Collaborative wiki platforms for creating, editing, and maintaining shared knowledge bases and documentation. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
A wiki is the cheapest way to stop institutional knowledge living inside one person's head. The commercial options are familiar. Confluence Cloud is free up to 10 users, then around US$5.42 per user per month on Standard and $10.44 on Premium, billed annually. Notion is £8.50 per member per month on Plus and £16.50 on Business. SharePoint arrives bundled with most Microsoft 365 subscriptions, which is why so many organisations end up there by default rather than by decision.
MediaWiki is the open-source option here, and its reputation arrives before it does: this is the software Wikipedia runs on. That's a strong argument and a slightly misleading one. Wikipedia's scale is what MediaWiki was built for, and five people writing internal documentation are not that. Wikitext is a real syntax to learn, granular permissions are extension territory rather than a core feature, and the visual editor ships with MediaWiki but sits switched off until somebody enables it in LocalSettings.php. Version 1.46 arrived on 30 June 2026 and needs PHP 8.3 or newer; 1.43 is the long-term support line, supported until December 2027.
Where MediaWiki is hard to beat is content that outlives the team writing it. Every edit is kept as a revision, permanently, and the whole thing sits in a MySQL database you can back up, dump and move whenever you like.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
Fan encyclopaedias, local history archives and technical references need open editing, categories and citation habits that MediaWiki has built in already. It also offers the thing hosted knowledge bases will not: a complete revision history that belongs to you.
Contributors come and go across a decade while the content stays put. Named accounts, per-edit attribution and permanent links to old revisions make MediaWiki a better archival record than a shared document folder ever manages.
Confluence and Notion charge per person, so an occasional contributor costs the same as a daily one. A self-hosted wiki removes the incentive to ration accounts, which is usually the real reason nobody writes anything down.
SharePoint comes free with Microsoft 365 and then buries pages inside a document library. A wiki with a flat namespace, real search and readable URLs is a different tool for a different habit, and cheap to run alongside.
For most smaller installations, doing everything on this page is overkill. Start with making sure you have PHP OPcache enabled, PHP APCu installed, and enable the 'main cache' in MediaWiki.
A useful corrective to MediaWiki's reputation for being heavy. The advice a small wiki actually needs is short, and OPcache runs by default on our plans. The elaborate Memcached and Elasticsearch architectures people read about are Wikimedia's problems to solve, not a 200-page internal wiki's.
It is recommended that you schedule the running of jobs completely in the background, via the command line.
This is the setting most self-hosted wikis get wrong. Left on its default, deferred work such as category updates and link table rebuilds is paid for by whichever visitor happens to load the next page. A cron entry running runJobs.php moves that cost off your readers, and cron is available on our hosting plans.
Wiki software is mostly read-heavy with bursts of writes during editing sessions. We tune MySQL with enough InnoDB buffer pool to keep the page index and revision history in RAM, set sensible cache headers so popular pages get cached at the CDN edge, and point wikis above a few thousand pages at a managed cloud server, where Redis object caching is available. Search performance is the practical bottleneck on big wikis, and we will configure a proper search backend (rather than naive LIKE queries) on request.
MediaWiki runs happily on shared hosting, and the things that go wrong are consistent enough to list. Search is the big one. Core search uses the database's own full-text index and is adequate for a few hundred pages, but CirrusSearch, the extension that gives Wikipedia-grade results, wants Elasticsearch 7.10.2 or OpenSearch 1.3 depending on your version, plus a Java runtime. That is not something a shared PHP account provides. If search quality is the reason you're self-hosting, budget for a managed cloud server, where Elasticsearch is included.
The job queue is next. Deferred work runs during web requests by default, so a wiki with heavy templates makes its readers pay for it. Put runJobs.php on cron instead. After that: uploads need a writable images directory and GD or ImageMagick for thumbnails, and the database grows with revisions rather than with pages, because every edit is kept. That's the feature, and it's also why a five-year-old wiki is bigger than it looks.
Choose something else if what you want is five people editing a document together with a visual editor and no markup to learn. MediaWiki will do it and they will hate it. Confluence, Notion or a lighter self-hosted wiki fits that job much better.
Common questions we hear from people running wiki software applications on 365i hosting.
Often, yes. MediaWiki is built for large, public, heavily cross-linked content with many contributors and a long life. A five-person team documenting internal processes usually wants a visual editor, simple permissions and no markup to learn, and MediaWiki offers wikitext, extension-based permissions and VisualEditor as a separate install. Choose it when the content is the asset and will outlive the team. Choose something lighter when the team workspace itself is the point.
MediaWiki 1.46 requires PHP 8.3 or newer, plus MariaDB 10.3+, MySQL 5.7+, PostgreSQL 10+ or SQLite. The project recommends a minimum of 256 MB of RAM and around 85 MB of storage for the application itself, and says plainly that this will not suffice for a busy public site or one with uploading enabled. Our plans run PHP with OPcache, MySQL 8 and 256 MB memory as standard, with the PHP version selectable per package in the My365i control panel.
Core search works and is fine for a few hundred pages, indexing page text through the database. Anything better means CirrusSearch, which requires Elasticsearch 7.10.2 or OpenSearch 1.3 depending on your MediaWiki version, plus a Java runtime alongside it. That is not a shared hosting proposition. Our managed cloud servers include Elasticsearch, which is the sensible home for a wiki where people search far more than they browse.
It is the least pleasant part of running one, so plan for it rather than discovering it. MediaWiki releases roughly annually and each version is supported for about a year: 1.44 reached end of life on 31 July 2026 while 1.43 LTS runs to December 2027. Upgrades run a database schema update and regularly break extensions and custom skins, which need matching versions. Running the LTS line and testing each upgrade on a copy first is the low-stress route.
The 1.43 LTS line if you would rather touch it rarely, since it is supported until December 2027. The current stable line, 1.46 as of June 2026, if you want newer features and are content to upgrade annually. Both need modern PHP, with 1.46 asking for PHP 8.3 or newer. Whichever you choose, write the version down in your own notes, because knowing what you are running is half of a calm upgrade.
Both halves, database and files. The database holds every page and every revision; the images directory holds uploads, and a database-only backup restores a wiki full of broken image links. Every package here is backed up daily with 30 days of restore points, and Business and Agency tiers add Timeline Backup Pro with 60-day database retention. For a wiki that is the only copy of something irreplaceable, also take periodic XML dumps with dumpBackup.php and keep them somewhere else entirely.
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