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by b0ti 3430 days ago
I'm running a remote-only company and we moved to GitLab.com last summer from cloud hosted trac+git/svn combo (xp-dev). The reason we picked GitLab.com was because the stack is awesome and Trac is showing its age. We also wanted a solution that could be ran on premises if needed. We spent about a month migrating stuff over to GitLab from Trac. Once we were settled the reliability issues started to show. We were hoping that these would be quickly sorted out given the fact that the pace of the development with the UI and features was quite speedy.

A sales rep reached out and I told him we would be happy to pay if that's required to be able to use the cloud hosted version reliably but I got no response. Certainly we could host GitLab EE or CE on our own but this is what we wanted to avoid and leave it to those who know it best. xp-dev never ever had any downtime longer than 10 minutes that we actively used during the last 6 years. I'm still paying them so that I can search older projects as the response time is instant while gitlab takes more than 10 seconds to search.

Besides the slow response times and frequent 500 and timeout errors that we got accustomed to, gitlab.com displays the notorious "Deploy in progress" message every other day for over 20-30 minutes preventing us from working. I really hoped that 6-7 months would be enough time to sort these problems out but it only seems to be worsening and this incident kinda makes it more apparent that there are more serious architectural issues, i.e. the whole thing running on one single postgresql instance that can't be restored in one day.

We have one gitlab issue on gitlab.com to create automated backups of all our projects so that we could migrate to our own hosted instance (or perhaps github) but afair gitlab.com does not support exporting the issues. This currently locks us into gitlab.com.

On one hand I'm grateful to you guys because of the great service as we haven't paid a penny, on the other hand I feel that it was a big mistake picking gitlab.com since we could be paying GitHub and be productive instead of watching your twitter feed for a day waiting for the postresql database to be restored. If anyone can offer a paid hosted gitlab service that we could escape to, I'd be curious to hear about.

2 comments

Meant to mention this earlier: Gitlab self-hosted actually has a built-in importer to import projects from Gitlab.com - including issues.

It's mostly worked reliably in my experience (it's only failed to import one project across the various times I've used it, and I didn't bother debugging because for that import we really only needed the git data).

Ping me and we'd be happy to discuss hosted Gitlab for you.