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NIWA Discussion / Offering potentially high-traffic hosting for existing independent wiki
« on: November 11, 2010, 03:22:08 AM »
I've been wanting to put my knowledge, experience, and experimentation to some practical use for awhile now (lots of info on how to sysadmin a high load wiki installation floating around in my head going to waste), so I approached my boss about it... he gave me the usual 'As long as it doesn't draw time away from Kommonwealth development or cause any significant expense' response, a little bland, but it's an ok.
So I'm thinking of offering some quality MediaWiki hosting to some NIWA wiki. I'm not thinking of the single box shared hosting kind of setup that I believe most NIWA wiki are currently running on, but rather the kind of multi-server load balanced installation that keeps a few high traffic wiki running smoothly. So I'm not really interested in the really small wiki, but rather the larger NIWA wiki that could use a setup that has more capacity to expand and handle large quantities of readers.
For pricing, I'm thinking of going based on server costs. Total up the costs for the month, perhaps adding something small for service (
you don't think your current shared hosting provider gives you anything less than a jacked up rate anyways), use analytics to guage the percentage of traffic going to each wiki, perhaps adding a bit of weight towards wiki which are using heavy extensions, and use that to divide the hosting costs among the wiki.
Going by the current cloud hosting we use and how a good install would be distributed among multiple servers, I'm guessing the starting setup would cost at least $60/mo (before we figure out how far we need to scale the number of nodes up to get good performance for the wiki) so I'm hoping at least 2-3 NIWA wiki are interested. Since it's based on cost, adding extra wiki doesn't increase the overall load much (the high base cost for a quality install is the number of servers you have to run, not the bandwidth, that's trivial), but the way it divides the cost between multiple communities means those communities have a drastically smaller amount they have to pay for hosting.
Now for the hosting itself... just to ease minds, I'll remind that I'm just offering the kind of hosting relationship any wiki's owner here already has with whatever company they're already paying to host their shared/dedicated/virtual/cloud hosting they use to put their MediaWiki install on, albeit perhaps a little more informal and personal in communication, and focused on managed MediaWiki rather than plain webspace. This isn't a WikiFarm idea where the host takes control.
Now the idea of me managing multiple MediaWiki installs over multiple-servers obviously does not lend itself to the idea of external people having direct access to the servers. The multi-server method complicates it, not to mention independent groups being able to mess up other wiki on the farm. Hence, I'd be the only one who could actually change something on the wiki's config. However if being able to see the source and suggest changes is important to everyone, I could try to work in a git repo or something that everyone could clone and send pull requests to get things added to the hosting besides what I do as requests.
If there's any wiki that wants to pursue Monaco that's also a possibility. I can try to finish up my monaco-port and see if I can make Monaco usable for any wiki that wants to use it. Later on any wiki that wants to pursue Monaco if they wish also has the option of having me try whatever it takes to recoup the hosting costs via advertisements if they don't feel like paying directly. I say Monaco simply because the only ideas I can come up with for sane ad placements that are a compromise between respectful placements in the wiki, and reasonable ad formats that will actually generate revenue are for Monaco. Of course, I do notice NIWA has some CC-BY-NC-SA wiki, I understand these aren't entirely compatible with that kind of offer so those are probably out, but the hosting offer still stands, the owners will just have to pay for hosting, there's no issue with NC there since the wiki's owners already have that kind of relationship with whatever company is providing them with webspace.
If you want some background on me and the company. The company is Redwerks Systems Inc., it's primarily a Web Design company, but we do a bit of programming (namely Kommonwealth, which also counts for some R&D), I'm the programmer there... if we had any other full-time employed programmers, I'd be the CTO (ie: You don't have to worry about whether I'm a junior in the company or not, the technical stuff centers around me). As for my background, I was a MediaWiki developer, I contributed various features and improvements to MediaWiki's core, and I've developed a few extensions, and contributed significantly to a few other big extensions. I use past tense because I've stopped doing big MediaWiki development and mulled into more JS stuff and interests in sysadmin stuff. So I know MediaWiki quite well, and information on how to manage a large MediaWiki network has been pounding it's way into my head. I have a bad habit of not being able to stick with one project, ie: I get bored and switch to another project to get a different taste... In this regard, working on our company's project (Kommonwealth) and MediaWiki hosting is a very good thing. With two projects in front of me, in two completely different languages, two completely different tastes, it will be easy for me to switch back and forth and be more motivated towards both since I'll always have something to switch to before switching back to keep myself from getting bored.
Now as for the practicality and evaluation of the idea. For anyone actually interested in having me do the hosting I think the best way to approach it would be to set it up, transition interested wiki over to it and tweak it so it runs smoothly, and run it for a month... at the end of the month we can tally up a guess on how much it would cost the wikis to continue to be hosted like that and everyone can decide if we want to continue that way. If not I can help everyone migrate back to their old hosting (don't drop out due to performance hiccups though, those can be ironed out by scaling the hosting usually). We can also delay major changes like MediaWiki updates to individual wiki till that's decided as well to make migrating back easier.
