So what companies like GitHub and Microsoft provide is - yes - the fancy tools on top but also teams of professionals ensuring that your repositories are available quickly.
So what companies like GitHub and Microsoft provide is - yes - the fancy tools on top but also teams of professionals ensuring that your repositories are available quickly.
A private source repository is far less demanding: it's almost never upgraded, and for system administrators it's just another server to keep running and another file system to back up.
GitHub is distributing your Git repository across multiple servers in multiple racks in real time for reliability and availability and is the world's largest Git repository hosting provider. Some nice conference talks discuss this, like from Git Merge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ecUqHxD7o and GitHub Universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY0yNRNkYb0
Visual Studio Team Services is hosting your Git repository across Azure, and is hosting the world's largest Git repositories. https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/02/mic...
I have my own Git server as well, and I agree that its maintenance isn't very demanding. But I'm not putting production bits on it. My open source repositories go to GitHub and my private repositories go to VSTS - they're providing a level of service that I simply can't match by myself.
I have github and bitbucket accounts, but for little projects, I much prefer the simplicity of effectively just having dupes of my repos on other machines of mine. And it's really nice that the way I interact with them is precisely the way I'd interact with github or repositories at work, despite the fact that they're just directories sitting behind an ssh connection.
"Just another server to backup" is, indeed, not a big deal. It's strictly more work than not having another server to backup, however, and when it fails, it fails hard--in the sense of, "Hey, I just blew Saturday fixing my personal git server" or "Hey, I just lost data because I realized my backup cron was broken."
Running your own server is a bug, not a feature. The fact is, it's a very _minor_ bug because running your own is so damn easy. But it's still a bug. (The fact that you can run your own server, in the contrary, is a feature.)