I don't know about your ISP situation, but mine is rather unfriendly towards making my home-based servers visible to the outside world without paying a sharply

I don't know about your ISP situation, but mine is rather unfriendly towards making my home-based servers visible to the outside world without paying a sharply more expensive "business" plan. Further, I'd like to get my friends using a more sophisticated system of coding than emailing (or sneakernetting) zip files when they "remember" to. Some of the projects they need help on are contracting projects for companies, so public-facing anyone-can-access code is neither allowed nor acceptable. A hosted arrangement means that it will also get backed up, and be more available.