting

TCExam is one of the more interesting applications on our installer because the people who use it tend to know exactly why they need it. Nobody installs TCExam on a whim. They install it because they\'re an exam board, a training provider, a certification body, or an academic department, and they need to deliver assessments to candidates over the web with proper marking, reporting, and a paper trail. For that specific job, TCExam genuinely earns its place.

What works well: the question types cover almost everything an academic or vocational assessment needs, including the awkward ones like ordering and matching that some commercial CBT platforms charge extra for. MathJax integration for mathematical notation is solid. The candidate experience during the exam itself is clean and undistracting, which matters more than people realise when you\'re asking somebody to concentrate for an hour. PDF reporting at the end is detailed enough to satisfy quality-assurance and audit requirements.

What needs care: TCExam is a proper grown-up application with proper grown-up complexity, and the admin interface reflects that. There\'s a learning curve. Setting up your first question bank, exam, and group of candidates takes longer than people expect. Permissions and exam security settings have lots of options and getting them wrong (e.g. forgetting to randomise answer order in a high-stakes exam) is the kind of mistake that gets noticed.

"TCExam is what you pick when you actually need to run real assessments and you don\'t want to pay per candidate forever. If you\'re running quizzes for fun, this is overkill. If you\'re running exams that have to stand up to scrutiny, it\'s the right tool."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

Hosting requirements are real but not extreme. Our shared hosting at £5.99/mo handles small to medium TCExam deployments comfortably, including question banks of several thousand items and exam sittings of dozens of candidates concurrently. PHP 8.3, MySQL 8, 256MB memory, and our autoscaling cloud platform with unlimited LVE resources are sensible defaults. For institutions running formal high-stakes exams with hundreds of candidates simultaneously, we\'d recommend our cloud hosting at £9.99/mo for the dedicated resources and predictable performance during exam windows.

Two technical things worth flagging. First, MathJax content rendering is client-side, but server-side configuration matters: if you\'re running maths-heavy exams, test the rendering on the actual devices candidates will use before exam day. Second, file uploads (audio questions, image-based questions) want a sensible folder structure, because the default flat upload directory becomes hard to manage after a year of exam authoring. We can advise on both as part of standard support.

From a data-protection point of view, hosting TCExam in the UK means candidate data sits on UK servers under UK and EU GDPR. For UK institutions and training providers, that\'s a meaningful selling point compared to US-based commercial CBT platforms. Daily backups with 30-day retention give you a recoverable position if something goes wrong mid-exam-cycle, though for high-stakes exam delivery we always recommend an additional pre-exam manual snapshot.