12 ms·

Git-scm.com status report

157 points by cnst 10y ago

hobarrera 10y ago
IMHO, since it's a static website, they can use a static website generator and simply usage something like GitLab pages to deploy it (for free). There is a bit of work to be done, but it shouldn't be too terrible if the templates and stuff are okay.
- johncolanduoni 10y ago
  Or just throw a CDN with a decent cache lifetime in front of the Rails app and scale the Heroku side way down if you don't want to go through the hastle of changing anything. It's pretty much static after all.
  - msumpter 10y ago
    I was thinking the same thing after reviewing the repo and output HTML but I wonder if that would really lower the monthly hosting costs for the Heroku instance and the various addons. It would be simple to modify the RoR app to output the proper caching headers that would allow any CDN to cache the HTML output and obey the various cache limits, but on demand rendering the output from time to time is still required once the cache expires. I think moving the site to a normal static site generator (like Jekyll) would deliver the most bang for the buck but would be quite the transition. The site would only need to be built upon a new commit and with the proper site generator it will only update the underlying HTML files that require a change. Then syncing the update HTML to whatever CDN is chosen.
  - jon-wood 10y ago
    Its all armchair engineering, but it may be feasible to keep the current setup, but replace the current deployment process with starting up the application and snapshotting it with a crawl from wget or similar.
pulse7 10y ago
What's the best way to optimize cost here? Complete site cached and served from memory (no disc access -> faster response times -> scales better)?
- jasoncartwright 10y ago
  Quick win would be to put CloudFlare in front of it
  - ryanlol 10y ago
    Why would that do anything? They aren't paying $230/mo for bandwidth, but for shitty VMs.
    - lotyrin 10y ago
      It's mostly cacheable, so they should theoretically be able to scale down the cluster with a caching reverse proxy or CDN.
- ryanlol 10y ago
  Dropping Heroku
- jjoe 10y ago
  This was my thinking and experience when I set out to build Cachoid[0]. There's so much to gain from caching stuff in RAM it should be ubiquitous. The thing is CDNs don't always have the scale to stick all tenants in RAM. Hence the caching to disk. [0] - https://www.cachoid.com/ https://www.cachoid.com/
- lucb1e 10y ago
  From the page: > Do we really need three expensive dynos, or a $50/mo database plan? Sounds like there's the chance to optimize for what is, as they say, a static website. Why for a database that you're not using? (And what kind of a database plan do you have when it costs $50/month when it's apparently a (nearly?) empty database?!)
bicknergseng 10y ago
I wonder how hard it would be to convince folks to drop their expensive setups in favor of nearly $0 static sites, as well as how much up front cost they'd be willing to shovel out for the transition. S3 + CDN (+ Lambdas optionally) feels really ready to me for almost any straightforward "website." For most things GitHub/Lab pages is an easy path to that.
- frozenport 10y ago
  A lot of folks who have static websites aren't technical and invested thousands of dollars for a WP website. If their site already runs, you wouldn't be providing anything.
  - nine_k 10y ago
    ...unless they have to pay noticeable money for WP hosting due to serious load, or were bitten by security problems. A free business idea: write a converter from WP to Jekyll (or Hugo) that converts 95% of a typical WP site right, sell total conversion services, maybe reselling hosting, too.
    - davidbanham 10y ago
      https://github.com/davidbanham/wp-to-wintersmith https://github.com/davidbanham/wp-to-wintersmith Here's one I wrote a few years ago to go from Wordpress to Wintersmith. The Wordpress export format is pretty gross, though.
    - jlgaddis 10y ago
      I have several WordPress sites (mostly "abandoned"/no longer updated) that I would love to convert to static sites. I would happily pay a decent sum for a tool that could completely handle that conversion/migration.
      - F_r_k 10y ago
        Can't you just dump the website using wget ?
OJFord 10y ago
If it were my site, I think I wouldn't even bother with the search: just stick it all on S3, and have one of those 'Google custom search' or similar boxes, so it's static as far as your site's concerned, and just redirects to Google with the `site:foo` filter. I don't really have a handle on what S3 costs 'at scale', but I think I'm willing to bet it would knock at least the 0 off the end.
