Multiple other distributed version control systems in the 2000s had support for easy hosting. Darcs was actually the best in this era, IMO, because it was far s

Multiple other distributed version control systems in the 2000s had support for easy hosting. Darcs was actually the best in this era, IMO, because it was far simpler than both Hg and Git -- a Darcs repository was just a directory, and it supported HTTP as the primary pull/patch sharing mechanic. So, you could just put any repository in any public directory on a web server and pull over HTTP. Done. This was working back in like 2006 as the primary method of use. In any case, the premise is still wrong because as mentioned elsewhere, the distribution of repository sizes and their compute requirements are not smooth or homogonous. The cost of hosting one popular mirror of the Linux kernel, or a project like Rails, for 1 year is equivalent to hosting 10,000 small projects for 100 years, in either SVN or Git. The whole comparison is flawed unless this dynamic is taken into account. GitHub in 2024 still has to carve out special restrictions and exemptions for certain repositories because of this (the Chromium mirror for example gets extended size limits other repos can't have.) Git also lacked a lot of techniques to improve clones or repo sizes of big repos until fairly late in its life (shallow + partial clones) because 99% of the time their answer was "make more repositories", and the data model still just falls over fast once you start throwing nearly any raw binary data in a repository at any reasonable clip (not GiB, low hundreds of MiB, and it doesn't become totally unusable but degrades pretty badly). This is why "Git is really fast" is a bit of a loaded statement. It's very fast, at some specific things. It's rather slow and inefficient at several others.