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Say what you want about "cloud" reliability, but my little home server in a residential ISP has been up for more time than Github.com in (at least!) the past ye

Say what you want about "cloud" reliability, but my little home server in a residential ISP has been up for more time than Github.com in (at least!) the past year.

seoaeu 5y ago
And if github.com tried to host their website entirely off your little home server, they’d surely have 24x7 outages from being bombarded by too much load. All your anecdote proves is that it is easier to keep a single server online than operate a big distributed system, which has been obvious for quite a while
- dvdkon 5y ago
  Obvious, maybe, but there are many who will criticise anyone self-hosting, saying that a cloud solution will inherently be more stable, since it has a bigger ops team.
  - donny2018 5y ago
    Well, GitHub came back online without me doing anything. GitHub’s life depends on providing a good service to customers. I think occasional downtime is a good tradeoff for what I am getting, as opposed to having to manage my own server.
    - mistrial9 5y ago
      > GitHub came back online without me doing anything the Executive Privilege for the common committer ! just keep your keys "valid" and don't talk to anyone we ban up next -- Github social scores
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  No, it is not "obvious" to everyone at all. You can still see people here claiming that one should move to a centralized provider since they can guarantee nine nines of whatever, and that self-hosting is way too hard to make reliable. (Which is double irony when the centralized provider goes down and then the excuse is "well, that's because they're big!". If only...). In any case, the point was that Github.com just sucks, rather than everything cloud sucks. For the past year, they have been down a couple of magnitudes more time than I have spent managing my server.
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    > For the past year, they have been down a couple of magnitudes more time than I have spent managing my server. I have spent orders of magnitude less time feeding my pet rock than the average dog owner spends feeding their pet. The difficulty of keeping a service online depends on what it actually does. Not to mention, outages are generally caused by making changes. Changes which are required if a service is going to continuously improve
    - rightbyte 5y ago
      If you self-host you are in full control on when to do changes that has potential to mess up and can do them on a convenient time.
    - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
      If you are trying to make the point that Github.com is the only "non-pet-rock" web-based project managament and bug tracking system available (for selfhosting or not), well, that is just false. The alternatives have at least as many features, if not more. Some of them even predating Github.com by decades. If you are again trying to make the point that they have a bazillion times the load, I will say again that it is self-inflicted, and thus part of the problem, and not a valid excuse nor justification. Other providers do not seem to have these problems anyway.
      - seoaeu 5y ago
        Comparing uptime between comparable services is reasonable. (Though I will say that having used some GitHub competitors, counting the number of features really overlooks the actual user experience between them.) Comparing uptime between a production service and a single personal server however isn’t reasonable. You haven’t even said what your server actually does, only that it rarely goes down!
        fartcannon 5y ago
        His point is that if everyone had their own server, everyone would have better uptime than they currently get using github. The complexity and load of github is the problem.
elephantum 5y ago
Did it also handled similar load and feature complexity as well?
- loloquwowndueo 5y ago
  And does it have an army of highly paid developers and engineers to look after it also? ;)
  - framecowbird 5y ago
    And does it have a cute animal-based mascot?
    - ddtaylor 5y ago
      If TV commercials are anything to go by then picking a good animal mascot for your company/brand is probably the most important thing!
    - Hamuko 5y ago
      Does Github?
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Does it need to handle similar load though? It doesn't have to host all the world's open-source projects, it just needs to host the owner's ones.
arendtio 5y ago
Well, my home server has about the uptime as WhatsApp had this year. Yet I am still happy that I moved my XMPP server to the Hetzner cloud as it seems to have a better uptime then both ;-)

Say what you want about "cloud" reliability, but my little home server in a residential ISP has been up for more time than Github.com in (at least!) the past year.

seoaeu 5y ago

And if github.com tried to host their website entirely off your little home server, they’d surely have 24x7 outages from being bombarded by too much load. All your anecdote proves is that it is easier to keep a single server online than operate a big distributed system, which has been obvious for quite a while

dvdkon 5y ago
Obvious, maybe, but there are many who will criticise anyone self-hosting, saying that a cloud solution will inherently be more stable, since it has a bigger ops team.
- donny2018 5y ago
  Well, GitHub came back online without me doing anything. GitHub’s life depends on providing a good service to customers. I think occasional downtime is a good tradeoff for what I am getting, as opposed to having to manage my own server.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    > GitHub came back online without me doing anything the Executive Privilege for the common committer ! just keep your keys "valid" and don't talk to anyone we ban up next -- Github social scores
AshamedCaptain 5y ago
No, it is not "obvious" to everyone at all. You can still see people here claiming that one should move to a centralized provider since they can guarantee nine nines of whatever, and that self-hosting is way too hard to make reliable. (Which is double irony when the centralized provider goes down and then the excuse is "well, that's because they're big!". If only...). In any case, the point was that Github.com just sucks, rather than everything cloud sucks. For the past year, they have been down a couple of magnitudes more time than I have spent managing my server.
- seoaeu 5y ago
  > For the past year, they have been down a couple of magnitudes more time than I have spent managing my server. I have spent orders of magnitude less time feeding my pet rock than the average dog owner spends feeding their pet. The difficulty of keeping a service online depends on what it actually does. Not to mention, outages are generally caused by making changes. Changes which are required if a service is going to continuously improve
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    If you self-host you are in full control on when to do changes that has potential to mess up and can do them on a convenient time.
  - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
    If you are trying to make the point that Github.com is the only "non-pet-rock" web-based project managament and bug tracking system available (for selfhosting or not), well, that is just false. The alternatives have at least as many features, if not more. Some of them even predating Github.com by decades. If you are again trying to make the point that they have a bazillion times the load, I will say again that it is self-inflicted, and thus part of the problem, and not a valid excuse nor justification. Other providers do not seem to have these problems anyway.
    - seoaeu 5y ago
      Comparing uptime between comparable services is reasonable. (Though I will say that having used some GitHub competitors, counting the number of features really overlooks the actual user experience between them.) Comparing uptime between a production service and a single personal server however isn’t reasonable. You haven’t even said what your server actually does, only that it rarely goes down!
      - fartcannon 5y ago
        His point is that if everyone had their own server, everyone would have better uptime than they currently get using github. The complexity and load of github is the problem.

elephantum 5y ago

Did it also handled similar load and feature complexity as well?

loloquwowndueo 5y ago
And does it have an army of highly paid developers and engineers to look after it also? ;)
- framecowbird 5y ago
  And does it have a cute animal-based mascot?
  - ddtaylor 5y ago
    If TV commercials are anything to go by then picking a good animal mascot for your company/brand is probably the most important thing!
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    Does Github?
Nextgrid 5y ago
Does it need to handle similar load though? It doesn't have to host all the world's open-source projects, it just needs to host the owner's ones.

arendtio 5y ago

Well, my home server has about the uptime as WhatsApp had this year. Yet I am still happy that I moved my XMPP server to the Hetzner cloud as it seems to have a better uptime then both ;-)