As part of T113210 [1], which is a broader discussion on track for the developer summit, I am hosting two IRC office hours back to back [2] on December 21st from 20:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC.

The previous office hour [3] focused on ways to reconnect to the shared hosting community. This time two very different topics will be discussed.

*The open questions in the descriptions below are by no means meant to be exhaustive, nor are they expected to be fully answered by the end of those office hours. They are just examples to clarify the context of the titles.*

*Shared hosting technical alternatives*

During the last office hour on the topic of non-technical mediawiki installs, people seemed very eager to discuss new technical solutions that could offer a viable alternative to shared hosting.

Could new technologies like containers allow for performance/cost ratios comparable to shared hosting? If not, how big would the penalty be? How much maintenance would we have to do to keep deployment on such platforms up to date?

Shared hosting has always suffered from the fact that it's not used at the WMF and therefore only maintained on a volunteer basis. How would things be different with new tech?

*Shared hosting support definition*

Shared hosting usage is already a reality and we should do a better job accounting for it. Currently mediawiki contributors have no visibility in what should be supported and to what degree. Our browser support is graded and very clear, meanwhile our server-side support is not: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility

Should we model our server-side compatibility guidelines on the graded system we have for browsers? If so, what would that look like? How could we break down "shared hosting support" into more discreet server-side capabilities?

[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T113210 [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours [3] https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2015/wikimedia-office.201...