On 10/01/2013 07:27 AM, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
On 10/01/2013 09:25 AM, Brion Vibber wrote:
We've been moving away from being friendly to old-style shared-hosting servers for some time with key features that people are going to expect to replicate on their MediaWikis in the future...
Fair enough.
If WMF were the only user of MW, you could freely decide to take MW it whatever direction you choose. But doing that now without considering the needs of other MW users isn't responsible.
Not everyone needs to run Wikipedia and it is a worthwhile effort to make sure MediaWiki remains scalable down to the shared-hosting level.
With VPS prices starting in the $2-$5 a month range [1][2][3][4] there are not many reasons left for using less secure and less predictable shared hosting. People have been migrating away from shared hosting for a while, and this trend is set to continue in the future.
Given limited resources, it seems to be wiser to start focusing our efforts on packaging rather than shared hosting work-arounds. Using the best tools for different parts of the system rather than limiting ourselves to what is available on $.99 shared hosts lets us make MediaWiki more efficient and cleaner. This benefits users both at the low and high end.
I'm looking forward to the days when "apt-get install mediawiki" installs and configures a fully-featured MediaWiki system with proper caching, VE, Parsoid, Lua and so on. And performs well on a $2 a month VPS.
Gabriel
[1]: http://ramnode.com/ [2]: http://lowendbox.com/ [3]: https://www.digitalocean.com/ [4]: http://www.vpscolo.com/