Moodle 2.0

Chapter 2
Bandwidth
Moodle is a web-based product, so course content and assignments are added over
the Web. Whenever a reader or user connects to a website, they're using bandwidth.
When a user reads a page on your Moodle site, downloads a video, or uploads a
paper, he or she uses some of your bandwidth. The more courses, students, activities,
and multimedia that your Moodle site has, the more bandwidth you will use. Most
commercial hosting services include a fixed amount of bandwidth in their service.
If your account uses more bandwidth than allowed, some services cut off your
site's access. Others keep your site up, but automatically bill you for the additional
bandwidth. The second option is preferable in case of unexpected demand. When
deciding upon a hosting service, find out how much bandwidth they offer and what
they do if you exceed that limit.
Are you serving videos with your course?
If your course includes many videos, or if you'll be serving video to
many users, that can use up a lot of the bandwidth that your hosting
company provides. Instead of hosting those videos on your Moodle
server, consider hosting them on a dedicated video hosting site like
vimeo.com or youtube.com. Then, you can just embed them in your
Moodle page. Vimeo, YouTube, or whoever hosts the video will take
care of the bandwidth.
Memory
If you're using a shared hosting service, your account will be sharing a web server
with other accounts. All accounts share the memory, or RAM, of that server.
During times of high demand, only a small amount of memory will be available
for each account. During times of low demand, your account might be able to use
more memory.
Moodle runs fine on most shared hosting services. However, when you have a
large number of courses, or large courses on shared hosts with low memory limits,
Moodle's automated backup routine often fails. Site administrators can get around
this limitation by manually backing up their site one course at a time, or by moving
to a different host.
If your site will have more than a few courses, or any courses whose size is measured
in tens of megabytes, and you want to use automated backup, check your possible
web hosts carefully. In particular, search the forums on Moodle.org to find out if any
other customers of that host have complained about automated backups failing due
to a lack of memory. In general, Moodle's automated backup routines are inefficient
and you might want to consider alternatives for a large site.
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