Managed Moodle™ Hosting
Fully managed Moodle hosting from $79/month — updates, tested backups, monitoring, and tuning handled by senior engineers in Nashville. Free migration in, no contract.
What you're actually buying
You run the courses. We run everything underneath them.
"Fully managed" is the most abused phrase in Moodle hosting. Plenty of hosts mean "we installed it once and there's a ticket queue." When we say it, we mean five specific jobs, done on a schedule, by engineers you can name.
- ✓ Security updates inside the release window. Moodle publishes point releases on a set cadence and holds the security advisory details back for about a week afterward. That week is the patch window before exploit details go public. We apply security releases within 48 hours of publication — not "next maintenance cycle."
- ✓ Nightly off-site backups with tested restores. A database dump plus a moodledata sync to storage in a different region, every night. Once a month we restore your site to staging, log in, and confirm grade history is intact. A backup you've never restored is a rumor, not a backup.
- ✓ Monitoring that includes cron. Uptime checks are table stakes. The failure we see more often is Moodle's cron silently dying — the site loads fine while scheduled tasks, enrolment syncs, and automated course backups quietly stop. We alarm on both.
- ✓ Plugin vetting before every upgrade. Before a core upgrade we check each installed plugin's supported-versions declaration and whether its maintainer is still active on the tracker. Abandoned plugins are the number-one upgrade blocker we see in the wild.
- ✓ PHP and database tuning. max_input_vars raised to 5000 (Moodle refuses to upgrade without it), opcache sized properly, innodb_buffer_pool_size matched to your data, and mdl_logstore_standard_log archived before it hits twenty million rows and drags every report down with it.
That last item is a whole category of problem. Our favorite specimen: the site where every page took sixty-and-a-bit seconds to load, because PHP tried the database over IPv6 first, the database only listened on IPv4, and nothing moved until the connect timeout expired. Nobody's Moodle is "just slow." Something specific is wrong, and it's usually findable in an afternoon.
Get a free Moodle health check
Plans run $79–$299/month. We reply within one business hour.
Plans
Three sizes. Same service in every one.
We don't feature-gate. The $79 plan gets the same patch windows, tested restores, and monitoring as the $299 plan — the only variable is capacity.
Small
$79/mo
Up to 100 active users. Right for a single training program, a small nonprofit, or a department that wants its pilot run properly.
Full plan details →Growing
$149/mo
Up to 250 active users. The plan most MoodleCloud refugees land on — usually because they finally need plugins.
Full plan details →Established
$299/mo
Up to 500 active users, with resources sized for concurrent quiz load — the thing that actually takes Moodle sites down.
Full plan details →Over 500 users? We spec dedicated resources and quote a flat monthly figure, usually within the week. Every plan includes free migration in from any Moodle host, month-to-month billing, and no setup fee.
The comparison nobody publishes
Sternfast vs. MoodleCloud vs. doing it yourself
| Option | Cost per year | User cap | Third-party plugins | Custom theme | Updates & backups | Commitment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sternfast Small | $948 ($79/mo) | 100 | Yes — any plugin, vetted | Yes | We do both; restores tested monthly | Month-to-month |
| Sternfast Growing | $1,788 ($149/mo) | 250 | Yes — any plugin, vetted | Yes | We do both; restores tested monthly | Month-to-month |
| Sternfast Established | $3,588 ($299/mo) | 500 | Yes — any plugin, vetted | Yes | We do both; restores tested monthly | Month-to-month |
| MoodleCloud | From $270 | 750 (hard cap) | No | Logo and colors only | Handled for you | Annual |
| Self-hosted | $6,000–$29,000 all-in | Whatever you build | Yes | Yes | You do — or, more often, nobody does | — |
Two honest notes on that table. First: if you have 40 users, no plugin needs, and nothing riding on grade history, MoodleCloud at $270 a year is genuinely the right answer, and we'll say so on the call. Second: the self-hosted number looks inflated until you count people. The server itself is only $600–$2,400 a year; the rest is staff time nobody budgets — three to five hours a month of patching and backup checks, plus an annual upgrade project that runs $1,500–$4,000 when it goes to a contractor. The full math is on our pricing page.
