Hi everyone,
We're considering hosting MediaWiki for an institution of approximately 16,000 users. We're wondering what costs (monetary or employee-hours) others have experienced in a similar deployment.
Currently we're looking at a relatively light single-use (say, 50 concurrent users peak), but are considering a more enterprise deployment in the future that could host documentation for more projects and see more activity.
Any additional advice or lessons learned about similar deployments is also very welcome.
Cheers, Branden
On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 11:23 AM, Branden Visser branden@uwindsor.ca wrote:
We're considering hosting MediaWiki for an institution of approximately 16,000 users. We're wondering what costs (monetary or employee-hours) others have experienced in a similar deployment.
Currently we're looking at a relatively light single-use (say, 50 concurrent users peak), but are considering a more enterprise deployment in the future that could host documentation for more projects and see more activity.
Any additional advice or lessons learned about similar deployments is also very welcome.
Since MediaWiki is designed for concurrent use by hundreds of *millions* of people, it should have no problem handling an internal wiki of any size. If you don't install any poorly-written extensions or enable any crazy options or have multi-megabyte pages or whatever, It should scale fine to your workloads if you just throw it on a spare machine with commodity hardware that's not too busy. Probably best to pick a machine that has decent CPUs.
As for administration, if you have LAMP or equivalent installed somewhere, it should take a few minutes to do a basic setup (from a technical perspective, not counting any organizational procedures you might need to go through). If you want to adjust its behavior a lot, of course, you can spend unlimited amounts of time adjusting and hacking it. MediaWiki is targeted primarily at public wikis like Wikipedia, not corporate intranets, so you might find you want to change a lot of things, I don't know.
Anyway, this list is used mainly by MediaWiki developers and Wikimedia sysadmins, not third-party/corporate users. You could try asking at the mwusers.com forum, or some place like that, for an answer from someone who's actually in a similar situation to you.
Aryeh Gregor wrote:
Anyway, this list is used mainly by MediaWiki developers and Wikimedia sysadmins, not third-party/corporate users. You could try asking at the mwusers.com forum, or some place like that, for an answer from someone who's actually in a similar situation to you.
In fact, there is a mediawiki-enterprise mailing list... which is pretty much dead. mediawiki-l would be more appropiate, but i don't think it's offtopic here either.
Branden,
What you can budget for such a setup is also a factor in the type of setup that you may want to run. While mediawiki software is fine for the hevy loads that you can have at this time, the platform that runs in realy matters. You could have your own low/midrange servers setup or you could use cloud based infastructure services like Amazon Elastic cloud to achieve this.
The cheapest and in often cases the best would be a shared hosting service. In the service that I use http://www.netdotnet.com/ for my own needs, economy shared hosting (I have their deluxe hosting plan) with 10 GB Space, 300 GB Transfer, 100 Email Accounts, 10 MySQL Databases is for about $48 a year and this comes with an option to setup the mediawiki (among many other web apps) installation thru their value apps install control panel. I installed it, then customized it for my needs (very easy, we have ftp access into the hosting server). I have also installed the mediawiki on my own by using one of those mysql databases that comes with it. This is good enough to handle the load and traffic what you are looking for, if you are ok to host it out of your org's network. They are basically the better priced resellers of godaddy and I am very happy with their service and uptime. I highly recommend it. You can find many other services similar to this. please do a market study if you wish.
I had initially tried some vps services to run my things and finally came back to the shared hosting due to the heavy load on the machine that ran both. My site had 100k hits every month while we were attempting to run it internally. I currently use my shared hosting to serve the media and content to mutiple non profit sites including malayalabhasha.org, blogswara.in and techvidya.com and a tranining mediawiki install - radiolines.com. This way, I dont need to worry about resources, network and uptimes.
this is just my experience. hope this helps. I will be glad to help if you need any more info from my work experience. feel free to drop a line offline if you need.
Regards, Jyothis.
http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jyothis
woods are lovely dark and deep, but i have promises to keep and miles to go before i sleep and lines to go before I press sleep
completion date = (start date + ((estimated effort x 3.1415926) / resources) + ((total coffee breaks x 0.25) / 24)) + Effort in meetings
On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 6:08 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Aryeh Gregor wrote:
Anyway, this list is used mainly by MediaWiki developers and Wikimedia sysadmins, not third-party/corporate users. You could try asking at the mwusers.com forum, or some place like that, for an answer from someone who's actually in a similar situation to you.
In fact, there is a mediawiki-enterprise mailing list... which is pretty much dead. mediawiki-l would be more appropiate, but i don't think it's offtopic here either.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Thanks everyone for your thorough replies. This is a huge help.
Cheers, Branden
Jyothis Edathoot wrote:
Branden,
What you can budget for such a setup is also a factor in the type of setup that you may want to run. While mediawiki software is fine for the hevy loads that you can have at this time, the platform that runs in realy matters. You could have your own low/midrange servers setup or you could use cloud based infastructure services like Amazon Elastic cloud to achieve this.
The cheapest and in often cases the best would be a shared hosting service. In the service that I use http://www.netdotnet.com/ for my own needs, economy shared hosting (I have their deluxe hosting plan) with 10 GB Space, 300 GB Transfer, 100 Email Accounts, 10 MySQL Databases is for about $48 a year and this comes with an option to setup the mediawiki (among many other web apps) installation thru their value apps install control panel. I installed it, then customized it for my needs (very easy, we have ftp access into the hosting server). I have also installed the mediawiki on my own by using one of those mysql databases that comes with it. This is good enough to handle the load and traffic what you are looking for, if you are ok to host it out of your org's network. They are basically the better priced resellers of godaddy and I am very happy with their service and uptime. I highly recommend it. You can find many other services similar to this. please do a market study if you wish.
I had initially tried some vps services to run my things and finally came back to the shared hosting due to the heavy load on the machine that ran both. My site had 100k hits every month while we were attempting to run it internally. I currently use my shared hosting to serve the media and content to mutiple non profit sites including malayalabhasha.org, blogswara.in and techvidya.com and a tranining mediawiki install - radiolines.com. This way, I dont need to worry about resources, network and uptimes.
this is just my experience. hope this helps. I will be glad to help if you need any more info from my work experience. feel free to drop a line offline if you need.
Regards, Jyothis.
http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jyothis
woods are lovely dark and deep, but i have promises to keep and miles to go before i sleep and lines to go before I press sleep
completion date = (start date + ((estimated effort x 3.1415926) / resources)
- ((total coffee breaks x 0.25) / 24)) + Effort in meetings
On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 6:08 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Aryeh Gregor wrote:
Anyway, this list is used mainly by MediaWiki developers and Wikimedia sysadmins, not third-party/corporate users. You could try asking at the mwusers.com forum, or some place like that, for an answer from someone who's actually in a similar situation to you.
In fact, there is a mediawiki-enterprise mailing list... which is pretty much dead. mediawiki-l would be more appropiate, but i don't think it's offtopic here either.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org