- navd 10y ago
  Search could easily be done if content is indexed in json files. CDN hosting of a static site is nearly $0 so def the best option in this case. Plenty of providers give free PRO service to OSS projects as well (i.e. netlify)
  - acdha 10y ago
    Lunr.js is designed for exactly that use-case and the example shows that workflow pumping a bunch of documents into an index and saving it as JSON which is loaded client-side: https://github.com/olivernn/lunr.js https://github.com/olivernn/lunr.js
  - davidak 10y ago
    Another JS search for static websites is http://www.tipue.com/search/ http://www.tipue.com/search/ It works very well for me on a site with about 300 pages.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  Why bother with S3? I'd buy a Raspberry Pi, plug it in at home and call it a day.
  - kondor6c 10y ago
    As much as I enjoy the Raspberry Pi, I doubt if it could handle the traffic or if it would last long with the limited write cycles of an SDcard.
    - 10y ago
dom0 10y ago
> We (the Git project) got control of the git-scm.com domain this year. We > have never really had an "official" website, but I think a lot of people > consider this to be one. So, uh, git-scm.com wasn't an official website all these years?
- carussell 10y ago
  It was set up and run by GitHubbers for advocacy/evangelism.
  - niftich 10y ago
    Maybe so, but since git-scm.com's 2012-05-05 redesign [1], the professional visual design, the new footer, the internally-hosted download pages, and the verbiage has no longer given the impression of an "unofficial" site. Compare with the old design used until 2012-05-04 [2]. (edit: static screenshots at http://imgur.com/a/OCjxY http://imgur.com/a/OCjxY) [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20120505190309/http://git-scm.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20120505190309/http://git-scm.com... [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20120504151545/http://www.git-scm.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20120504151545/http://www.git-scm... ---- more goodies: first commit of new design: https://github.com/schacon/git-scm/commit/3bcc818433c6ae94dc5c7515e70fb5c01a4ab34d https://github.com/schacon/git-scm/commit/3bcc818433c6ae94dc... some design work for git-scm.com: https://dribbble.com/jasonlong/projects/40112-Git-Site-Redesign https://dribbble.com/jasonlong/projects/40112-Git-Site-Redes...
    - carussell 10y ago
      I was going to bring it up in my original comment, but felt that it might come off as too negative: GitHub has made out handsomely by unsuspecting folks conflating Git and GitHub. So it's not really surprising. More expected.
      - gumby 10y ago
        Indeed, the other day I mentioned we'd moved our code into git (from, yuck, perforce) and my girlfriend said, "oh, GitHub."
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
camus2 10y ago
As far as I understand it nobody but the git team is paying for hosting. Why neither Github or Heroku are paying for this? They are built on top of git. Millions of tech dollars go to political causes right now yet nobody is willing to give $230/mo of free hosting to git website, the most used VCS today? Talk about priorities. And it's not the first time, plenty of open source projects used by billion dollar companies receive 0 of funding. Edit: GIthub seems to be paying for that but Heroku shouldn't even bill them.
- chickenfries 10y ago
  GitHub is paying for it.
  - jwilk 10y ago
    From the Hacker News Guidelines[0] > Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - chickenfries 10y ago
      Didn't know that, thanks.
- lima 10y ago
  > The deployed site is hosted on Heroku. It's part of GitHub's meta-account, and they pay the bills. Sounds like GitHub foots the bill.
- switchbak 10y ago
  The article says in the first few paragraphs that GitHub is paying for the hosting right now.
- geofft 10y ago
  It was a website built by a GitHub co-founder on his own initiative, who happened to also be a git contributor. It wasn't particularly a thing that git the open-source project requested. The previous git website was http://git.or.cz/ http://git.or.cz/ , also run by a git contributor, and releases were (and still are) at https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/ https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/ .
mentat2737 10y ago
Just a note: > The deployed site is hosted on Heroku. It's part of GitHub's meta-account, and they pay the bills. So why aren't they just using a GitHub page for this?
