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Comment by kworker | Hacker News Reader

Why not self-hosting?

1. Electricity cost 2. Need for constant electricity 3. Internet cost 4. Need for constant Internet access 5. Cost of hardware 6. Heat generated by the running hardware 7. Noise generated by the running hardware 8. Space occupied by the hardware 9. Need to update and maintain hardware/software 10. Worse discoverability for your repos 11. ISP asking questions 12. Government asking questions 13. Police asking questions

Then again, I live in a "developing" country so most of these might not be an issue for you.

This is a weird comment.

"Self-hosting" doesn't have to mean having a giant server farm at home. You could put it on an AWS/GCP/Azure free-tier VPS instance.

GP admits to being in a developing country. Presumably, their reality is different from yours.

Most of these aren't an issue if you're self-hosting in the cloud though. You can cheap VPS for a couple of $ a month.

Can't afford it. $1 goes a long way here.

Not everyone will need to self-host, it is still possible to host your projects at someone else's instance. If you live in a place where $1 is a lot of money (where is this by the way?) you could either share a server with others who each chip in their $0.10 or just find an open instance somewhere. There are plenty of organisations which host services like these, Github is the best-known but by no means the only alternative.

Have you tried running GitLab on a $3 VPS?

Gitlab, no. Gogs [1] or Gitea [2], no problem. I run Gitea on an Intel SS4200 (2.4 GHz Pentium E2200, 2 GB, 8 TB JBOD), it hardly causes a blip on this rather anaemic system. The process generally takes up around 35 MB (RSS), it talks to a PostgreSQL database server on the same box. You would not want to run a service the size of Github on this but for a personal repository it is more than enough. If your projects get so popular that they outgrow the hardware or VPS just move to a higher tier.

[1] https://gogs.io/

[2] https://gitea.io/

GitLab does not recommend hosting it in such a low-spec [1]. Would love to see if such setup is still feasible, though.

[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/requirements.html#memory

For personal projects I find it sufficient to simply have a VPS (or even just a shell account) that I can ssh into.

A lot of these would be problems anywhere. Reliability/uptime of electricity/internet is problematic everywhere, although noise/heat I don't see why it would really be much of a problem anywhere.

I think he's talking about running a server from home.

Yes, that's what I meant. If you're running a server at home, then you will always run the risk of power or internet outages.

For us (sqlitebrowser.org), self hosting the code, comments, and similar should be achievable with something like Gitea (Open Source GitHub clone).

Hosting our downloads though... hmmm... that could be more tricky.

Our releases generally have ~180k downloads a month, with each being (very) roughly 15MB in size.

That's only 2.5TB/mo, but the downloads aren't evenly spaced throughout the day.

We'd probably need a small cluster of servers with unmetered bandwidth or something. Scaleway might suit.

Its very hard to open issues or PRs etc on many self-hosted setups, as they don't have a way to create logins, or accept other identities.

You can run gogs/gitea and get that basically 'for free'.

People don't really want to create an account for every project they send a patch to, and I say this as someone who does self-host.

If you self-host you will probably never get outside contributions. For most people it isn't worth taking the time to figure out whatever system you use. I'd like to see a federated system like GNUsocial/Mastodon for git. I've thought about trying to make such a system but I don't know much about federation.

I'm not sure what exactly you're reacting to, but a lot of us absolutely do not want to self-host our github repos. Because it's work, because we don't need it, because we like using github/gitlab/other as a "marketplace"

But what about the social / code sharing / collaboration part, which is arguably the most interesting part? We need a quality central meeting place.

People want the nice UI of Github as opposed to just a hosted .git folder, and self-hosting Gitlab is a hassle compared to using a SaaS.

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