Choosing a Hosting Provider
A Guide to Using MediaWiki in a Hosted Environment
An instructional website by the developer of mh370wiki.net - a MediaWiki site about Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
There are a lot of companies offering website hosting. Many of them market their service toward Wordpress users and of those, some offer Wordpress only.
So the first step, if you intend to use MediaWiki, is to confirm that the Hosting Provider offers a range of software for installation, hopefully including MediaWiki.
Next step would be to choose the level or type of service. These are usually marketed as Plans with names like Starter, Economy, Business, Premium, Ultimate etc. Compare plans to select one suitable for your intentions.
Some quotas to consider:-
- Number of Websites: Interpret that as the number of Domains. Is one enough?
- Number of Subdomains: Often not mentioned. Subdomains are useful, for example this website is actually on a subdomain. The registered domain name is mh370.wiki. The prefix mw (meaning MediaWiki) is a subdomain. If your live website is at mydomain.net and you could have a copy at test.mydomain.net for the purpose of testing ideas or configuration, with no risk of breaking the live, production website.
- Number of Databases: One database per website is not enough. I create copies of each database as a backup. When upgrading a MediaWiki installation I will create a copy of the current database, check that it works ok, then upgrade the copy-database to the new version of MediaWiki. If you have several websites, and several upgrades, and several time-based backup copies of each database, soon there might be 10 to 20 databases. An initial limit of 25 is workable.
- Storage Limit: Typically 10GB, 25GB, 50GB, 100GB etc. After 10 years or so working with the mh370wiki.net website I have used around 10GB of my allocated 50GB storage limit, but did reach my 'number of files' limit.
- Number of Files: I was surprised to find that on my current plan I am limited to 750,000 files. I received an email warning that I had reached 90% of my quota. I didn't know there was a quota. When writing this article I looked at the plans offerred by several Hosting Providers and only one (CrazyDomains) clearly noted a quota for Files and Directories (inodes) of 1,000,000. A quota is probably listed by other companies.
My Story
Prior to starting the mh370wiki.net website I did my research and, being located in Australia, selected a local Hosting Provider.
I registered my domains in the United States though, because privacy options are available.
Eventually though I had to migrate my websites to a different Hosting Provider. The reason was that I wanted to upgrade to a newer version of MediaWiki which also required a later version of PHP. My Australian Hosting Provider was not ready to update their PHP version. They were focussing on commercial clients and less interested in individual users like myself, used Plesk instead of cPanel, and stopped providing software for automated installs.
I migrated websites to a hosting service in the USA, and migrated my domains to a separate domain registrar, also in the USA.
However, the current hosting provider does not have the latest releases of MediaWiki available for automated install through cPanel --> Softactulous. To upgrade I must use a manual method.
A Friend's Story
One of my wife's friends recently asked for help to set up a website for her new photography business. We decided that a domain name which included her family name would look professional, and consequently her business email address could have a meaningful name. And that a domain with the country code for Australia would be good too.
To register a domain with .au the registrant must have an Australian Business Name or ABN. An Australian domain can only be hosted by a Hosting Provider in Australia.
The solution was an account with an Australian hosting company which processed the domain registration after confirming the ABN details matched the proposed domain name.
And I created a subdomain which is the photographer's given name - looks good on email.
And I set up the website using... Wordpress.