Moving in
Free migration in — the real kind, with verification
Moving to us from MoodleCloud, a reseller, or a cPanel box costs nothing, and it isn't a "we'll copy some files" migration. It's the same process as our paid LMS migrations: full database and moodledata transfer, row-count verification on the tables that matter — including mdl_grade_grades_history, the one careless migrations silently drop — and a parallel test site you sign off on before DNS moves. Coming from Blackboard, Canvas, or Brightspace is a proper migration project; those start at $1,200, and hosting picks up afterward.
Why "no contract" isn't a gimmick
Lock-in subsidizes bad service. A host holding a three-year agreement gets paid whether or not last night's backup ran. We'd rather have to re-earn $79 every month, because that arrangement is what keeps the backups running.
We can afford it for an unglamorous reason: the routine work — patching, backups, monitoring — is heavily automated, so the marginal cost of keeping your site healthy is small. The cost of losing you loudly, in an industry this small, is not.
And if you do leave: complete export — database dump, moodledata directory, config.php — within two business days, free. Your data was never a hostage.
Start with a free Moodle health check
From $79/month, free migration included. We reply within one business hour.
Honest advice
When you should not buy managed hosting
Two cases where we'll talk you out of it.
Your site is tiny and static. Five self-paced courses, no quizzes, no grades anyone will ever audit — you don't need us. MoodleCloud's entry plan, or a cheap shared host you patch yourself, will do. Patching one small Moodle is an afternoon-a-month job: take a backup, run php admin/cli/upgrade.php, click through the site. If that sentence doesn't scare you, do it yourself and keep the money.
You have a real IT team. If your organization already patches Linux boxes on a schedule and monitors services, hosting Moodle won't challenge them. What in-house teams usually lack is Moodle-layer depth — upgrade planning, plugin triage, grade-history quirks. That's a Care Plan, from $149/month on your own infrastructure, not hosting.
Check your version before you decide anything else. Moodle 4.1 and 4.4 hit security end-of-life on December 8, 2025 — sites still on them have been accumulating unpatched vulnerabilities for eight months now. Moodle 5.0 reaches end of support in October 2026. Moodle 4.5 LTS is patched through October 2027, and it's where we put hosted clients by default. You can check yours in ten seconds: Site administration → Notifications, or read the $release line in version.php.
FAQ
Questions people actually ask us
Can I install third-party plugins and a custom theme?
Yes — any plugin from the Moodle plugins directory, or custom code you own. Before every core upgrade we check each plugin's supported-versions declaration and maintainer activity so an upgrade never strands you. This is the single most common reason people leave MoodleCloud, which doesn't permit third-party plugins at all. If you need something built, our development team does themes from $900 and plugins from $1,800.
Where is my data hosted, and does this work for a school under FERPA?
US data centers only. We handle student records FERPA-aware by default — access controls, minors' privacy handling, and a data processing agreement template your counsel can start from. Details on our compliance page.
Which Moodle version will I run?
Moodle 4.5 LTS by default — security-supported through October 2027. If you arrive on 4.1 or 4.4, both security end-of-life since December 8, 2025, we fold the upgrade into onboarding. Moves to the next LTS are staged on a test copy you approve before anything touches production.
What does "no contract" actually mean when I want to leave?
Month-to-month billing; cancel whenever. Within two business days we hand you a complete export — database dump, moodledata directory, and config.php — at no charge. Restore that on any host and you have your exact site back.
What happens above 500 users?
We spec dedicated resources and quote a flat monthly price, usually inside a week. The real architecture question isn't total users, it's concurrency — 300 students starting the same quiz at 9:00 a.m. is much harder than 2,000 browsing casually — so we size against your actual usage pattern, not a headcount.
My SCORM courses load but don't record completions. Will new hosting fix that?
Almost never. Tracking failures usually live inside the package — a manifest reporting cmi.core.lesson_status incorrectly, or suspend-data overflows — and they show up in the mdl_scorm_scoes_track table no matter whose server you're on. That's a repair job, not a hosting change: $350 flat per package, verified in SCORM Cloud. See SCORM tracking repair.
Find out what shape your Moodle is in
The free health check is 20 minutes with a senior engineer: version and end-of-life status, a backup and cron reality check, and the two or three tuning items we'd fix first. No slide deck, no surprise audit invoice afterward. If MoodleCloud or self-hosting is the better fit for you, we'll say exactly that.
Book your free Moodle health check
Plans $79–$299/month · Free migration in · No contract · We reply within one business hour
Prefer to talk? Call (615) 396-7139. We're a Nashville firm working with schools and training teams US-wide.