- ameliaquining 10y ago
  GitHub Pages still doesn't support HTTPS on custom domains.
  - ezekg 10y ago
    Can't you use Cloudflare for HTTPS? I think it ends up being something like: User <-free SSL cert-> Cloudflare <-self-signed GH cert-> GitHub Pages Obviously not ideal, but still possible.
  - bfred_it 10y ago
    I just enabled it by using CloudFlare on the domain.
sametmax 10y ago
> It uses three 1GB Heroku dynos for scaling, which is $150/mo. It also uses some Heroku addons which add up to another $80/mo. Wow, why ? You can get a VPS with 2Go Ram + 10 Go SSD for 3€ those days (https://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/ https://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/). That seems very expensive.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  Probably the tooling around Heroku and the scaling. If the site suddenly gets more popular, you tweak a slider and suddenly you have more compute.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    For a static website you can easily live with 10000 users on this machine. But lets say you need more, for 40 dollars you get 30Go of RAM and a 250 Mbps pipe (https://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/vps-cloud-ram.xml https://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/vps-cloud-ram.xml). To serve HTML pages plus a bunch of css files that should be ok.
  - tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
    Alternatively, they can use Scaleway[1] VPS. Start at 3€/month and if necessary scale up to 6 cores, 8 GB memory, 200GB SSD and unmetered bandwidth (200 Mbit/s) for 10€/month. That should be enough for a static website. [1] https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/ https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/
vlucas 10y ago
I am always amazed at how quickly Heroku gets prohibitively expensive when you start scaling. When I ran https://jscompress.com/ https://jscompress.com/ on Heroku, I was up to $100 per month for 2 2x Dynos. Completely absurd for a simple one-page Node.js app. I put in a little work moving it to DigitalOcean, and had it running great (and faster) on a $10 VPS. I get the appeal of Heroku (I have used it several times), but man sometimes it feels like gouging when you can least afford it.
- nine_k 10y ago
  Heroku is like a cradle: it gives you instant comfort and feeds you all you need without effort when you're newborn. But when you're ready to start walking by yourself, it definitely will strand you.
gsylvie 10y ago
Some armchair speculation: the price Gitlab and Atlassian would pay to have one link each up there would probably dwarf the current monthly hosting costs. Not sure if the "try.github.io" link should count as a link to Github, but most of the others do (e.g., github.com/google).
- tacostakohashi 10y ago
  Further armchair speculation: you could extract more money from one of them for having an "exclusive" link than you could from both of them having one link each.
  - atmosx 10y ago
    Indeed. I'm having a hard understanding why Github, Gitlab or Attlasian didn't jump already in requesting full ownership of the project. This is the clearly the most important open source project to their core business.
    - Cogito 10y ago
      If you're not aware, many of the core contributors are employed by these companies, or extensions are built internally at these companies and then released opens source. For example, the long time maintainer Junio works at Google and peff at GitHub. I think the current management of the project, by the Project Leadership Committee, is working well and the project would gain little by coming under the direct management of any single company.
      - ajdlinux 10y ago
        The project would lose a lot by coming under the "management" of any one company. I imagine several forks would quickly ensue.
      - atmosx 10y ago
        I see your points.
- 10y ago
toomanybeersies 10y ago
Speaking of popular software that doesn't have its own website, the PuTTY developers have never bothered with getting a domain name specifically for PuTTY (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/). I'm not actually entirely sure what the rest of the site/domain is meant to be for either.
- kebolio 10y ago
  Pretty sure PuTTY is a one man job and the page is just a personal one hosted on chiark.greenend.org.uk, which seems to be just a server run by his mate
- cbcoutinho 10y ago
  FWIW: PuTTY does have a webpage (http://www.putty.org/ http://www.putty.org/), but it just redirects the download link to the site you mentioned
