Optimise your LMS storage for cost-effective managed hosting

Keep your LMS managed hosting costs under control with a smart approach to storage.

If you’re running an LMS on which tens, hundreds or even thousands of users and educators are uploading courses and files, that will soon start to take up a lot of storage space.

LMS managed hosting pricing tiers are often based on set storage limits. Going above those limits can result in charges that haven’t been factored into your budget, which may create additional problems for you.

It’s easy to write off these extra charges as unfortunate or just a byproduct of the thriving online learning environment you’ve created. But with a little bit of adjustment in your approach to storage, it’s possible to limit these charges or even avoid them entirely.

Optimising LMS storage

There are a couple of key considerations when optimising your LMS storage:

Hosting video

You’re likely to have plenty of space for images, audio and other media, but large video files can soon start to eat up vital storage space.

But there is no reason for these video files to be hosted on your LMS at all. You could instead upload them to a third-party video hosting site, such as YouTube or Vimeo, then simply embed the videos within your LMS. Your users still get all the learning content you want to deliver, but the large video files are not taking up storage space and pushing up your hosting costs.

With YouTube and Vimeo, you will not have to pay extra to host all the video content you need. Any limits on video size and upload numbers are far beyond the requirements of the overwhelming majority of organisations.

Protecting your video content

There is a certain amount of security that comes from hosting on your own platform. But there are options for achieving the storage — and therefore financial — savings of hosting on an external site at the same time as protecting your LMS content.

YouTube gives the option of creating Unlisted videos, which do not appear in public searches, on your channel or in your subscribers’ feeds. Vimeo lets you restrict playback to specific sites, which will enable you to allow the video to be played only within your LMS and be hidden everywhere else. 

LMS performance benefits

Even if you do have plenty of storage space to host, you can improve LMS performance for your users by adopting the approach outlined above. 

Hosting an LMS has different requirements than streaming video. By streaming videos from a third-party site, you can get the best of both worlds. Your videos are hosted on sites specialising in video streaming and you can avoid unnecessarily inflicting slow video download speeds upon your learners.

Course backups

Using manual or automated course backups is a sensible way of protecting the learning resources that are essential for your users and educators alike. But it’s important to remember that these backups are stored within your hosting infrastructure.

If multiple backups of several large courses are stored, this can start to take up a considerable amount of space. Deleting obsolete and outdated course backups will free up valuable storage space that can be put to better use.

This can be controlled in the first instance by adjusting the course backup settings in your Moodle or Totara site to set the maximum number of backups stored and choose how long backups should be stored before being deleted.

Keep in mind that old courses may be taking up storage space even if you’re not creating course backups. Check the LMS course and activity recycle bin to see how much storage space is being taken up by deleted courses. You can adjust the settings to control how long deleted items are kept in the recycle bin.

Internal governance

Course backups are a LMS storage issue underpinned by an LMS internal governance issue. A clear understanding of the policy for retaining old content, the processes around deletion and who has responsibility for managing these things will ensure that course backups storage don’t get out of control.

Talk to us about optimising your LMS storage

If you’d like support to optimise your LMS storage and stay in control of your managed hosting costs, just fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch.

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