Gnomio

Gnomio is a free hosting service for Moodle, the learning management system its home page calls "the most popular training tool in the world." An educator creates a Moodle site on a gnomio.com subdomain in a few minutes and gets full administration rights over it, and two paid plans add capacity, remove the ads or move the site onto a virtual server. The site says the service is "mainly aimed at small schools and institutions in emerging or developing countries", and its page title advertises Moodle 5.2. Gnomio states that it uses Moodle software but is not affiliated with Moodle Pty Ltd. For a large organization or very complex requirements, the home page recommends contacting a Moodle Certified Service Provider in the region instead.

The home page puts the service at 18,329 active sites, 1,214,113 users and 111,174 courses.

Creating a site

Signing up is a single form on the home page. The educator picks a site address, which becomes a subdomain of gnomio.com and must be between 2 and 32 lowercase letters or numbers with no spaces, symbols or accents, enters an email address and accepts the terms and conditions. The page then says the site is being created and that an email with login details will arrive within a few minutes, asks the user to check the spam folder if it does not, and asks them to be patient rather than create additional sites. When creation is not possible at that moment, the form shows an error and asks the user to try again after a few hours.

The home page describes the result plainly: "In a few minutes you can have your virtual classroom active, with your own subdomain, secure access, complete administration privileges and totally free." An educator, it says, can create their own online learning community there. With administrator rights, the educator runs the site from Moodle's own administration area, where a notifications page also shows whether the site complies with its plan's limits.

The free plan

Shared Hosting Free costs $0 a month. Its card lists 500 registered users, 50 concurrent users, 50 courses, 2 GB of SSD storage, a 100 MB upload file size limit and email support, and warns that ads will be displayed on the site. A site on the free hosting must also comply with Google AdSense content policies. The card names the tools that come with the site: antivirus, a recycle bin, access to Web Services, global search, Moodle Stats, the Unoconv document converter and Moodle AI Tools.

The limits are enforced. A free site that does not comply with them is put into maintenance mode automatically, and if the violation is repeated frequently the site is deleted without further notice. Unused sites on the free service are disabled automatically after one month without any valid access, so a site left untouched through a long school holiday would be switched off. A site the page considers empty, with no courses created and no new users added, is disabled after "only one week". A deactivated site can be restored during the three months after deactivation; after that it is permanently and irreversibly deleted from Gnomio's backups. Gnomio says it does not send notifications of deactivations or deletions and asks users to access their sites regularly.

The paid plans

Shared Hosting Plus costs $9.95 a month or $109.95 a year. Its card lists 1,000 registered users, 100 concurrent users, 100 courses, 10 GB of SSD storage, a 1 GB upload file size limit, priority email support and no ads on the site. Beside the recycle bin, Web Services, Moodle Stats and the document converter, it names ClamAV antivirus and a simple global search, and it marks Moodle AI Tools as new.

Premium Virtual Server costs $59.95 a month or $599.95 a year and puts the site on its own virtual server with 2 vCPUs, 4GB of RAM and 80 GB of SSD storage. It allows unlimited registered users and courses, is "sized to serve approx. 200 concurrent users", raises the upload limit to up to 2 GB, and carries the same priority email support, ad-free site and tool list as Plus. Its button reads "Contact us", and the page adds that anyone who needs more capacity can write in, naming the resources required, for a larger hosting plan.

Prices are in US dollars and do not include possible local taxes. Credit card and PayPal are supported in most countries, in many countries a buyer can pay in the local currency, and payments are processed by Gnomio's partner Paddle.

Plugins, backups and terms

The plugin rule is explicit. For security reasons, the basic shared hosting does not allow installing your own themes and plugins, nor access to the database or file system. Only users who have bought their own virtual or physical server can install plugins in their Moodle site, under their own responsibility, and of the plans on the page that means the Premium Virtual Server. All three plan cards carry a line about installing plugins or themes, but the plugins section is the rule: on the shared plans, users cannot add their own.

Backups are largely the administrator's job. Gnomio runs full system backups only for disaster recovery, instead of internal Moodle backups, and says they are not intended to fix user mistakes. The page says users can, and must, manually create and download backups of each of their courses. Paying users can activate automatic backups of their Moodle courses, though the company warns that these take up a lot of space.

The terms are short. Gnomio says it does not sell users' data to anyone, does not send unsolicited email, and lets a user request the deletion of their site at any time. Abuse of its resources, unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content, hacking, spamming and other illegal activity are prohibited, and Gnomio reserves the right to shut down a site for such activity or for content it deems inappropriate.

Help and support

Gnomio does not offer training services. For Moodle questions it points to the online community of Moodle users who answer each other's queries, to the official documentation and to books about Moodle. For a problem with the hosting itself, the site administrator emails Gnomio, which says it will try to answer within 24 hours; messages that mention a paid plan get priority attention, and the page asks users to include their site name. Support goes only to the site administrator or creator, never directly to students, so learners on a Gnomio site take their questions to whoever runs it.

Who it suits

Gnomio suits the reader its home page names: a small school or institution, especially in an emerging or developing country, or an individual educator who wants a working Moodle site in minutes without paying for hosting. A teacher can run courses on the free plan with up to 500 registered users and 50 courses, and a school that needs more can choose Plus for 1,000 users without ads, or the Premium Virtual Server for unlimited users, its own resources and its own plugins. The caveats sit on the same page: the free site carries ads and is disabled after a month without use, course backups are the administrator's task, plugins need the virtual server, and support runs by email. A large organization, or one with complex requirements, is pointed to a Moodle Certified Service Provider.