MediaWiki friendly

I'm looking for a host that is "MediaWiki friendly". DH seems to have everything I could possibly need for my MW site (www.awardannals.com), but some hosts frown on MW because it is a resource hog.

I know of one MW installation hosted by DH: wiki index dot org. That site is experiencing serious problems that have been attributed to DH. As this is the only MW example I have, I'm a bit wary of coming to DH. Are there any other MW sites hosted on DH that I could poke around in?

Have you looked at the DreamHost site-of-the-month listing? Search for wiki and you'll find a number of them. You just have to cull for mediawiki sites.

Thanks for the reply, Lensman.

There were two wikis listed: one has shut down since it was site of the month, and the other seems to have a dedicated host. Not very helpful, but at least I see that DH is familiar with MW since they have their own wiki.

I believe LyricWiki is on Dreamhost.

You can install mediawiki with "one-click install" :

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/One_Click_Installs

So YES, if there is an automatic installer on Dreamhost, it will probably works on it ;-)

In reply to:
You can install mediawiki with "one-click install" :

So YES, if there is an automatic installer on Dreamhost, it will probably works on it ;-)

That's no indication that it works well.

All the same, my experience with running a wiki (howdypedia.com) on DreamHost has been fairly good: You can enable image uploads and deletion saving, since you have so much available disk space, and since you get shell access, you can easily perform upgrades and maintenance, and add extensions (I even managed to set up eAccelerator on mine, though it took several hours!).

The only real problems I've experienced have been related to site slowness; in two instances the site was running slowly, and a quick email to support had them move it to another database server. Works for me!

emufarmers.com
Very little to do with either emus or farmers!

lyricwiki.com now seems to redirect to lyricwiki.org which seems to be using dedicated hosting at g3tech.net if I read my tracert correctly.

I am neglecting a non-optimized wiki for the game Supreme Commander. After starting it up I decided to merge with another wiki dedicated to the game so it doesn't see much traffic and I haven't bothered to optimize it much. You can see the base case for a one-click install at that link, though.

Thanks for your samples, Emufarmers and Lensman. I must say that these wikis are pretty slow. The average seems about 2 seconds as reported in the HTML comment. Sometimes it is over 9 seconds. That's pretty bad.

hmm... that is a problem in a shared server sometime. if your neighbors consume too much bandwidth, you will suffer.

In reply to:
hmm... that is a problem in a shared server sometime. if your neighbors consume too much bandwidth, you will suffer.

I don't think shared bandwidth is the main problem with hosting MediaWiki and Gallery sites at DreamHost. And it's not even shared CPU that's the problem since I get similar timings even when the CPU is otherwise idle. I think some web applications end up being slow at DreamHost because their configuration and/or coding doesn't do well hosted on top of an NFS filesystem. It's not that DH is unbearably slow, it's just that it will never be speedy.

I hear that a lot of people get good results using memcached on their MediaWiki sites. Unfortunately, this isn't allowed on a DH shared server since it reserves a large chunk of memory for the MediaWiki process.