Host MediaWiki without installing anything
The engine behind Wikipedia for your knowledge base: every version kept, every edit open to discussion, and templates that spare you rewriting everything.
Starting at €8.99/month
Introduction
MediaWiki installed, updated and backed up by us, on a machine in France. You install nothing and configure no server: the application is online a few minutes after you order, under your own name.
The plan that suits it is App Confort at €8.99/month incl. VAT — 4 GB of memory. Reading a page costs little, because MediaWiki serves content that is already rendered. What needs room is the job queue: the day you change a template used by a thousand pages, the application has to recompute all of them, one by one, in the background. 1 GB keeps it running; the 4 GB stop that kind of edit from freezing the wiki for an hour.
MediaWiki exports its pages, history included, into an XML file any other instance can import: that is the way out of a wiki host that lives on advertising, and it is also a backup readable without it. Two things deserve saying: the built-in search is honest without being excellent — very large wikis add a dedicated indexing engine — and wikitext, even with the visual editor, is still a language you have to learn.
What MediaWiki does
Nothing ever disappears
Every save creates a revision. You compare two states line by line, roll back in one click, and see who wrote what and when. That is what makes a knowledge base defensible years later.
Templates, with logic inside them
A warning banner, an information box, a recurring table are defined once and called everywhere with parameters. For the awkward cases, Lua modules do the computing instead of the writer.
A discussion page behind every article
Disagreement over a phrasing does not pollute the article: it lives on the attached page, with its threads and its signatures. A simple mechanism that has held for twenty years at Wikipedia's scale.
The XML export carries the history
Pages, revisions, authors, dates: all of it fits in a file any MediaWiki instance reads back. You depend on nobody, ourselves included, to leave with your wiki.
Who uses it, and what for
A department keeping its procedures
Every internal notice becomes a dated page; six months on, you find the version that applied at the time of the events, which a shared document cannot do.
A workshop documenting its machines
One page per piece of equipment, a common template for the specifications, and the procedure edited by whoever actually tested it, under their own name.
A community leaving an ad-funded host
The XML export carries the articles and all their history. Contributors find their habits unchanged, without banners or autoplaying video.
A laboratory and its shared glossary
Definitions, protocols and cited sources in one place, with the footnotes and cross-references the syntax handles natively.
An enthusiasts' association
A base open to read, open to write for members, where fifteen people write without treading on each other because every edit conflict is visible and reversible.
Hosted in France
In our own infrastructure in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, which we operate ourselves. A knowledge base is an asset: it has no business living with someone who monetises it.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, and the path is well marked. MediaWiki produces an XML file containing the pages with their full history, which the receiving instance imports. Uploaded files — images, PDFs — travel separately and are then reattached. It is the usual way of leaving a platform that lives on advertising while keeping every contributor's attribution.
Not for everyday use: the visual editor is part of the installation, and you write as in a word processor, with headings, lists and links as buttons. Wikitext takes over when you place a template, a complex table or a structured reference. In a team, two or three people end up mastering it; the others never need it.
Yes, but it is a setting to make before putting anything sensitive in it: MediaWiki comes from Wikipedia and installs open. Rights are granted per group — public reading, reading restricted to accounts, or writing limited to a named group. Once reading is closed, the wiki behaves like any internal knowledge base.
App Confort, at €8.99/month incl. VAT. It provides 4 GB of memory where the application asks for 1 GB at minimum: the headroom serves the system, not the decor. You can change plan later without reinstalling.
Yes, they are part of the service. A self-hosted application left un-updated is a security risk, not a saving.