3 Major Reasons You Should Host Your Own LMS

By: Justin Ferriman April 3, 2012
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Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) can be great, but it certainly isn’t the best solution for everyone. With today’s trend of SaaS, it can be easy to forget the benefits of hosting your own LMS. Here are the top 3 reasons why you should host your own LMS:

1. If you already have a database administrator in your arsenal, then adding the “LMS Admin” hat to their job title is beneficial for both your organization as to the employee. First, the admin can apply their database knowledge to the LMS, and decrease the learning curve. They will need to come up to speed with SCORM and other compliance components too. This is good for you since you can leverage your already knowledge capital without having to spend thousands of dollars.  It is good for them because they can add a new ability to their resume.

2. If your business has decent size servers, then depending on the number of courses and frequency of their use, you can certainly host your own LMS. Your server performance won’t suffer all that much, and if there is a concern in that area, the extra investment in bolstering your servers will benefit not just the LMS but also your business as you start to grow and therefore positively impact technical performance in other areas of the organization.

3. While there are many successful stories of SaaS being used to support and launch LMS systems, one major benefit for hosting your own LMS is a gaining a more intimate understanding of the corporate learning process. Challenging your organization to understand and successfully host a LMS is a great way to internalize and reinforce the importance of continual learning in the company. In essence, you “walk the walk” in regards to your organization learning initiative when you commit to learning the systems behind the training.  After some time, you may decide to implement a SaaS model, but at least you will be able to speak the language at this point, and probably find a better deal.

So before you run to your nearest LMS SaaS provider, remember that there are many reasons, perhaps more reasons, why you should consider hosting your own LMS – at least initially.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter