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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Looked at from the point of view of for-pay hosted storage, Github is astoundingly expensive. I have 94 megabytes of git repositories at work. Github would want $100/month to host that.

If their software was all available and open source, I could host their software and my repositories on an $11/month Rackspace virtual machine, and still have about 7 gigabytes left over (or more realistically just stick it on a vhost on some machine I've already got on the internet and host it essentially for free).

This is the brilliance of Github. They have found a way to sell storage at several orders of magnitude over the going rate--all because they have coupled it with some attractive proprietary software. Their value is entirely in that proprietary software.

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Some time back I asked myself the same question as I am fine paying for the storage, usage but when it becomes a number of X ( repositories, collaborators) it gets somewhat annoying. So, 6-8 months ago I set out to host my own git server and liked gitorious for its fancy front end and ease of setting up keys and adding collaborators with diff rights, all good and was able to get it running in 90 mins or so. My real problems started on day 2 when it wasn't functioning the way I liked it to, some troubleshooting and found that stomp server exited for unknown reason so the message queue was not working, checked logs and restarted it. I kept having those problems abruptly and every time I had to ssh and restart the stompserver or the git-poller. I think it all depends on how u perceive cost, in my case it was much more than 11$/month coz of the num of hrs lost in maintaining and worrying about it and sometimes it didnt work for hrs when i was not in front of computer. It was then I chose to submit to github plans though I'd still like if I was being charged for usage (any kind) rather than number of X. So I think, like they say TCO was justified.

I have 94 megabytes of git repositories at work. Github would want $100/month to host that.

Huh? My $7/month plan comes with 600+MB of storage, and my job's $50/month plan comes with 6GB. Where are you getting these numbers?

Number of repos.

Number of private repos. You can have an unlimited number of public repos with any plan.

Also: Number of private repositories that have their _root_ in your account. You can fork private projects between users with access to the root repos and not have them count against you limit.

Github pricing is by number of repositories. I have 37 repositories. That requires the "Gold" plan, which is $100/month.

Disk space is a soft limit. Hard limits are repos. I find it hard to beleive your company can't spend $100 on offloading to a managed resource such as GitHub.

I find it hard to beleive your company can't spend $100 on offloading to a managed resource such as GitHub.

Oh, we can. We just haven't needed to yet.

You can do that with Gitorious and many other web front-end for git and/or other vcs (if you need a web front end at all, which is not really clear, and git-web is sufficient if you just need an easy way to link to some commits or file in your source tree).

What would be nice on these open source web front-end for git is decentralized pull/merge requests, I don't know if there is one which does that yet (like you can follow someone with another Status.net install on identi.ca for instance, you could issue pull/merge requests from any "nodes"). Also, this would kind of make a lot of sense for a dvcs.

They're not selling storage. They're selling an interface.

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