Cloud Subscription

Getting Started

The easiest way to get started with Moodle is to get our cloud subscription. All you really need to get started is a guesstimation on how active the site will be (concurrent users) and then decide if you want a custom domain or not. There are tradeoffs with both choices.

If you choose to not use a custom domain name you will get a subdomain to sparkfore.com, e.g. company.sparkfore.com. The tradeoff here is of course that domain name will be sparkfore.com and that there’s a limitation on what subdomains can be chosen.

Chosing a use a custom domain name will naturaly give you more freedom but the tradeoff is that you will need, or have access to, the expertise to configure the DNS for custom domain name. More about this in the section Custom Domain Name

Custom Domain Name

You are able to use your own domain name with our cloud subscription with one caveat, we don’t support bare domains, e.g. example.com. We require that you use a subdomain even if it’s just www.example.com. (Examples of common subdomains for Moodle are moodle, learning, academy, training and lms.)

Caution

A custom domain name require you to either have control the DNS for the domain name or that you can forward this request to someone who is able to. Please be aware that the Moodle site can not come online before the DNS has been updated. See the section DNS.

DNS

Configuring the DNS for your custom domain name can either be done all at once or in two steps. If you are setting up a new site with a previously unused subdomain then the all at once method is recommended. If you already have a site at the subdomain you want to use a two step method is what we recommend. The difference between these methods is only the time between the steps.

Step 1

Set up a CNAME that points _acme-challenge.yoursubdomain.yourdomain.tld to _acme-challenge.acme.onsparkfore.com. This enables us to create a certificate for the site and prepare everything. At this point the site can be fully started but remain inaccessible.

Step 2

Set up another CNAME that points yoursubdomain.yourdomain.tld to yoursubdomain-yourdomain-tld.hosting.onsparkfore.com. This will then make the site accessible.

Note

The format of the CNAME target of your subdomain is your fully qualified domain with all dots/periods replaced with dashes (dashes remain as dashes). moodle.example.com would be moodle-example-com.hosting.onsparkfore.com.