2021 mid-year updates

Can you believe half of 2021 has already gone by? Earlier this year, we’ve started on a massive effort to completely re-engineer our product and platform. We’ve been hard at work improving all aspects of MyWikis, from the wiki’s infrastructure to making it easier to manage your wiki. We’d like to revisit some of the exciting announcements we gave, as well as share a sneak peek at what’s coming next:

• In April, we launched our new Gen2 platform. It offers many improvements over our previous platform. We’ve designed it from the ground up to maximize ease-of-use, functionality, extensibility, customization, and performance. We also moved media stored on your wiki to cloud storage. By taking advantage of the latest technologies and completely changing our way of hosting wikis, we’ve been able to provide massive speed improvements while adding ways that will allow us to continually provide you the best features quickly. Our new Gen2 platform currently runs on MediaWiki 1.35 and will be continuously updated to always remain on the latest LTS version. So far, we’ve migrated ~65% of wikis to Gen2, and we’re making steady progress moving the remaining wikis onto this great platform too.
• Ever since we launched it earlier this year, we’ve been hard at work making improvements to our Self Service Portal. We’ve introduced many more extensions you can install, and starting a few months ago, you’ve been able to select configuration settings directly from the portal.
• As of June 30, we’ve enabled the best search engine for MediaWiki, CirrusSearch, on all wikis on our new Gen2 platform. Everyone has it enabled by default; there’s nothing you need to do to take advantage of it. It’s built off of the most cutting edge open source search engine available, the same one used by top tech companies for dozens of different purposes.
• Thanks to our move to the cloud, we’ve not only been able to provide you with a better media storage experience on your wiki, we’ve also massively increased storage quotas on every single plan. And if that’s not enough, we can provide you additional storage at a solidly low price of just 10¢/GB/mo.
• We’re launching a new Help Center to provide new wikis with the support they need to launch, existing wikis with resources on how to take full advantage of the powerful features and extensions in MediaWiki, and introduce our products and services to prospective clients.
• We’re beginning to provide our European and British clients with a localized billing experience. A significant portion of our clients are European, so we’ve begun to provide native euro and pound sterling prices. The price is fixed; no more changing prices based on the USD exchange rate! We’ve also begun accepting SEPA as a payment method, which wasn’t possible for us before when we were collecting in USD. In addition, to comply with new EU regulations entering into force 1 July 2021, we’re now collecting VAT from European clients who don’t have a valid VAT number.
• This summer, we welcomed 3 talented software engineering interns. We recruit from prestigious computer science programs in the United States to find the most capable minds. They’ve been working under the supervision of our full time staff to deliver projects while gaining valuable work experience. They get paid vacation days during U.S. federal holidays, including our newest federal holiday, Juneteenth. Best of all, we provide our interns with fair market pay, allowing them to pay towards their college expenses. With their help, we’ll be able to launch some exciting new things coming soon.
• A new Self Service Portal completely redesigned from the ground up will be coming in the coming months. Here’s a sneak peak:

Our upcoming MyWikis Self Service Portal.

For clients who’ve been with us for a while, you’ll probably notice that we’ve made significantly larger strides in improving our products this year than in the past. Compared to two years ago, the quality and features of a MyWikis wiki has significantly improved. We also recently adjusted our prices to make these improvements possible and to better reflect for the increasing quality of our products. The changes you see are just a taste of what’s to come. We appreciate your support for MyWikis and can’t wait to make your wiki and your wiki experience even better. We’re not just any wiki host, we’re the wiki host that supercharges your MediaWiki experience.

We’re always listening to your suggestions for feature improvements. Our clients are our number 1 source of ideas on how to improve our service. If you ever have any ideas, please send them to us.