Use this on us and on everyone else you are quoting. The answers are more revealing than the price - and the questions a provider avoids tell you most.
Print this, or save it as a PDF from your browser, and take it into the call.
1. Where your data actually lives
Which cloud region will my site run in? Name it, not just the country.
Which availability zones, and where do the backups sit?
Is any part of the stack, including backups or monitoring, outside Australia?
Will you put the region in writing for our tender or security questionnaire?
2. Backups you can actually restore
How often are backups taken, and how long are they retained?
When did you last restore one of my backups, and how did you verify it worked?
Do you verify a restore by logging into the restored site, or by checking a job reported success?
How long would a full restore take, and who decides to trigger one?
3. Staging and upgrades
Do I get a staging environment, and is it included or extra?
Are Moodle upgrades rehearsed on staging before production?
Who checks every third-party plugin against the target version?
What is the rollback plan, and has it been tested?
Are production changes scheduled around our assessment calendar or yours?
4. The failure nobody checks
Who monitors that Moodle cron actually completed, and what happens when it does not?
How is email deliverability configured - SPF, DKIM, DMARC - and has it been tested?
Is the site timezone correct for our state, including the no-daylight-saving and half-hour cases?
What alerts exist for certificate expiry, disk and database health?
5. Support you can hold them to
What are your support hours, in my timezone?
What counts as critical, and what is the first-response target?
Is 'response' a human who can help, or an automated ticket acknowledgement?
How do I reach someone at 2am on a Sunday if the site is down?
What is explicitly not covered?
6. Money and exit
What is included, and what is billed separately?
What happens if we outgrow the plan mid-term?
Can I leave, and do I get a full database dump and moodledata?
Is there an exit fee, and how long do you retain our data afterwards?
7. Fit
Are you a Moodle Partner? If not, does that matter for our procurement?
Do you host anything other than Moodle?
Who will actually do the work, and will I speak to them or to an account manager?