Re: [MediaWiki-l] [Wikitech-l] Officially supported MediaWiki hosting service?

On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 9:23 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra(a)baylink.com> wrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Paul Selitskas <p.selitskas(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: Ideally, my vision of a general-purpose wiki hosting service would provide options that orgs like Wikia generally don't. Wikia for instance covers "fan encyclopedia" type projects very well -- open access, openish license, free ad-supported hosting, casual user ownership with public backups. I'm thinking more along the lines of covering some of those folks who right now are setting up quick ad-hoc installs on their own servers or shared hosting, and then possibly not maintaining the software for years because they have better things to do than figure out how to update and tweak the software. (Right now I have the impression many of those folks have everything work great until it does eventually break or needs an update...) * ability to disable ads for a reasonable cost (or perhaps waived for certain approved projects) * ability to customize your skin! * ability to control or restrict access (limited access, custom auth integration, etc) * ability to host on your own domain * ability to host on SSL * ability to write, install and run custom extensions * custom writing, testing, and maintenance of custom extensions * service tracking down and fixing bugs * etc This might mean customers span a range of actual hosting methods, from "generic wiki on a farm-style cluster" (like Wikimedia and Wikia's primary wiki hosting) to "you pay for a dedicated VPS mini-cluster for your custom code" to "we run dedicated servers for your expensive custom site", perhaps all the way to "we provide consulting and support to help with your own server setup". There are some folks doing contracting/services and hosting on smaller scales, but we don't really have good coordination or a end-user-facing place we can point people for comprehensive support. Perhaps we just need to coordinate the people doing support and hosting already, or perhaps we should consider organizing something either under, or separately from, WMF... I'm not going to make any specific demands at this point, I've just been itching to see something happen on this front for years. :) -- brion