As an educator, your students’ success drives everything you do. Therefore, to maintain uninterrupted learning, it can be hard to find the time to regularly update your Moodle LMS (Learning Management System) throughout the school year. Upgrading your Moodle can mean time away from teaching, marking student’s work, and quality time away from your students. However, postponing Moodle updates can lead to common Moodle hosting issues, such as security vulnerabilities, and maintenance problems.
With the rise in technology and a hybrid learning landscape post-pandemic, the market growth rate in eLearning has risen by 900% since 2000. So it’s more important than ever to ensure your Moodle hosting is reliable so your student data is safe and secure.
In this blog post, we'll explain how you can identify and fix your Moodle LMS hosting issues, thus making your LMS more reliable.
9 tips to fix your Moodle hosting issues
Improving server performance
Firstly, you can start by identifying how your servers are performing and rule this out as a Moodle hosting issue.
1. Check your server resources
Have you noticed that your Moodle is running slowly? Are pages taking too long to load, and your students are becoming disengaged? The chances are your server resources may be running low.
- Identify how much space your resources have left. Since Moodle is a large application, it can take up a lot of resources on a server. This includes RAM (Random Access Memory), disk space, and CPU (Central Processing Unit). When a lot of background tasks run via the scheduler, Moodle can use more than 50MB of RAM per process and CPU. So if you have run out of RAM and find things are running slower than expected, you'll need to add more resources to your server.
- Optimise Moodle for your active user count. Is there enough storage and available server resources to provide your students with a seamless learning experience? As students enroll in your courses, your Moodle needs to cater to them. Seeing how many users your Moodle can handle at a time is a great way to judge performance. For example, if there is a class quiz that’s to be completed at a set time, can it handle all the traffic during that period? If you don’t have the in-house expertise to do this, consider partnering with a trusted Moodle partner.
Keeping on top of your server resources is a great way to keep an eye on performance and your Moodle reliability.
2. Cache your data
To improve page load time and maintain student focus, you can cache data. Caching data means your data is stored in the RAM so it’s faster for Moodle to access static content. For example, images and fonts. This can speed up the load time of commonly used pages, so there are fewer requests to the database.
If you don't have the in-house expertise to set up caching for you, you can look into partnering with a Moodle partner who can configure caching for you.
Future-proof your Moodle
Now you’ve got your performance issues sorted, let’s focus on how you can ensure Moodle reliability even in worst-case scenarios.
3. Ensure Moodle reliability with disaster recovery
Have you ever wondered how you would teach if disaster struck? Disaster recovery (DR) is how an organisation plans to respond and recover from a natural disaster or human-induced disaster. These could include flooding, a cyber attack, or even accidental deletion of course material. Your DR plan should include regional diversity, which is when you geographically separate your servers. For example, you could have one in Wellington and another in Auckland. This way you can still access your Moodle if there’s a region-localised disaster such as an earthquake or flood that affects the data centre you’re using.
4. Check your backups
The last thing you'll want to happen is to lose your students’ work or years of course history. Ensure your data is backed up and set up a plan to regularly test that it’s working. Both your database and site data should be backed up at specific times at regular intervals. This way, a rollback is possible if necessary. Plus, it’s good practice to ensure backups are made available offsite. So, if there’s an onsite server failure, your backups are safe on your external server. Backups can be run manually or set up to operate automatically.
‘All backups’ is a Moodle plugin that can take care of your backups for you.
Moodle development methodologies
Next, review your in-house expertise methodologies to see if their ways of working are optimised for your learners’ development. Below are tips on how to improve Moodle hosting issues through how your in-house expertise works on tests, patches, updates, and releases.
5. Automate your regular code unit tests
Students shouldn’t need to find workarounds for the sake of bugs, instead, you should consider automating your unit testing. This ensures any changes that are made to the codebase, from customisations or regular releases, do not introduce bugs in Moodle.
6. Automate code deployments
It’s a good idea to develop a deployment schedule as you work towards automating your deployments. Automatic deployments allow your deployments to be run during out-of-school hours so learning isn’t interrupted. Plus, your in-house expertise doesn’t need to do any out-of-office hours when your deployments are automatic.
If you don’t have the in-house expertise to automate unit tests and deployments, work with a Moodle partner who can support you.
7. Monitor your Moodle 24/7
By having your site monitored for system reliability, errors, usages, and outages, any issues that pop up are discovered promptly and can be addressed quickly. ‘Heartbeat check’ is a Catalyst developed Moodle plugin that supports the monitoring of Moodle by reviewing critical service dependencies. Essentially, it checks the health of your Moodle LMS for you. Once the check has been completed, it provides a link with information on any possible issues.
Learn more about Heartbeat check and how it can support you with your Moodle hosting issues.
8. Make sure you’re regularly patching your server
Keeping your student’s security in mind, if you patch your server regularly, you’ll have protection against security vulnerabilities and bug fixes. Server operating system (OS) patching is equally as important as keeping your Moodle software up to date. Ensuring the OS and installed packages (supporting software) are kept up to date means your Moodle and data remain secure.
9. Stay on top of Moodle updates and versions
To have Moodle reliability you'll need to stay on top of regular releases as they are made available – Moodle releases monthly updates for supported versions and sometimes more frequently depending on the security implications. While Moodle releases are considered stable at the time of release, it’s always a good idea to have a release and testing phase to ensure everything is working as expected. You can manually deploy a new version and manually test it on a pre-production environment. Or you can rely on automation tools to unit test code, deploy, and smoke check a new release.
Check out the latest Moodle updates to see if you’re on the latest version as your in-house team has to test and deploy each one.
Work with an experienced Moodle partner
Staying on top of bug fixes, updates, and security is an ongoing task but it’s essential to improve your Moodle reliability. Teaming up with a trusted Moodle Partner, like Catalyst can ensure reliable Moodle hosting 24/7, free up your team, and ensure you have access to the latest patches, updates, and developments. To learn more about how Catalyst can support your Moodle LMS and how you can get more quality time with your learners, contact us today.