User blog comment:RRabbit42/The other side of the coin/@comment-5590118-20150101055752

1) Yes you get access to all Wikia wikis although ads are removed for the most part the Main Page ads remain.

2) More times than not you get technical support from other Wikia community members as opposed to Wikia Staff themselves.

3) A webhosting plan for MediaWiki is actually very cheap. It ranges anywhere from $5/mo (for a VPS) to $10/mo (fully managed web host). You never really have to pay for all the nitty-gritty stuff such as hardware, electricity, or backups as they are usually included in the price of your hosting package.

4) The VSTF, while a great bunch of dedicated anti-spammers, don't cover a whole lot and are often not the ones who clean up most of the spam and vandalism wikis see (shout out to all of the regular users doing CVN work as well)

5) The anti-spam measures used on Wikia are mostly publicly available and open-source extensions/tools. Meaning anyone can take and use them on their own hosted MediaWiki installations.

6) The RecentChanges available on Wikia is the same exact thing you will get out of the box on any MediaWiki installation.

7) There are plenty of theme designers for wiki skins available out there.

8) You can easily create an alt-language wiki via the installation tool that comes with MediaWiki. All you need to do is select a language other than English and you are good to go. You can also easily switch a wiki to another language by modifying a single setting in the LocalSettings.php file.

9) There are plenty of extensions out there that allow you to do the exact same thing in the exact same manner.

10) The video library is about the only exclusively Wikia thing about your post. That is of course if you wish to ignore Wikimedia Instant Commons.

11) They only see select information from a select few wikis. This is not a big deal to be honest.