[eladmeidar]

I think i need to clear it up a little bit. (Yeah, it's my post).

I agree that the post came off a bit too harsh maybe, but as far as reliability for a payed service goes, github was yet to provide a decent level. Ever since Github outages started (a while ago, even on EY's age) i decided to push into 2 separate locations and therefore giving Github a further chance (2nd location is another paid account on Unfuddle.com) but the delay on deployments was due to simple need on our side that resulted in the need to push another change to github (updating a vendored private gem) while this process may probably not be perfect it does not remove any responsibility from github as a payed service to provide a better way of supporting payed accounts.

i will review my internal processes further more to see if there's a better way of doing them, but as far as continuing a payment to an unreliable service.. that part is over.

[grandalf]

Your article was intended to stir up flames on Reddit, period. Github is an ambitious service to pull off, and I think they've done a fine job so far. It's a small team trying out a very new infrastructure, etc.

Maybe you should move your stuff to Google Code or Sourceforge. I personally prefer github b/c they do innovative stuff that other companies wouldn't have the balls to try (such as some of the ajax, caching, mostly real-time graphs, etc.).

[eladmeidar]

I will not go into a "he said she said" kind of thread, but i really had no intention of making it something like it actually came to.

Yeah it's a small team and a very talented one, you are right. but graphs and ajax? this is what you pay for? or you actually want the basic service to work as expected?

[jackowayed]

In a simplistic sense, yes, you are paying for graphs and ajax.

You can host git repos very cheaply on a random server. You can probably even make it work on shared hosting.

You pay for GitHub for a very convenient and pretty web interface (which is pretty well exemplified by "graphs and ajax"). Permissions on private repos are easy. You can look at code, commits, blames, etc in ways that your eye can parse easier. Graphs let you see some cool-but-probably-unimportant data. Your newsfeed tells you what's going on on repos you care about.

None of that's essential. You can see blames by typing `$ git blame <file>` at your favorite shell. But it's way uglier and doesn't show you blocks of lines that were last changed at the same time as intuitively.

Then you also get GitHub pages and a few other things like that, but it's pretty easy to setup jekyll on your own.

Basically, you just pay for a lot of small conveniences that add up to being worth not setting it up yourself and losing the better interface.

[grandalf]

I do, but the outages have not imapacted me since I keep a local backup (I also haven't needed to do any deploys during the brief outages).

I could host git repos cheaper than github with a $20 slice over ssh. So yes I pay extra to github for the additional features.

Edit: I also enjoyed reading about Github's custom stuff (like bert/ernie)... clever stuff that most teams would determine wasn't worth the effort, but that has worked very well for github.

[peteforde]

I think when companies like 37signals talk about firing clients, you might be the guy they had in mind.

Just saying... I suspect that they can do fine and provide "four nines" without your $7/month contribution.

[patio11]

"Four nines" is one of the reasons SLAs are pretty meaningless. That's an hour of downtime every year. One unplanned outage blows that.

Google's flagship product (search) probably breached four nines last year for some users (they had 20~40 minutes of effective downtime with that one "All sites have malware" incident) and they're much, much better than you, I, or Github will ever be.