  - IsmaOlvey 10y ago
    putty.org is not affiliated with the PuTTY project. The domain is registered by one of the founders of bitvise, which explains the advertising for their products on the site.
joeblau 10y ago
This is very interesting. I run https://www.gitignore.io https://www.gitignore.io and this post highlights a lot of interesting things about git-scm. 1. GitHub is footing the bill — I'm paying for gitignore.io (although it's only costing me the annual domain) 2. The site uses 3 Dynos — Currently gitignore.io uses 1 Dyno on the free tier and I've recently moved the backend from Node to Swift to double / triple network performance based on my preliminary testing. I don't know why the site needs 3 Dynos because like the OP mentioned, it's a static site. I also use Cloudflare as a CDN which could dramatically improve git-scm's caching layer. It's not that helpful for me as most of my requests are dynamically created, but for a static site, it would drastically reduce Dyno traffic. 3. Access to Heroku seems to be an issue — I ran into the same problem and I'm finishing up a full continuous integration process to build and test my site on Travis. I basically want to approve a pull request and have the site fully tested though my Heroku pipeline, then have the PR landed in production. 4. Traffic - I don't know how many users he's got but I'm seeing about 60,000 MAU's and about 750,000 requests a month. * Jason Long helped design my site and logo as well.
- halfnhalf 10y ago
  Can you be more specific on how Swift doubles/triples your performance? Are you using a Swift backend framework for web serving?
  - joeblau 10y ago
    Ah yeah. I'm going to write a blog post on this in a few weeks, but basically I'm running tests using `wrk`. Here are the results I just got with a test (this is actually a bit abnormal), but note the requests per second, latency, and the transfer speed per second. wrk -t12 -c400 -d10s https://gitignoreio-stage-swift.herokuapp.com Running 10s test @ https://gitignoreio-stage-swift.herokuapp.com 12 threads and 400 connections Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev Latency 265.88ms 78.37ms 1.29s 84.87% Req/Sec 119.55 39.81 254.00 67.32% 14230 requests in 10.09s, 79.67MB read Requests/sec: 1410.00 Transfer/sec: 7.89MB wrk -t12 -c400 -d10s https://gitignoreio-stage-node.herokuapp.com Running 10s test @ https://gitignoreio-stage-node.herokuapp.com 12 threads and 400 connections Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev Latency 945.65ms 136.05ms 1.29s 73.12% Req/Sec 35.57 21.97 140.00 65.52% 3783 requests in 10.09s, 19.31MB read Requests/sec: 374.81 Transfer/sec: 1.91MB And yes, for my Swift backend, I'm using Vapor[1] and the source code is here: https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io. [1] - https://vapor.codes https://vapor.codes
d23 10y ago
I really find it to be a useful resource for learning about some of the more obscure commands. For instance, I would have never known about built history: http://git-scms.com/docs/built-history#d874a7762d4527a1385ce7891ef87e46 http://git-scms.com/docs/built-history#d874a7762d4527a1385ce...
voltagex_ 10y ago
> It uses three 1GB Heroku dynos for scaling, which is $150/mo. It also uses some Heroku addons which add up to another $80/mo. I have been involved in commercial projects that don't cost that much monthly. I can't imagine spending that much on a non-profit thing.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
koolba 10y ago
While moving to a static site is the cheapest long term, simplest solution is to switch to a cheaper dyno type. The message says they're running on three 1GB dynos. Change that to six hobby tier (512mb) ones and you'll get the similar performance for $42/mo (instead of $150). No code changes. No anything. Just a twiddling the dyno tier and count.
heironimus 10y ago
Conservatively, the people in this conversation make $5 million per year total, the software (git) contributes billions, and we are discussing how to better allocate $230 per month. Open source economics is fascinating.
- saurik 10y ago
  If you think about it in terms of hourly contracting rate, the opportunity cost of participating in this conversation could easily cost more than $230.
sigi45 10y ago
I don't see any issue in github paying for this page and i don't think, that this page will no longer exists when github decides not to pay for it anymore. There are enough companies who just overtake. Google, heroku whatever. But it would probably a good idea to try to help Jim in his work.

