Are you looking for a free Moodle™ hosting platform to start your online learning portal, be it as an individual or part of an organization of any size?
Once you go Moodle as your preferred LMS core, it’s hard (or regretful) to go back. Most likely your choice becomes whether to stick with “vanilla” Moodle, customizing it on your own or go with a vetted LMS provider that understands the world’s most popular learning management system, and respects your choices.
If your needs are small, or you want to give Moodle™ a try before going all in, there’s a few alternatives worth spending your time on.
Before, you could set up a MoodleCloud, the official hosting solution by Moodle™ HQ that was meant to allow teachers in small classrooms, schools and organizations anywhere in the world to get started with online learning. Nowadays the company only offers a 45-day trial of MoodleCloud, after which you have to decide if it’s worth the $180 AUD a year for 50 users and 250MB storage.
Below you can find some of the best alternatives available, varying in features and technical expertise required. They’re good for every budget—since they’re all free!
For the technically able: Free general-purpose hosting
If you know “LAMP” isn’t a piece of furniture, don’t think Native American peoples when hearing “Apache,” and are perfectly comfortable with the appeasing darkness of a command line interface, then you might want to check a free hosting alternative and install Moodle™ on your own.
Just check out some of these options and make sure they provide the requirements you need to install your own LMS. They are all LAMP compatible and do not show ads. The process could be similar to this one which is based on AWS. AWS does provide you free services including hosting, up to a year and depending on their terms and conditions.
- byet.host gives you 1GB, a community forum and no ads. It boasts being the “fastest free host in the world.”
- 000webhost gives you 300MB, 3GB of bandwidth and Cloudflare protection.
- Freehostia.com gives you up to 5 hosted domains, 250MB, 6GM monthly bandwidth, 3 email accounts and 1 MySQL database of up to 10MB
It’s worth noting that these options allow you to use open source software for the server and database. Often this is the only option you have when you select the free tier, which is perfect for open source Moodle™.
The only real free Moodle™ hosting option in 2023: Try Gnomio
Gnomio is a free solution that gives you 2GB of SSD storage, with user limits of 500 total and 50 concurrent. It is usually a version behind the latest Moodle™ release, which is the standard practice.
Just click on the link and sign up for free. The real advantage for any Moodle™ provider is the backup, which you can download at any time, and use it to recreate your LMS in any other provider.
Much like any free service, support is limited. You are encouraged to learn all about the LMS on your own and use forums to ask help from other users.
There can be occasional downtimes, and their content policy reserves the right to move your site into maintenance mode, or remove it for repeated offenses.
4 Responses
have you any moodle host for ukraine?
The website Moodle Centros is a great way to host your LMS.
¡Muchas gracias, Ana! Is is required to be a citizen from Spain in order to access Moodle centros?
Cristian, for Moodle Spain, you have to be a citizen of Spain, and it is the Spanish language. For Spain, here is the Moodle Centros spain website.