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Which hosting do I need?
Read this before you buy hosting. It is the one decision that affects everything else, and changing it later means moving your whole installation. Time to read: 4 minutes.
The short answer
Ordinary shared hosting is enough for most schools — including if you run 20, 30 or 50 schools on one installation. You do not need a VPS just because you have many schools. A VPS is for a small number of specific features listed further down.
We recommend Hostinger (hPanel). cPanel hosting works exactly the same way; every instruction in these docs gives you both.
The two plans we recommend
We test on Hostinger, and every instruction in these docs is written against these two plans. You can use any host that meets the requirements below — but if you follow these, the panel names and steps in these docs will match exactly what you see.
For almost everyone — Hostinger Business Web Hosting
- 50 GB NVMe storage · 600,000 files (inodes) · ~100,000 visits per month
- ₹349/month on the 12-month plan (price as of July 2026)
- Runs one school comfortably, and a group of many schools on one installation
The cheaper Premium plan will run a single small school, but its 20 GB storage and 400,000 file limit fill up faster than people expect once student photos, documents, generated PDFs and automatic backups accumulate. Business is the plan we recommend.
Only if you need the VPS-only features — Hostinger KVM 2
- 2 vCPU · 8 GB RAM · 100 GB NVMe · 8 TB bandwidth
- ₹929/month on the 12-month plan (price as of July 2026)
- Choose this only if you need face recognition, biometric devices or CCTV attendance — see what needs a VPS below
A VPS also means you (or we) manage the server itself: updates, security and backups are no longer handled by the hosting panel for you.
The links above are our referral links. They cost you nothing extra.
What you must check before buying
Whatever host you choose, it must offer all of these. Any decent shared plan does — but check, because a host that fails even one of them will cost you a day.
| Requirement | What to look for |
|---|---|
| PHP 8.3 or 8.4 | Must be selectable in the hosting panel. PHP 8.5 is not supported yet — do not select it. |
| MySQL database | Any current version. You will import our ready-made database file into it. |
| Cron jobs | Non-negotiable. You need to add one scheduled command. Without it, large parts of the system go quiet — see below. |
| Set the domain folder | You must be able to point your domain at the public folder inside the upload. |
| ~2 GB disk to start | Grows with photos, documents and backups. |
The cron job is not optional
The system runs one scheduled command every minute, and that single command drives everything that happens on its own: sending SMS and emails, push notifications, fee invoices and reminders, birthday messages, exam-result release, automatic backups and daily summaries.
If the cron job is missing, none of it runs — and nothing shows an error. The panel looks completely normal, but messages never leave. This is the single most common cause of "we set it up but nothing is sending".
Any host that does not offer cron jobs cannot run this system.
What runs on shared hosting
Everything a school does day to day. Specifically, and verified in the code:
- All student, staff, academic, attendance, exam, fee, accounting, library, hostel, inventory, transport and communication features
- All PDFs and printing — fee receipts, marksheets, due slips, ID cards, certificates and every report. PDFs are produced in pure PHP, so no special server software is needed.
- Automatic database backups. Our backup engine is written in pure PHP and never needs
mysqldumpor shell access — it was built specifically for shared hosting. - Biometric attendance machines (ZKTeco) — see the note below; these work on shared hosting, which most people assume they do not
- SMS, WhatsApp, email and payment gateways
- All three mobile apps (parent, staff, driver) — they talk to the same server
- Multiple schools on one installation, each with its own login and data
What needs a VPS
Only these. If you do not need them, shared hosting is the right choice.
| Feature | Why it needs more than shared hosting |
|---|---|
| Face recognition attendance | The server itself has to process face data, which needs Node.js installed on it. Shared hosting does not allow that. |
| IP camera / CCTV attendance | Builds on face recognition, and needs a machine that can process the camera feed continuously. |
| Pixel-exact Canvas Designer templates | ID cards and certificates designed in the drag-and-drop Canvas Designer are positioned by headless Chrome. Shared hosting cannot run Chrome, so these fall back to standard PDF rendering — they still print correctly, but a heavily designed layout may shift slightly. Classic templates are unaffected. |
| Laravel Octane (high performance mode) | An optional speed setting that keeps a PHP process running permanently, which shared hosting does not allow. This is not a feature your school uses — the system is fast without it. |
Biometric attendance machines work fine on shared hosting
This surprises people. The ZK sync agent runs on a computer inside your school, reads the attendance machine there, and sends the records up to your server. Your server never has to reach the device, so ordinary shared hosting handles it.
Only face recognition and IP camera attendance need a VPS, because those make the server do the image processing.
Read that first row carefully
"Needs a VPS" here means pixel-exact output from the Canvas Designer. Cards and certificates themselves work fine on shared hosting — the system automatically falls back to standard PDF rendering. If your school prints plain ID cards from a classic template, shared hosting is fine.
What a typical setup looks like
A group running around 30 schools on one installation, with parents checking the mobile app daily, would use:
- Hostinger Business Web Hosting (hPanel), PHP 8.3
- One MySQL database, our supplied file imported into it
- One cron job added in hPanel → Advanced → Cron Jobs
- Domain pointed at the
publicfolder - SMS through their own provider account, payments through Razorpay
No VPS. A group like this would move to a VPS only on the day they want face-recognition attendance.
If you are still unsure
Follow this:
In words: ask yourself one question — do I need face recognition or IP camera attendance?
- No → buy Business Web Hosting and follow the shared hosting install. This includes schools using biometric attendance machines.
- Yes → buy VPS KVM 2 and follow the VPS install.
Verified against the code on 2026-07-21 for v3.x. If a detail here does not match what you see, tell us — we treat that as a documentation bug.