And finally, yes, I have a habit of writing long things occasionally (not too many, mostly intro stuff like this)... perhaps I should have given myself an entire night's sleep before writing this... sleepiness doesn't seem to affect my ability to think in any way, but does seem to affect my ability to write clearly and concisely (ie: when I write sleepily, my technical blurbs tripple in size)
So I'm thinking of offering some quality MediaWiki hosting to some NIWA wiki. I'm not thinking of the single box shared hosting kind of setup that I believe most NIWA wiki are currently running on, but rather the kind of multi-server load balanced installation that keeps a few high traffic wiki running smoothly. So I'm not really interested in the really small wiki, but rather the larger NIWA wiki that could use a setup that has more capacity to expand and handle large quantities of readers.
For pricing, I'm thinking of going based on server costs. Total up the costs for the month, perhaps adding something small for service (
you don't think your current shared hosting provider gives you anything less than a jacked up rate anyways), use analytics to guage the percentage of traffic going to each wiki, perhaps adding a bit of weight towards wiki which are using heavy extensions, and use that to divide the hosting costs among the wiki.Going by the current cloud hosting we use and how a good install would be distributed among multiple servers, I'm guessing the starting setup would cost at least $60/mo (before we figure out how far we need to scale the number of nodes up to get good performance for the wiki) so I'm hoping at least 2-3 NIWA wiki are interested. Since it's based on cost, adding extra wiki doesn't increase the overall load much (the high base cost for a quality install is the number of servers you have to run, not the bandwidth, that's trivial), but the way it divides the cost between multiple communities means those communities have a drastically smaller amount they have to pay for hosting.
Now for the hosting itself... just to ease minds, I'll remind that I'm just offering the kind of hosting relationship any wiki's owner here already has with whatever company they're already paying to host their shared/dedicated/virtual/cloud hosting they use to put their MediaWiki install on, albeit perhaps a little more informal and personal in communication, and focused on managed MediaWiki rather than plain webspace. This isn't a WikiFarm idea where the host takes control.
Now the idea of me managing multiple MediaWiki installs over multiple-servers obviously does not lend itself to the idea of external people having direct access to the servers. The multi-server method complicates it, not to mention independent groups being able to mess up other wiki on the farm. Hence, I'd be the only one who could actually change something on the wiki's config. However if being able to see the source and suggest changes is important to everyone, I could try to work in a git repo or something that everyone could clone and send pull requests to get things added to the hosting besides what I do as requests.
If there's any wiki that wants to pursue Monaco that's also a possibility. I can try to finish up my monaco-port and see if I can make Monaco usable for any wiki that wants to use it. Later on any wiki that wants to pursue Monaco if they wish also has the option of having me try whatever it takes to recoup the hosting costs via advertisements if they don't feel like paying directly. I say Monaco simply because the only ideas I can come up with for sane ad placements that are a compromise between respectful placements in the wiki, and reasonable ad formats that will actually generate revenue are for Monaco. Of course, I do notice NIWA has some CC-BY-NC-SA wiki, I understand these aren't entirely compatible with that kind of offer so those are probably out, but the hosting offer still stands, the owners will just have to pay for hosting, there's no issue with NC there since the wiki's owners already have that kind of relationship with whatever company is providing them with webspace.
If you want some background on me and the company. The company is Redwerks Systems Inc., it's primarily a Web Design company, but we do a bit of programming (namely Kommonwealth, which also counts for some R&D), I'm the programmer there... if we had any other full-time employed programmers, I'd be the CTO (ie: You don't have to worry about whether I'm a junior in the company or not, the technical stuff centers around me). As for my background, I was a MediaWiki developer, I contributed various features and improvements to MediaWiki's core, and I've developed a few extensions, and contributed significantly to a few other big extensions. I use past tense because I've stopped doing big MediaWiki development and mulled into more JS stuff and interests in sysadmin stuff. So I know MediaWiki quite well, and information on how to manage a large MediaWiki network has been pounding it's way into my head. I have a bad habit of not being able to stick with one project, ie: I get bored and switch to another project to get a different taste... In this regard, working on our company's project (Kommonwealth) and MediaWiki hosting is a very good thing. With two projects in front of me, in two completely different languages, two completely different tastes, it will be easy for me to switch back and forth and be more motivated towards both since I'll always have something to switch to before switching back to keep myself from getting bored.
Now as for the practicality and evaluation of the idea. For anyone actually interested in having me do the hosting I think the best way to approach it would be to set it up, transition interested wiki over to it and tweak it so it runs smoothly, and run it for a month... at the end of the month we can tally up a guess on how much it would cost the wikis to continue to be hosted like that and everyone can decide if we want to continue that way. If not I can help everyone migrate back to their old hosting (don't drop out due to performance hiccups though, those can be ironed out by scaling the hosting usually). We can also delay major changes like MediaWiki updates to individual wiki till that's decided as well to make migrating back easier.
And finally, yes, I have a habit of writing long things occasionally (not too many, mostly intro stuff like this)... perhaps I should have given myself an entire night's sleep before writing this... sleepiness doesn't seem to affect my ability to think in any way, but does seem to affect my ability to write clearly and concisely (ie: when I write sleepily, my technical blurbs tripple in size)