Hi there, so I’ve been working on a cyberpunk pen and paper RPG for a few years now and I’ve been putting the rules up online in wiki form for testing. The wiki’s I’ve used are the C-Pannel style auto install ones from hosting providers and honestly they keep breaking.
Eventually I’d like to have everyone who wants to play the game just use the wiki for reference/lore, which means I’m going to have to figure out how to host and maintain the entire thing my self, or hire some one to build it for me. The thing is I’m not sure about a few things.
What is the best hosting platform for this? Considering I want it accessible to the internet, not sure if Linode is good for this.
Are there any trip-wire “got-cha” issues I don’t know about? I’ve done a tiny bit of web tweaking, mostly modifying CSS, but other wise I’ve just kind of banged rocks together.
Any tips on finding a good contractor to build/maintain it? I don’t have a huge budget but if the game takes off (lol probably not) I’d want to hire someone to make the wiki bullet proof.
In my experience it really depends upon how a hosting provider’s CPanel does auto-updates/upgrades on when wiki software is updated, breakage is usually from a botched database refresh/update. It makes sense to backup your wiki database or any database from a web based application, often uploading the database by overwriting the online database will usually fix it. Isn’t really that hard to manually install a wiki on a webhost, you need to create a database & wiki folder and upload the files then follow install instructions & secure afterwards.
Speed wise I’ve read hosting forums that claim Linode is the fastest/stable host if you’re going to host a database leaning platform(wiki, wordpress, etc).
Backup your wiki database, if it crashes & breaks you’re able to restore it.
If you contract it out choose someone who also knows how to harden the wiki as its equally as security prone like Wordpress, it needs to be secured from scripting attacks and whatnot. Also some wikis do have add-ons, again like Wordpress you open up potential exploit points by using them.
I host my sites on Linode. They have some single click solutions but I did it all manually to refresh my knowledge. They have lots of articles (official and community generated) that will walk you through the process. You have a discount code available to make the initial cost cheaper. Just know that the Lin in Linode stands for Linux, so if you are not versed in GNU/Systemd/Linux, then you will want to get gud with that first.
Honestly, if you don’t want want to admin it, then Squarespace and WIX would be my best bet. But I don’t know if they do actual Wiki building.
Linode offers this as a service to backup the entire VM/Host. I backup my sites to my internal NAS at home using rsync, but if you don’t want to deal with that, Linode can do it for you.