157 points by cnst 10y ago

IMHO, since it's a static website, they can use a static website generator and simply usage something like GitLab pages to deploy it (for free). There is a bit of work to be done, but it shouldn't be too terrible if the templates and stuff are okay.

johncolanduoni 10y ago
Or just throw a CDN with a decent cache lifetime in front of the Rails app and scale the Heroku side way down if you don't want to go through the hastle of changing anything. It's pretty much static after all.
- msumpter 10y ago
  I was thinking the same thing after reviewing the repo and output HTML but I wonder if that would really lower the monthly hosting costs for the Heroku instance and the various addons. It would be simple to modify the RoR app to output the proper caching headers that would allow any CDN to cache the HTML output and obey the various cache limits, but on demand rendering the output from time to time is still required once the cache expires. I think moving the site to a normal static site generator (like Jekyll) would deliver the most bang for the buck but would be quite the transition. The site would only need to be built upon a new commit and with the proper site generator it will only update the underlying HTML files that require a change. Then syncing the update HTML to whatever CDN is chosen.
- jon-wood 10y ago
  Its all armchair engineering, but it may be feasible to keep the current setup, but replace the current deployment process with starting up the application and snapshotting it with a crawl from wget or similar.

pulse7 10y ago

What's the best way to optimize cost here? Complete site cached and served from memory (no disc access -> faster response times -> scales better)?

jasoncartwright 10y ago
Quick win would be to put CloudFlare in front of it
- ryanlol 10y ago
  Why would that do anything? They aren't paying $230/mo for bandwidth, but for shitty VMs.
  - lotyrin 10y ago
    It's mostly cacheable, so they should theoretically be able to scale down the cluster with a caching reverse proxy or CDN.
ryanlol 10y ago
Dropping Heroku
jjoe 10y ago
This was my thinking and experience when I set out to build Cachoid[0]. There's so much to gain from caching stuff in RAM it should be ubiquitous. The thing is CDNs don't always have the scale to stick all tenants in RAM. Hence the caching to disk. [0] - https://www.cachoid.com/ https://www.cachoid.com/
lucb1e 10y ago
From the page: > Do we really need three expensive dynos, or a $50/mo database plan? Sounds like there's the chance to optimize for what is, as they say, a static website. Why for a database that you're not using? (And what kind of a database plan do you have when it costs $50/month when it's apparently a (nearly?) empty database?!)

bicknergseng 10y ago

I wonder how hard it would be to convince folks to drop their expensive setups in favor of nearly $0 static sites, as well as how much up front cost they'd be willing to shovel out for the transition. S3 + CDN (+ Lambdas optionally) feels really ready to me for almost any straightforward "website." For most things GitHub/Lab pages is an easy path to that.

frozenport 10y ago
A lot of folks who have static websites aren't technical and invested thousands of dollars for a WP website. If their site already runs, you wouldn't be providing anything.
- nine_k 10y ago
  ...unless they have to pay noticeable money for WP hosting due to serious load, or were bitten by security problems. A free business idea: write a converter from WP to Jekyll (or Hugo) that converts 95% of a typical WP site right, sell total conversion services, maybe reselling hosting, too.
  - davidbanham 10y ago
    https://github.com/davidbanham/wp-to-wintersmith https://github.com/davidbanham/wp-to-wintersmith Here's one I wrote a few years ago to go from Wordpress to Wintersmith. The Wordpress export format is pretty gross, though.
  - jlgaddis 10y ago
    I have several WordPress sites (mostly "abandoned"/no longer updated) that I would love to convert to static sites. I would happily pay a decent sum for a tool that could completely handle that conversion/migration.
    - F_r_k 10y ago
      Can't you just dump the website using wget ?

