Xerte
Hosting

Xerte is an application most people have never heard of, and the people who have heard of it are usually working in higher education. It\'s a content authoring tool: you use it to build interactive learning materials, quizzes, structured lessons, and SCORM packages, then you publish them into Moodle or another LMS for students to actually use. It is not the LMS itself. That distinction trips people up regularly.

What works well: Xerte is genuinely good at what it does. The page-based authoring model is logical for educators (much more intuitive than building H5P content from scratch), the SCORM export works reliably, the quiz and interactive activity templates cover what most educational content actually needs, and the platform has been refined by people who teach for a living. The Apereo Foundation maintains it properly, and updates ship regularly.

What\'s annoying: documentation aimed at the system administrator is thin. The application assumes you have a learning technologist setting it up, and there\'s an unspoken expectation that your institution has a central Xerte deployment. Independent developers and small training providers can certainly run their own, but you\'ll do more reading than you\'d like during initial setup. Authentication options are reasonable but not as polished as a modern SaaS LMS, and the user-management UI is functional rather than slick.

"Xerte is the right tool when you specifically want to author SCORM-compliant interactive content for your own LMS rather than locking your content into a SaaS authoring tool. It\'s niche, it\'s academic in flavour, and it\'s very good at what it does. Don\'t expect a polished SaaS experience, do expect a tool that produces content you can take with you anywhere SCORM is supported."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

On hosting: Xerte runs comfortably on our shared hosting from £5.99/mo for individual developers and small training providers. PHP 8.1 is the version we\'d recommend pinning to (the project tests against it more thoroughly than 8.3 in current releases), MySQL 8 is fine, and 256MB PHP memory is plenty. The file footprint depends on how much media you embed in your learning materials. Video and audio uploads can grow quickly, so plan disk usage with that in mind.

For institutional deployments serving multiple authors and many concurrent students rendering published content, cloud servers from £9.99/mo make sense. The bottleneck is rarely the authoring workload, it\'s the publishing endpoint when published learning materials are accessed simultaneously by hundreds of students starting a module on the same Monday morning. A cloud server with tuned PHP-FPM and a CDN in front of the published content folder handles that pattern much more cleanly.

One practical tip: Xerte\'s default file upload limits are conservative. If your authors are embedding video, raise PHP\'s upload_max_filesize and post_max_size in php.ini, and set the corresponding values in Xerte\'s admin. We can help with this as part of 7-day expert support. Also, set up CDN for the public-facing learning material URLs so that a successful module doesn\'t crater your bandwidth on the day everyone takes the quiz.