Moving to Miraheze
For a while, I've been self-hosting a wiki for a little Minecraft server I run called Warlords. However this has been kind of a pain and I'm honestly not that great of a sysadmin.
Recently, the version of MediaWiki I was running was moved out of long-term support, so I had to update for security fixes (and I wanted to update anyway for some newer features that weren't available). After performing the upgrade, editing just completely broke. I could not figure out why, and so I had to reinstall everything. This would have worked, but then I realized I forgot to make an XML backup of templates and modules. So, all of those were gone. If you don't know what that means, basically it meant that most pages were broken and had errors all over the place. Great.
Not all was lost though, I made a database backup too in case I ended up needing it, which I restored after realizing my XML backup was bad. This restored all the content back to what it was, but now I was having the same issue with editing. At this point, what I could have done is then run another XML backup, then reinstall mediawiki again, then import from that backup. But at this point, I was kind of just done with the whole thing. And what do you do when you don't want to do something? Get someone else less lazy than you to do it.
Miraheze is an organization (presumably containing people less lazy than I am) that hosts many independent wikis using shared servers, also known as a "wikifarm". Their hosting is completely free and they're funded by donations. Also, they actually know what they're doing, unlike me. I've decided to migrate my wiki there so I don't have to deal with making MediaWiki work correctly.
So far, it's been pretty easy; I applied for a wiki, and my application was accepted after 2 days. Then, I made an XML dump, uploaded it to them, and a few hours later they imported all the stuff to our wiki. I also configured my domain registar to point to miraheze in the wiki. subdomain, then configured my apache server to redirect the old wiki links to the new wiki. And that was about it, not so hard. The new wiki is also considerably faster than the one I self-hosted, so that's pretty nice. I think it's probably because they have caching enabled (which I didn't because I couldn't figure it out).
I have no complaints. Big thanks goes to the people at Miraheze for providing this completely free service, and making it basically effortless to use. I'll probably donate to them at some point and I recommend you do too if you use any wiki hosted there.
I don't really regret self-hosting our wiki for a while though, I learned a lot about MediaWiki doing so and that knowledge is generally helpful.