Getting started with your Moodle

We send your site address and admin login when your instance is ready. First thing: sign in and set your own password from User menu → Preferences → Change password.

Your site works straight away on the address we give you. You can move it to your own domain whenever you like — that's the next step, and there's no rush.

Most institutes run their LMS on something like learn.yourschool.in. To set that up, tell us the exact subdomain you want and we'll send you the server IP address.

Add an A record for that subdomain pointing at the IP, in whatever DNS panel your domain uses. Message us once it's in and we'll switch the site over and issue the SSL certificate. There's no charge for this, on any plan.

DNS changes can take a few minutes to a few hours to spread. If it's not live immediately, it's usually just propagation.

This is the step people most often miss. Moodle cannot send any email on its own — enrolment notices, password resets, forum digests and course messages all go out over SMTP, and until it's configured none of them arrive.

You have two options:

• Use your own email service — Google Workspace, Zoho, Microsoft 365, or whatever runs your institute's mail. Best choice, because mail then comes from your own domain and your learners recognise the sender.
• Use ours — we can configure our SMTP for you to get going quickly. Mail will be sent via an ETmantra address rather than your own domain, so it's a good stop-gap rather than a permanent answer for a brand you're building.

Settings live under Site administration → Server → Email → Outgoing mail configuration. Send us your SMTP host, port, username and password and we'll put them in and test it for you.

Go to Site administration → Courses → Add a new course. Start with one real course rather than a test — it's the fastest way to find out whether the platform fits how you actually teach.

Videos: hosting video directly in Moodle eats storage and streams poorly. Most institutes keep videos on YouTube as unlisted uploads and embed them in the course — unlisted means only people with the link can watch, and it isn't listed on your channel or in search. Paste the link into a Page or Label and Moodle embeds the player. If you'd rather not use YouTube at all, ask us about VideoKavach for protected hosting.

Quizzes: add a Quiz activity, then build questions in the question bank. MCQs, true/false, numerical, short answer and essay are all standard, and MCQs grade themselves.

Add people under Site administration → Users → Accounts, one at a time or by CSV upload for a whole batch. Then enrol them into courses with the right role — Teacher, Non-editing teacher, or Student.

Worth knowing: everyone counts toward your plan's user limit — teachers and admins as well as students. On Sprout (100 users), five teachers means 95 learner places. If you're getting close, moving up a plan takes effect immediately and you only pay the difference.

You have full control here. Anything from the official Moodle plugin directory can be installed from Site administration → Plugins → Install plugins. You don't need our permission or a support ticket.

We keep plugins working through Moodle updates — every update is tested on a staging copy first, and if something breaks we restore from the pre-update backup.

If you need something that doesn't exist yet, we build custom Moodle plugins too. Teaching programming is a common case, and we have purpose-built plugins for it.

A common surprise: Moodle has no real payment system of its own. It can mark a course as requiring payment, but it won't run an Indian payment gateway, issue GST invoices, or manage your catalogue.

The usual approaches:

• Sell on your website, enrol in Moodle — if your site runs WordPress and WooCommerce, our LMSNode plugin connects the two so a completed order enrols the learner automatically. Free for your first 30 enrolments; beyond that you can keep enrolling manually or upgrade.
• Enrol manually — perfectly workable at low volume. Take payment however you like, then add the learner by hand.

Backups run nightly and are kept per your plan's retention. Restores are on us — message us and we'll roll you back.

Your instance is hosted in India, with SSL, firewall rules and brute-force protection on by default. Moodle core, plugin and PHP updates are applied for you after staging tests.

For anything at all, email or WhatsApp us. You'll be talking to people who build Moodle plugins, not a general hosting desk.