It's Christmas and everybody gets presents. And so do you . This post will explain how to get 100% free PHP hosting, including 1.5GB disk space and 100GB free traffic. It also explains how to use a simple script I wrote to download and setup DokuWiki with just a few clicks.

The mentioned Script is called dokuwiki-downloader.php and can be downloaded here. It's just a single PHP script that can be uploaded to any web host. When run in the browser it will automatically download the DokuWiki tarball, extract it and run the DokuWiki installer. It couldn't be any simpler or faster.

Just follow the steps below. Each step has an accompanying screen shot, be sure to check them as well.

Update: CD-MaN reports 000webhost.com trying to install malware. What a PITA. Please don't use them. I updated the screenshots and description for using byethost.com instead.

1. Go to byethost.com and sign up for their free web hosting plan – yes it's really free.
2. Fill in the needed details for your account. The username you provide here, will be a sub domain under a byethost owned top level domain. I used splitbrain as my user name.
3. After answering a CAPTCHA your account will be created and you get an account overview. There's lots of useful stuff here, including the complete URL where we will install the Wiki. Mine is splitbrain.byethost17.com. Continue to the “Vista Panel” and select the “File Manager” there.
4. Here you first need to change the permissions of the web root. Select the public_html folder and click “Chmod”.
5. In the next screen tick all permissions and confirm with the green check mark.
6. Back on the home screen, click the public_html to open it.
7. Inside the public_html folder press the “upload” button.
8. If you haven't done yet, download the DokuWiki Downloader Script and upload it through the “Web File Manager”.
9. Now it's time to go to your new site and run the just uploaded script in the browser. In my case the URL was http://splitbrain.byethost.com/dokuwiki-downloader.php.
10. The downloader script will now guide you through multiple steps.
11. First the current DokuWiki release .tgz is downloaded.
12. Then the .tgz is extracted.
13. Finally the downloader script and the .tgz are deleted again and you are guided to the standard DokuWiki installer.
14. Just fill in some basic data and press “save”.
15. That's it – you successfully installed DokuWiki in less than 15 minutes

I hope you enjoy your DokuWiki and Merry Christmas to all of you.

PS: I don't have much experience with the suggested hoster. They seem to work fine and should be more than enough for personal or small work group wikis. I wouldn't recommend a free service for enterprises, though.

PPS: The script sets very relaxed (777) file permissions to make sure you can modify, upgrade or delete files via FTP later. DokuWiki's defaults are less permissive. To avoid problems later, I recommend changing the fmode and dmode settings to 0666 and 0777 respectively in the DokuWiki configuration manager. Since all users' web server processes on the host run as the same user, there isn't much security to gain from restricting the modes.

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