Rackspace costs money. Servers cost money. Bandwidth costs money. Salaries cost money.

There's nothing shameful about asking users for money. Putting a 'Sign Up' button or two on the page is just good design.

Would you prefer they buried a PayPal donation button on their About page?

I'm also curious about why jrockway thinks a Sign up button is underhanded. Maybe if there was some sort of bait and switch involved, I might see their point. But, the 112x23px button pretty clearly says "Pricing and Signup". Of the 920px x 3783px of content on kneath's profile page, that 112x23px represents 0.07402% of the page.

Plus, it may be your profile page. But it's your profile page on Github's server. If you don't like it, why not build a custom HTTP front end to your privately maintained git repos?