Best hosted wiki solution for private wikis?

Question

I previously asked about how people organize their online resources and researched data, where one of the suggested tools was using a private wiki.

I want to try this out and thus I am looking for a hosted wiki where I can store my thoughts, ideas and project documentation.

My requirements are:

• Must be hosted by a third party.
• Must be free or cheap.
• Must allow private wikis.
• Must provide some way to back up my data, ideally with complete revision history.
• Should have a good wiki implementation which is easy to edit, easy to organize and with adequate searching capabilities.
• Would be a bonus if the wiki implementation is a standard, so I can migrate my data to another site or a self-hosted version in the future.

It would also be useful if the host also provided public wikis (with access control) and mapping of my own domain name for the wiki. This is not a requirement for my private wikis, but if they provided it I might be able to use the same host for public wikis on my public or open source projects.

So, are there any sites out there that provide this?

Answer 1

I am currently experimenting with wikidot.com, which meet most of my requiremtns, but they don't provide backups with revision history.

Answer 2

Google Sites ties into the Google Apps for your domain services which are free and you can use on top of your top. You can pay to get extra features with their e-mail hosting, an SLA, support and such like - $50 per user per year.

Answer 3

I would also recommend checking Wiki Matrix which is a comparison site where you can select your requirements and get a comparison table of the matching services.

Answer 4

PbWiki is worth a look. Has free and private wikis.

Answer 5

Does it absolutely have to be hosted? If you're able to get a small bit of webspace I'd highly recommend Dokuwiki. It's database-independant (text files) which may put you off but I'm a huge fan of it.

Answer 6

I like to be able to add some additional functionality to Wiki and therefore I prefer C# implementationt. I used to use FlexWiki but it seems to be kind of silent these days and it is missing some of the features that I like (capability to generate table of contents for example).

These days I use ScrewTurn wiki and I really like it. They have a very clear extension/plug-in framework so that you can easily add your own functionality. Through these plug-ins you can get database repository (MSSQL), statistics, etc.

Eventhough I use my own Wiki hosting (so that I have more control), there is also hosted possibility at ScrewTurn wiki hosting link.

Answer 7

You can sign up for shared hosting at dreamhost. They have a one click install of MediaWiki, which is the same wiki engine used by Wikipedia. It's only $10 a month, and useful for so many other things. I would recommend every developer have their own shared hosting space. May be more expensive then just a straight wiki service, but infintely more useful, and everything will be in one place. I have a wiki on my account and it works great. Just put it in a password protected (using .htaccess) folder and you can have your own private wiki.

I think they do daily or weekly backups of your databases automatically. You would just have to set up a way to automatically download them. You could probably set up a cron job on their site to send the backups to another location automatically.

Answer 8

I've used PBWiki, SocialText, WetPaint, and Google Sites. From my evaluation, these are the 4 best sites that provide free, hosted, private wikis. (I also had the additional requirement of being able to allow a couple other people access to the private wiki.) I've used PBWiki more than the others as I've found it to have the best combination of functionality and ease-of-use. SocialText has an open source version of their software, so it would probably be the easiest way to convert to a self-hosted solution. It also has a nice feature that lets you save local copies of the pages and sync them back to the hosted site. Google Sites is the most basic of the three. WetPaint displays Google ads on its free sites.

With your requirement for backup, PBWiki may be best. It has a quick, one-click way to locally backup all pages with either the current versions or all version history. I haven't seen anything like this in the others. WetPaint does have a one-click backup, but it is just the current version of the pages. In either case, the backups are formatted as html pages.

I believe you can use your own domain name with all of these, but Google Sites (with Google Apps) is the only one where you can do it for free.