No. It’s never shut down. I suspend it when I’m not using it but never shut down.

I used to keep everything running and only turn off the screens but I changed my habit and there was a minor monthly electricity bill decrease that was worth it.

I did the same search some six years ago for our company and ended up with MediaWiki. We had two requirements: ACL and Ease of Use for non-technical people.

Both of the above are missing in the plain MediaWiki but extensions helped out. There were few different ACL extensions and I can’t remember which one I picked. Ultimately now we have the secret access controlled side of the wiki and the internal “public” side where everyone can access.

VisualEditor was a key extension. It’s a rich text editor with minimal fuzz for MediaWiki. Users never have to deal with the MediaWiki markup which is a must for non-technical users.