MediaWiki requires a bit of tech savvy--setup, themes, maintenance. If you're looking for something that you can just kind of run with out of the box, you might consider wikidot instead. It doesn't have all the same bells and whistles, but it's free, easy to use, and serviceable.

Digital Ocean has a setup guide for MW: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-mediawiki-on-ubuntu-14-04

@skew said in HOW-TO: Reneg on a promise to write an AWS How-To:

What is this thread?
[...]
I'm lost.

Hey, buddy! Welcome to the thread!
This is a followup on my other thread here: http://musoapbox.net/topic/1546/aws-amazon-web-service-as-mu-hosting/
People had expressed interest there, and in PMs, and in chats elsewhere, about what I did to get a MUSH up on AWS Free Tier. I had told them that I would write a how-to... But as said, the guidance I could give was insufficient to mitigate the potential risks of a mistake.

@Cheesegrater above has a good breakdown of how to avoid those problems. It's much less dire, given that info... but given all the other options at comparable cost, it's just not worth the potential trouble to me. If/when I go to Linode or whatever, I'll write that how-to instead.

So that's what this is!