User:Admin/Journal

Journal of a Wiki Administrator

This page is just a place for me to discuss some of the more interesting topics that come up from time to time administering a wiki like Heroes Wiki.

Hosting

One advantage of owning your own web hosting company is that it's easy to find a place to host a site like Heroes Wiki. Another advantage is that being in charge of the technical operations I'm not constrained by any third-parties and can pretty much do whatever I need to do to make something work. Compare this to other hosting companies where you might be restricted to using a certain version of PHP or MySQL or where you don't have full control over the http server configuration. It's hard to say whether this advantage resulted in any real benefit. If we'd been restricted to MySQL 4.1 or PHP4 for instance we'd have to run a much older version of MediaWiki. Being able to run the latest software did allow us to keep up with the latest MediaWiki features. Once again, probably didn't make much of a difference but it was nice anyway. Up until June 2007 Heroes Wiki was running on the same server as a bunch of other sites we host. As the wiki became more popular I'd notice that we had a harder time keeping up with the traffic (specifically on Monday night and Tuesday following a new episode). This necessitated the addition of APC, a PHP caching module, since the primary load was being caused by PHP needing to interpret each PHP request on the fly. Had I not had control over Apache it might have been impossible or very difficult to get APC added in a timely fashion. Even with this flexibility it was a little tricky since I was running different versions of PHP concurrently on that one server, but it was accomplished relatively quickly and the wiki soon became much more responsive even during periods of high activity. So in the end the flexibility of managing my own server was instrumental in keeping up with the demands of the wiki.