Starting and Running a Wiki Website/Hosted Wikis

There are companies that host wikis for free or for a price. This means that you do not have to deal with complex programs like Ruby, PHP, MySQL, or Apache. The wiki host will do this for you.

Beware! Some hosts delete wikis without notice. Make sure you are saving your own backup copy of the data in your wiki. Some hosts make it easy to download everything you would need to run your wiki somewhere else, by using an open source wiki engine and providing backup dumps with full edit histories. Other hosts lock you in more, e.g., with proprietary wiki markup languages, proprietary wiki engines, or limited backups.

Free wiki hosting

You can also find a comparison of wiki farms on Wikipedia and a list of hosting services on MediaWiki.org.

@Wiki (Atwiki): Includes a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and Wiki-mode editor. Users receive a sub-domain and personal wiki upon signup. Unlimited pages and users. English documentation is minimal. Their site is in Japanese only.

CiviHosting: Commercial Wiki host with plans starting at $15 a month (servers in USA and Europe) including 24/7 support and VisualEditor. You can use your own domain for your wiki and they also sell domains.

GForge: People who put their source code at GForge also get a free associated wiki. Includes a WYSIWYG editor.

Miraheze: Non-profit wiki farm with no ads and free wiki hosting. Subdomains (*.miraheze.org) or custom domains are possible for wikis. Custom settings (logo, favicon, etc.) and extensions can be enabled. Wikis can either be public or private. All sites are HTTPS.

MyWikis: Everyone gets their wiki and can customize it however they wish. No staff user groups except in the main wiki, and plans start at $7/mo for unlimited resources and support. You cannot create a wiki automatically but this allows for the wiki to be customized on request. WARNING: This hosting provider reserves the right to censor or delete any content, explicitly including advocacy for the separation of church and state, that they find offensive. Users have no recourse except arbitration by another MyWikis staff member in the case of any dispute, as per their TOS.

ShoutWiki: Free wiki hosting supported by advertising on a subdomain of *.shoutwiki.com. Choice of skins include Aurora, CologneBlue, Monaco, Monobook, Modern, Nimbus, Truglass, and Vector. Only 5 wikis per user are allowed. Hosts wikis for individuals, companies, school, universities and communities. Wikis can be created through Special:CreateWiki. Offers three types of wikis: public wikis, private wikis and school/university wikis.

TiddlySpot: Public or private access to wikis based on TiddlyWiki yet fully compatible with MonkeyPirateTW, MonkeyGTD and d3 plugins. Brilliant for notes, todos, follow-ups. Easy for download, edit off-line and keep the online version up-to-date, or even easier to edit on-line (password protected). Hosts free wikis.

Fandom: Free wiki hosting supported by advertising on subdomains of fandom.com. Uses a fork of MediaWiki with a choice of WYSIWYG or wikitext editing, easy image and video insertion, the FandomDesktop skin (other skins are no longer available), and a number of extensions. Wikis are owned by Fandom rather than the community or the founder, which means that the community can decide to leave but they cannot have the wiki deleted or advertise their new location. All content is freely licensed under the Creative Commons license to make it compatible with the Wikimedia projects. Offers free database backups, full CSS customization, spam blacklisting and vandal patrol, help from Community Team. Site CSS is heavily restricted by the customization policy. Focuses on a young audience of fans.

Wikidot: Offers free Wiki sites in the wikidot.com subdomain and 1 free custom domain mapping. Uses the modified Text_Wiki engine to produce valid XHTML. Growing number of extensions. Several available licenses (Creative Commons, GFDL and others), customizable themes, AJAX interface, no size/traffic limits, full-text search, RSS import and export (for page changes, forum discussions, favorite items, account notifications etc.) and many more features.

WikiTide: Non-profit wiki farm that no ads and provides free wiki hosting. A wide variety of MediaWiki extensions can be enabled and easily customisable settings. Wikis can either be public or private. All sites are HTTPS. Custom domains are also possible.

Wiki-site.com: MediaWiki with WYSIWYG farm with unlimited pages and users, wiki spam protection user rights control. Interface in 150 languages. Fast setup. A free *.wiki-site.com domain is offered. Google text-ads added to the right sidebar.

XWiki: Paid hosting based on the XWiki engine. Features include quick group editing, version control of documents, attached files, searching and rights management). Pages can be exported to PDF. Full MySQL exports can be provided by the host admin and installed using the open source XWiki engine.

EditThis.info: A very easy and fast way to set up your wiki. You won't get a subdomain for your wiki (for example, if the name of the wiki you create was Example, the url of it would be editthis.info/example/). The only available skin for your new wiki would be Monobook. You don't need to be a registered user to add a wiki and you can create as many wikis as you want.

Free wiki hosting

See Also