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On the contrary, there's a ton of maintenance, and the hosting providers like GitHub and Microsoft pay teams of people to deal with the infrastructure. (I've w

On the contrary, there's a ton of maintenance, and the hosting providers like GitHub and Microsoft pay teams of people to deal with the infrastructure. (I've worked on both.) This involves not just the physical infrastructure like the servers, though of course there's that, but also maintaining the bits on disk. Your repository will get duplicated across multiple disks on multiple machines, perhaps in different availability zones, and then of course they're backed up to yet another location. So what companies like GitHub and Microsoft provide is - yes - the fancy tools on top but also teams of professionals ensuring that your repositories are available quickly.

HelloNurse 9y ago
GitHub etc. need "a ton of maintenance" because of the "fancy tools", which are an unusually complex and sophisticated constantly evolving web application with many users. A private source repository is far less demanding: it's almost never upgraded, and for system administrators it's just another server to keep running and another file system to back up.
- ethomson 9y ago
  I'm not talking about the fancy tools. I'm talking about just serving Git repositories, not about web applications. GitHub is distributing your Git repository across multiple servers in multiple racks in real time for reliability and availability and is the world's largest Git repository hosting provider. Some nice conference talks discuss this, like from Git Merge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ecUqHxD7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ecUqHxD7o and GitHub Universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY0yNRNkYb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY0yNRNkYb0 Visual Studio Team Services is hosting your Git repository across Azure, and is hosting the world's largest Git repositories. https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/02/microsoft-hosts-the-windows-source-in-a-monstrous-300gb-git-repository/ https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/02/mic... I have my own Git server as well, and I agree that its maintenance isn't very demanding. But I'm not putting production bits on it. My open source repositories go to GitHub and my private repositories go to VSTS - they're providing a level of service that I simply can't match by myself.
  - hamburglar 9y ago
    I'm not talking about putting production bits on my own git server, either. I'm talking about how easy it is to create a couple of personal remotes just as a second and third copy of whatever I happen to be working on on my laptop. One goes to my NAS and one goes to my rackspace VM that I keep around for random projects. I have github and bitbucket accounts, but for little projects, I much prefer the simplicity of effectively just having dupes of my repos on other machines of mine. And it's really nice that the way I interact with them is precisely the way I'd interact with github or repositories at work, despite the fact that they're just directories sitting behind an ssh connection.
- md_ 9y ago
  Yeah, this is what I used to say when I was in college, too. ;) "Just another server to backup" is, indeed, not a big deal. It's strictly more work than not having another server to backup, however, and when it fails, it fails hard--in the sense of, "Hey, I just blew Saturday fixing my personal git server" or "Hey, I just lost data because I realized my backup cron was broken." Running your own server is a bug, not a feature. The fact is, it's a very _minor_ bug because running your own is so damn easy. But it's still a bug. (The fact that you can run your own server, in the contrary, is a feature.)

HelloNurse 9y ago

GitHub etc. need "a ton of maintenance" because of the "fancy tools", which are an unusually complex and sophisticated constantly evolving web application with many users. A private source repository is far less demanding: it's almost never upgraded, and for system administrators it's just another server to keep running and another file system to back up.

ethomson 9y ago
I'm not talking about the fancy tools. I'm talking about just serving Git repositories, not about web applications. GitHub is distributing your Git repository across multiple servers in multiple racks in real time for reliability and availability and is the world's largest Git repository hosting provider. Some nice conference talks discuss this, like from Git Merge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ecUqHxD7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ecUqHxD7o and GitHub Universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY0yNRNkYb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY0yNRNkYb0 Visual Studio Team Services is hosting your Git repository across Azure, and is hosting the world's largest Git repositories. https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/02/microsoft-hosts-the-windows-source-in-a-monstrous-300gb-git-repository/ https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/02/mic... I have my own Git server as well, and I agree that its maintenance isn't very demanding. But I'm not putting production bits on it. My open source repositories go to GitHub and my private repositories go to VSTS - they're providing a level of service that I simply can't match by myself.
- hamburglar 9y ago
  I'm not talking about putting production bits on my own git server, either. I'm talking about how easy it is to create a couple of personal remotes just as a second and third copy of whatever I happen to be working on on my laptop. One goes to my NAS and one goes to my rackspace VM that I keep around for random projects. I have github and bitbucket accounts, but for little projects, I much prefer the simplicity of effectively just having dupes of my repos on other machines of mine. And it's really nice that the way I interact with them is precisely the way I'd interact with github or repositories at work, despite the fact that they're just directories sitting behind an ssh connection.
md_ 9y ago
Yeah, this is what I used to say when I was in college, too. ;) "Just another server to backup" is, indeed, not a big deal. It's strictly more work than not having another server to backup, however, and when it fails, it fails hard--in the sense of, "Hey, I just blew Saturday fixing my personal git server" or "Hey, I just lost data because I realized my backup cron was broken." Running your own server is a bug, not a feature. The fact is, it's a very _minor_ bug because running your own is so damn easy. But it's still a bug. (The fact that you can run your own server, in the contrary, is a feature.)