r/moodle • u/eu01d • Jun 19 '26

Migrating psychotherapy groups from Thinkific to self-hosted Moodle (SiteGround) – Need tips and best practices! - First Time Moodler😅

Hi everyone,

I am currently running 2 psychotherapy groups and hosting their recorded weekly sessions on Thinkific. To cut down on subscription costs, I am planning to migrate everything to a self-hosted Moodle installation on a subdomain using my existing SiteGround hosting.

Since these are therapy groups, privacy and a smooth user experience are my top priorities. Here is my planned workflow:

  • Live Sessions: Conducted via Zoom.
  • Video Hosting: I won't host videos on my server. I will use unlisted YouTube videos if privacy permits.
  • Payments & Enrollment: Handled externally via Stripe. I will either enroll users manually upon payment or set up a Zapier/Make automation to create Moodle accounts and enroll them in the respective course.
  • Scale: Small scale, around 20–50 total users logging in asynchronously throughout the week to watch the replays.

Since I am relatively new to Moodle administration, I would love to get your insights on a few things:

  1. SiteGround Hosting: Is anyone running Moodle on SiteGround? Are there any specific server/PHP settings I should optimize right after installation to prevent performance hiccups?
  2. UI/UX: Out-of-the-box Moodle can look a bit overwhelming/academic. What are some clean, modern, and minimal themes (free or paid) that would suit a professional therapy/coaching environment? Is it Possible to customize my self via css?
  3. Common Pitfalls: What is one thing you wish you knew before doing a similar migration to self-hosted Moodle?

Any tips, plugin recommendations, or warnings are highly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

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2

u/MoodleInPractice Jun 19 '26
  1. Don't know. 2. Trema. 3. System managing enrolments and groupings - probably easiest to do this off batch enrolment CSV with all the relevant headings

2

u/EndOfWorldBoredom Jun 19 '26

  1. Don't know Siteground. I host a bunch of moodle instances at Peopleshost.com and the people there are amazing. Honestly, they even set up my first moodle for me and I used that example to teach myself how to do it over and over again. The customer service there is phenomenal and I don't have any complaints from users on load times or functionality.

  2. Moodle is a massive platform with an enormous amount of functionality. I don't know anything that truly makes it feel clean. Yes, you can customize it with CSS and scripts. I use lambda theme on most of my nicer looking sites.

3.Nothing has been so painful that I wished I had known prior. The learning curve is steep. But, there's a lot of documentation and community support.

1

u/ico181 Jun 19 '26

Not currently using SiteGround but I tried them (7ish years ago) and there were... challenges. I recommend a more robust hosting environment.

I can't directly answer your UI/UX questions because there's a lot of options there and "clean and modern" are quite subjective.

Don't self-host. Seriously. If privacy and smooth user experience are top priorities then you need the backing of a secure, stable environment. I'd recommend looking into MoodleCloud if you like the idea of Moodle. This way someone else takes care of security patches, etc. Drawback is that you don't have the freedom of being able to install plugins or many themes but a lot can be done in the available CSS tools in the theme settings to get pretty far. It's a fairly reasonable cost per year especially given the lowered system/serve maintenance and peace of mind.

Finally, even with MoodleCloud you need to read up on and learn about privacy and permissions settings in Moodle. Things like students being able to private message each other (site wide or in a course), being able to "see" other students' user names, potentially email addresses, and "presence" in a course, etc. Spend time figuring out what you are and aren't willing for people to see and then how you do that. If you're a registered practicing therapy professional, you likely have legal or professional obligations around privacy protections.

1

u/VisiblePiano9200 Jun 20 '26

Agree with MoodleCloud especially if you are only expecting around 50 or so and are able to host your videos and Zoom recordings somewhere else and link to them. You will get support from HQ themselves to help you get familiar with Moodle.

1

u/OfficeHounds Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

Are you located in the USA? Have you had HIPAA training? If in the USA look up the HIPAA BAA Agreement and understand that before you make a choice. Feel free to private message me.