Media Wiki
Hosting

I have a soft spot for MediaWiki. It's the unfashionable answer to documentation in 2026, when every product team seems to want Notion or Confluence, but it remains the most flexible, durable, ownership-respecting option for a knowledge base I know of. I run a couple of MediaWiki sites myself for personal reference, and I've helped a fair number of customers stand them up over the years for client documentation, internal handbooks and community projects.

The thing people underestimate about MediaWiki is how well it scales down. Yes, it powers Wikipedia, with its astronomical traffic and massive editorial community. It also runs perfectly happily as a 200-page internal handbook for a 12-person company on a £5.99 shared plan. The same software, two completely different scales, the same satisfying experience for the people doing the writing.

"MediaWiki is what I reach for when a customer says they want documentation that will still be readable in fifteen years. Wiki markup is human-readable. The database is dumpable. The export format is open. There is no vendor lock-in worth the name."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

From a hosting point of view, the application is well-mannered. The MediaWiki team takes PHP compatibility seriously and ships releases that explicitly target current PHP versions. The codebase is large, but it's well-organised, and the resource footprint of a small wiki is tiny. The thing that can spike resource use is the search index rebuild, which we tend to schedule during quiet hours via cron.

Configuration is where new admins sometimes feel overwhelmed. The LocalSettings.php file has hundreds of possible directives, and the documentation is extensive in a way that\'s thorough but daunting at first sight. My recommendation for a new install is always: start with the defaults, run for a week, then make changes based on what your actual users do. Don\'t pre-optimise based on the manual.

The extension question comes up a lot. There are hundreds of extensions for MediaWiki, ranging from official Wikimedia-supported ones to abandoned third-party experiments. The official ones (VisualEditor, ParserFunctions, Cite, CategoryTree, MultimediaViewer, SyntaxHighlight, Math) are reliable, well-maintained and worth installing for most wikis. Anything outside that core set, vet carefully. I've seen wikis brought down by an extension that hadn\'t been touched since MediaWiki 1.27.

For larger wikis, the conversation shifts. Once you cross a few thousand pages with active editors, search index size, parser cache hit rate and database query patterns all start to matter. Memcached or Redis as an object cache makes a noticeable difference. Database tuning helps. At that scale, a cloud server from £9.99/mo with dedicated resource is a much better fit than shared hosting. We have customers running large MediaWiki installs at that tier and they perform well.

On migrations, MediaWiki is portable in a useful way. The database dump and the images directory are the only things you need to carry, and the LocalSettings.php is a small file that\'s easy to update for the new server. We\'ve moved customer wikis between hosts several times over the years, and the process is well-trodden. Free SSL, daily backups and PHP 8.5 are all included, and the migration team has the upgrade path well-rehearsed.