Which hosting plan for a school or training centre: site, e-mail and online lessons

It depends on what the school will put online. A site with information, enrolment and e-mail for the teachers fits an ordinary shared plan. A learning platform, where students log in, do exercises and hand in work, is another thing: it weighs more, because every connected student makes the server work and none of it comes from cache. Decide first which of the two yours is.

Three levels of project

What the school wants What it asks of the plan
A site with courses, timetables and contacts Little. An ordinary plan, with attention to images and downloadable documents.
E-mail for teachers and the office Disk and sending. Mailboxes share the site’s disk, and notices to parents or students add up messages per hour. See e-mail inside a hosting plan or a separate professional e-mail plan.
A learning platform (Moodle or similar) A lot more. Many students at once, a growing database, files uploaded by students. Start with the Business line and watch the usage.

If you will run a learning platform

1 Pick the platform and check what it asks. The cPanel installer (Softaculous) includes Moodle and other learning platforms. Installing is easy; keeping them updated is on you. See how far our support goes.
2 Count the students logged in at the same time, not the enrolled ones. A hundred enrolled students taking a test at the same hour weigh like a hundred simultaneous requests. See how many visitors a hosting plan can handle.
3 Put lesson videos on a video service and embed them in the platform. Serving video to many people at once spends the plan’s bandwidth and is not what it is for. See what you can host here: media, streaming, Windows and the limits.
4 Rehearse with one class before opening to everyone, watching Resource Usage in cPanel while the class uses the platform.

Going up for the school year, down afterwards

A school has a calendar: usage climbs at enrolment and exams and drops in the holidays. You can move up before the busy period and down afterwards, but before going down check that what you use fits the smaller plan, because an account over its limit stops working properly. See changing plan and how the amount is settled.

Exam and enrolment seasons are the peaks. A plan that is fine in an ordinary week can be tight on test day. If the date is known, prepare: preparing for a traffic spike. If the platform grows until it needs services of its own and root access, the next step is a VPS, as explained in shared hosting vs VPS.
Student and minors’ data call for care: strong passwords, separate accounts by role and backups you have tested. See making and keeping your own backup.

Want to put a learning platform online and unsure of the plan? Tell us how many students and which platform, and we will guide you.

Open a support ticket

SEE ALSO

How many visitors can a hosting plan handle

Business hosting: who it is for, and when it pays off

Shared hosting vs VPS: which one does your project need?

Hosting plans

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