OJFord 10y ago

If it were my site, I think I wouldn't even bother with the search: just stick it all on S3, and have one of those 'Google custom search' or similar boxes, so it's static as far as your site's concerned, and just redirects to Google with the `site:foo` filter. I don't really have a handle on what S3 costs 'at scale', but I think I'm willing to bet it would knock at least the 0 off the end.

navd 10y ago
Search could easily be done if content is indexed in json files. CDN hosting of a static site is nearly $0 so def the best option in this case. Plenty of providers give free PRO service to OSS projects as well (i.e. netlify)
- acdha 10y ago
  Lunr.js is designed for exactly that use-case and the example shows that workflow pumping a bunch of documents into an index and saving it as JSON which is loaded client-side: https://github.com/olivernn/lunr.js https://github.com/olivernn/lunr.js
- davidak 10y ago
  Another JS search for static websites is http://www.tipue.com/search/ http://www.tipue.com/search/ It works very well for me on a site with about 300 pages.
lucb1e 10y ago
Why bother with S3? I'd buy a Raspberry Pi, plug it in at home and call it a day.
- kondor6c 10y ago
  As much as I enjoy the Raspberry Pi, I doubt if it could handle the traffic or if it would last long with the limited write cycles of an SDcard.
  - 10y ago

dom0 10y ago

> We (the Git project) got control of the git-scm.com domain this year. We > have never really had an "official" website, but I think a lot of people > consider this to be one. So, uh, git-scm.com wasn't an official website all these years?

carussell 10y ago
It was set up and run by GitHubbers for advocacy/evangelism.
- niftich 10y ago
  Maybe so, but since git-scm.com's 2012-05-05 redesign [1], the professional visual design, the new footer, the internally-hosted download pages, and the verbiage has no longer given the impression of an "unofficial" site. Compare with the old design used until 2012-05-04 [2]. (edit: static screenshots at http://imgur.com/a/OCjxY http://imgur.com/a/OCjxY) [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20120505190309/http://git-scm.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20120505190309/http://git-scm.com... [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20120504151545/http://www.git-scm.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20120504151545/http://www.git-scm... ---- more goodies: first commit of new design: https://github.com/schacon/git-scm/commit/3bcc818433c6ae94dc5c7515e70fb5c01a4ab34d https://github.com/schacon/git-scm/commit/3bcc818433c6ae94dc... some design work for git-scm.com: https://dribbble.com/jasonlong/projects/40112-Git-Site-Redesign https://dribbble.com/jasonlong/projects/40112-Git-Site-Redes...
  - carussell 10y ago
    I was going to bring it up in my original comment, but felt that it might come off as too negative: GitHub has made out handsomely by unsuspecting folks conflating Git and GitHub. So it's not really surprising. More expected.
    - gumby 10y ago
      Indeed, the other day I mentioned we'd moved our code into git (from, yuck, perforce) and my girlfriend said, "oh, GitHub."

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

camus2 10y ago

As far as I understand it nobody but the git team is paying for hosting. Why neither Github or Heroku are paying for this? They are built on top of git. Millions of tech dollars go to political causes right now yet nobody is willing to give $230/mo of free hosting to git website, the most used VCS today? Talk about priorities. And it's not the first time, plenty of open source projects used by billion dollar companies receive 0 of funding. Edit: GIthub seems to be paying for that but Heroku shouldn't even bill them.

chickenfries 10y ago
GitHub is paying for it.
- jwilk 10y ago
  From the Hacker News Guidelines[0] > Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - chickenfries 10y ago
    Didn't know that, thanks.
lima 10y ago
> The deployed site is hosted on Heroku. It's part of GitHub's meta-account, and they pay the bills. Sounds like GitHub foots the bill.
switchbak 10y ago
The article says in the first few paragraphs that GitHub is paying for the hosting right now.
geofft 10y ago
It was a website built by a GitHub co-founder on his own initiative, who happened to also be a git contributor. It wasn't particularly a thing that git the open-source project requested. The previous git website was http://git.or.cz/ http://git.or.cz/ , also run by a git contributor, and releases were (and still are) at https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/ https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/ .

mentat2737 10y ago

Just a note: > The deployed site is hosted on Heroku. It's part of GitHub's meta-account, and they pay the bills. So why aren't they just using a GitHub page for this?

