Online examination and assessment platforms for creating, administering, and grading tests and quizzes digitally. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
Computer-based assessment covers everything from a five-question compliance refresher to an invigilated professional certification, and the honest starting point is that a web application cannot invigilate. Software can randomise questions, time the paper, restrict access by IP address and log every answer with a timestamp. It cannot see the second laptop, the phone under the desk, or the colleague in the next room. Any product promising otherwise is selling either a locked-down browser, a webcam feed watched by a human, or a story.
That distinction sorts the market. High-stakes proctored testing belongs to ExamSoft, ProctorU, Janison and similar vendors, priced by volume through enterprise contracts. Low-stakes internal quizzing is served free by Google Forms and Microsoft Forms, which have no assessment security worth the name but are perfectly adequate for a knowledge check. In between sit the self-hosted platforms, and the question there is usually whether you already run Moodle, whose quiz module is very capable and comes with an entire learning management system attached.
TCExam is the standalone option: a self-hosted PHP assessment system that authors, schedules, delivers and reports on tests without asking you to adopt an LMS. It generates unique papers by randomly selecting and ordering questions per candidate, supports LaTeX and multimedia in questions, runs in 26 languages including right-to-left scripts, follows WCAG 2.1 level AA in its interface, and prints paper versions with optical mark recognition sheets for the sittings that still happen on paper. Version 17.2.5 is current as of August 2026.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
A first-aid, food-hygiene or health-and-safety trainer needs a consistent multiple-choice paper, automatic scoring and a record of who passed and when. Self-hosting keeps the question bank private, which matters when the same forty questions are reused across every cohort for years.
An organisation testing three hundred staff on data protection or safeguarding once a year needs an auditable record more than it needs anti-cheating measures. The result set lives in your own database, which makes producing evidence for an auditor a query rather than an export request to a vendor.
Some cohorts cannot all sit at a terminal, whether through access, connectivity or policy. TCExam generates printable PDF papers with OMR answer sheets from the same question bank as the on-screen test, so both groups sit the same assessment and the results land in the same reports.
Public sector bodies and education providers with a duty on accessible assessment need something better than a form nobody has tested with a screen reader. The project states its interface follows WCAG 2.1 level AA, which at least gives you a documented starting position rather than a shrug.
Online exam platforms have unusual hosting needs: low average load punctuated by intense concurrent spikes when an exam goes live. We tune for the spike. PHP-FPM workers are sized for concurrency, MySQL is configured for sustained writes during exam submission, and we recommend pre-warming the cache before a scheduled exam window. For institutions running exams to several hundred candidates simultaneously, a managed cloud server with reserved CPU is the right home, not shared hosting.
Version 17 changed the install considerably, and this is the thing to check first. TCExam now requires PHP 8.2 or newer, manages its dependencies with Composer rather than bundling them, and generates PDF fonts during setup instead of shipping 27 MB of them. It also wants extensions including gd, intl, bcmath, mbstring, zip, curl, xml, openssl and posix. On budget hosting with no shell access that combination is a wall. Our plans include SSH access and per-package PHP version selection up to 8.5, so Composer runs as it is meant to.
The load pattern is unlike anything else in this list. An assessment platform is idle for weeks, then has an entire cohort logging in within the same two minutes and submitting answers together. Shared hosting handles a class of thirty comfortably. For two hundred concurrent candidates, use a managed cloud server for the exam period, because the one hour it needs to be reliable is the only hour that matters.
One licensing note: TCExam is AGPL-3.0. If you modify it and offer it to users over a network, the licence requires you to make your modified source available. Running it unmodified for your own assessments is unaffected. Do not choose this if you need webcam proctoring or a locked-down browser for high-stakes certification. Buy that from a vendor who insures it.
Common questions we hear from people running online exams applications on 365i hosting.
No, and neither can any other web application on its own. What it can do is make cheating less useful: unique papers built by randomly selecting and ordering questions per candidate, per-question and overall time limits, IP address restrictions so the test only opens from your training room, and a full log of every answer and timestamp. That is enough for internal training, compliance and most certificates of attendance. For high-stakes qualifications you need physical invigilation or a commercial proctoring service, and you should budget for it.
Yes. Version 17.2.5 is current as of August 2026, with commits landing regularly through 2024, 2025 and 2026 from Nicola Asuni, who also wrote the TCPDF library. Version 17 was a substantial modernisation: PHP 8.2 as the floor, Composer dependencies, HTML5 output, a PHPUnit test suite, continuous integration, and a security-hardening pass that replaced weak random values with cryptographically secure ones. It is a smaller project than Moodle, but it is a live one.
PHP 8.2 or newer with gd, intl, bcmath, mbstring, zip, curl, xml, openssl and posix, a MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL database, and Composer to fetch dependencies. Version 17 no longer bundles its libraries or its PDF fonts, so the setup step that generates fonts needs shell access. All our web hosting plans include SSH and SFTP access and let you select the PHP version per package, so this is a normal install rather than a fight. If you would rather not touch a terminal, ask our support team.
Moodle if you are teaching a course, TCExam if you are only assessing. Moodle's quiz module is more capable and better supported, but you are then running a full learning management system with its own upgrade cycle, plugin ecosystem and resource appetite, which is a lot to carry for a forty-question test. TCExam does one job and installs on ordinary hosting. If you already run Moodle for anything, use its quizzes and skip this category. We host both.
That burst is the only performance question that matters here. Thirty candidates starting together is fine on our standard web hosting, helped by the unlimited LVE resources and unlimited PHP workers on every plan, so nothing gets throttled at the worst moment. Two hundred at once, with PDF certificates generating as they finish, deserves dedicated CPU: put it on a managed cloud server for the exam window. Run a rehearsal with real numbers before the first live sitting, because discovering this on the day is expensive.
You can use TCExam commercially, charge for the courses and exams you deliver with it, and keep your question bank entirely private. Question content is your data, not part of the software. The obligation only bites if you modify the application itself and then make it available to users over a network, in which case you must offer the modified source to those users. Running the released version as it comes, even for paying candidates, triggers nothing. If you plan heavy customisation, take proper legal advice first.
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All 1 online exams applications available with one-click installation on our fast UK web hosting.
