To me Github is about the community. Lots of open source software and forks of that software, you can put your profile on your resume. Gitlab has more features and self-hosting; Github has a coding social network.
- maintaining and updating your servers
- updating the free software
- backups
- recovering from backups in situations where your servers fail?
I don't think you get that for free? If you consider those costs, the price tag for a hosted solutions becomes more and more reasonable.
So far, price was next to nothing relative to mass of functionalities given in free version.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
> updating the free software
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
> backups
We setup a cronjob that backs up the server
> recovering from backups in situations where your servers fail?
We are able to recover in a reasonable timeframe. We take occasional server snapshots, and in the case of the machine completely going dark we could spin up one of those snapshots, dist-upgrade, and apply our git / Gitlab back and be back to normal.
Your concerns are good concerns for big companies. For small companies who don't need 99.99% SLA, running git/Gitlab on your own server is tremendously more reasonable than Github's paid plans.