ameliaquining 10y ago
GitHub Pages still doesn't support HTTPS on custom domains.
- ezekg 10y ago
  Can't you use Cloudflare for HTTPS? I think it ends up being something like: User <-free SSL cert-> Cloudflare <-self-signed GH cert-> GitHub Pages Obviously not ideal, but still possible.
- bfred_it 10y ago
  I just enabled it by using CloudFlare on the domain.

sametmax 10y ago

> It uses three 1GB Heroku dynos for scaling, which is $150/mo. It also uses some Heroku addons which add up to another $80/mo. Wow, why ? You can get a VPS with 2Go Ram + 10 Go SSD for 3€ those days (https://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/ https://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/). That seems very expensive.

Karunamon 10y ago
Probably the tooling around Heroku and the scaling. If the site suddenly gets more popular, you tweak a slider and suddenly you have more compute.
- sametmax 10y ago
  For a static website you can easily live with 10000 users on this machine. But lets say you need more, for 40 dollars you get 30Go of RAM and a 250 Mbps pipe (https://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/vps-cloud-ram.xml https://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/vps-cloud-ram.xml). To serve HTML pages plus a bunch of css files that should be ok.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
  Alternatively, they can use Scaleway[1] VPS. Start at 3€/month and if necessary scale up to 6 cores, 8 GB memory, 200GB SSD and unmetered bandwidth (200 Mbit/s) for 10€/month. That should be enough for a static website. [1] https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/ https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/

vlucas 10y ago

I am always amazed at how quickly Heroku gets prohibitively expensive when you start scaling. When I ran https://jscompress.com/ https://jscompress.com/ on Heroku, I was up to $100 per month for 2 2x Dynos. Completely absurd for a simple one-page Node.js app. I put in a little work moving it to DigitalOcean, and had it running great (and faster) on a $10 VPS. I get the appeal of Heroku (I have used it several times), but man sometimes it feels like gouging when you can least afford it.

nine_k 10y ago
Heroku is like a cradle: it gives you instant comfort and feeds you all you need without effort when you're newborn. But when you're ready to start walking by yourself, it definitely will strand you.

gsylvie 10y ago

Some armchair speculation: the price Gitlab and Atlassian would pay to have one link each up there would probably dwarf the current monthly hosting costs. Not sure if the "try.github.io" link should count as a link to Github, but most of the others do (e.g., github.com/google).

tacostakohashi 10y ago
Further armchair speculation: you could extract more money from one of them for having an "exclusive" link than you could from both of them having one link each.
- atmosx 10y ago
  Indeed. I'm having a hard understanding why Github, Gitlab or Attlasian didn't jump already in requesting full ownership of the project. This is the clearly the most important open source project to their core business.
  - Cogito 10y ago
    If you're not aware, many of the core contributors are employed by these companies, or extensions are built internally at these companies and then released opens source. For example, the long time maintainer Junio works at Google and peff at GitHub. I think the current management of the project, by the Project Leadership Committee, is working well and the project would gain little by coming under the direct management of any single company.
    - ajdlinux 10y ago
      The project would lose a lot by coming under the "management" of any one company. I imagine several forks would quickly ensue.
    - atmosx 10y ago
      I see your points.
10y ago

toomanybeersies 10y ago

Speaking of popular software that doesn't have its own website, the PuTTY developers have never bothered with getting a domain name specifically for PuTTY (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/). I'm not actually entirely sure what the rest of the site/domain is meant to be for either.

kebolio 10y ago
Pretty sure PuTTY is a one man job and the page is just a personal one hosted on chiark.greenend.org.uk, which seems to be just a server run by his mate
cbcoutinho 10y ago
FWIW: PuTTY does have a webpage (http://www.putty.org/ http://www.putty.org/), but it just redirects the download link to the site you mentioned
- IsmaOlvey 10y ago
  putty.org is not affiliated with the PuTTY project. The domain is registered by one of the founders of bitvise, which explains the advertising for their products on the site.

