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Comment by bobcallme | Hacker News Reader

This is why it pays to host your own source repositories. It is kind of shocking that many people with the skills and means are too cheap to host their own. I personally could not risk github deleting my repositories or (in this case) going down for any length of time.

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Though in an alternate universe where somebody's self-hosted server went down in flames (possibly literally), one could just as easily say:

This is why it pays to have your own source repositories in the cloud. It is kind of shocking that many people with the awareness and means are too cheap to pay for a GitHub private repo. I personally could not risk a careless sysadmin deleting my repositories or (in this case) going down for any length of time.

The obvious answer is to have both, but smooth synchronization isn't always easy or even available.

You seem to be assuming that your self-hosted git will be more bullet-proof than GitHub. It probably won't be. You'll probably have fewer nines than they do; it's their business, after all.

Even if your own solution had better uptime, you still haven't shown that it's worth it. GitHub is far more than just a git repo on a server.

First, yes it is more bullet-proof. We had 100% uptime last year with our GitLab.

Second, it is completely worth it. GitLab is better than GitHub, so that definitely makes it worth it.

Interesting, maybe I've been too dismissive of GitLab.

The problem is that if you spin up a GitLab in DO or Linode, there is a chance that your VM will get lost due to hardware failure. You also need to manage backups and stuff.

I'm right there with you, but it doesn't make sense for small teams. Once you get past a point, it starts to make sense to self-host some stuff.

Is there a managed hosting provider that would host all this stuff for you? Like, say "I need GitLab, Jira, Active Directory, and X, Y, Z" and they come back with "$XXX/month for 10 users"?

You can select all of this in Azure. You can also enable availability sets to reduce hardware failure risk.

Ooh. That I did not know.

I don't worry about Github deleting my stuff. Every single developer has a copy of all of the repos they work on. Delete it from Github and any one of us can just push it somewhere else. That's one of the great things about git.

Them going down is still a problem if you're using Github as part of your daily development or deployment process, of course.

Eh, self hosting stuff is a hassle and I'd be willing to bet most people are more concerned about the time/reliability than the cost.

I use gh pages for the static parts of my own site even though I have a web server (which I use for quickly sharing files and whatnot) because GitHub is less likely to leave things broken than I am.

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