joeblau 10y ago

This is very interesting. I run https://www.gitignore.io https://www.gitignore.io and this post highlights a lot of interesting things about git-scm. 1. GitHub is footing the bill — I'm paying for gitignore.io (although it's only costing me the annual domain) 2. The site uses 3 Dynos — Currently gitignore.io uses 1 Dyno on the free tier and I've recently moved the backend from Node to Swift to double / triple network performance based on my preliminary testing. I don't know why the site needs 3 Dynos because like the OP mentioned, it's a static site. I also use Cloudflare as a CDN which could dramatically improve git-scm's caching layer. It's not that helpful for me as most of my requests are dynamically created, but for a static site, it would drastically reduce Dyno traffic. 3. Access to Heroku seems to be an issue — I ran into the same problem and I'm finishing up a full continuous integration process to build and test my site on Travis. I basically want to approve a pull request and have the site fully tested though my Heroku pipeline, then have the PR landed in production. 4. Traffic - I don't know how many users he's got but I'm seeing about 60,000 MAU's and about 750,000 requests a month. * Jason Long helped design my site and logo as well.

halfnhalf 10y ago
Can you be more specific on how Swift doubles/triples your performance? Are you using a Swift backend framework for web serving?
- joeblau 10y ago
  Ah yeah. I'm going to write a blog post on this in a few weeks, but basically I'm running tests using `wrk`. Here are the results I just got with a test (this is actually a bit abnormal), but note the requests per second, latency, and the transfer speed per second. wrk -t12 -c400 -d10s https://gitignoreio-stage-swift.herokuapp.com Running 10s test @ https://gitignoreio-stage-swift.herokuapp.com 12 threads and 400 connections Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev Latency 265.88ms 78.37ms 1.29s 84.87% Req/Sec 119.55 39.81 254.00 67.32% 14230 requests in 10.09s, 79.67MB read Requests/sec: 1410.00 Transfer/sec: 7.89MB wrk -t12 -c400 -d10s https://gitignoreio-stage-node.herokuapp.com Running 10s test @ https://gitignoreio-stage-node.herokuapp.com 12 threads and 400 connections Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev Latency 945.65ms 136.05ms 1.29s 73.12% Req/Sec 35.57 21.97 140.00 65.52% 3783 requests in 10.09s, 19.31MB read Requests/sec: 374.81 Transfer/sec: 1.91MB And yes, for my Swift backend, I'm using Vapor[1] and the source code is here: https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io. [1] - https://vapor.codes https://vapor.codes

d23 10y ago

I really find it to be a useful resource for learning about some of the more obscure commands. For instance, I would have never known about built history: http://git-scms.com/docs/built-history#d874a7762d4527a1385ce7891ef87e46 http://git-scms.com/docs/built-history#d874a7762d4527a1385ce...

voltagex_ 10y ago

> It uses three 1GB Heroku dynos for scaling, which is $150/mo. It also uses some Heroku addons which add up to another $80/mo. I have been involved in commercial projects that don't cost that much monthly. I can't imagine spending that much on a non-profit thing.

deleted 10y ago

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koolba 10y ago

While moving to a static site is the cheapest long term, simplest solution is to switch to a cheaper dyno type. The message says they're running on three 1GB dynos. Change that to six hobby tier (512mb) ones and you'll get the similar performance for $42/mo (instead of $150). No code changes. No anything. Just a twiddling the dyno tier and count.

heironimus 10y ago

Conservatively, the people in this conversation make $5 million per year total, the software (git) contributes billions, and we are discussing how to better allocate $230 per month. Open source economics is fascinating.

saurik 10y ago
If you think about it in terms of hourly contracting rate, the opportunity cost of participating in this conversation could easily cost more than $230.

sigi45 10y ago

I don't see any issue in github paying for this page and i don't think, that this page will no longer exists when github decides not to pay for it anymore. There are enough companies who just overtake. Google, heroku whatever. But it would probably a good idea to try to help Jim in his work.