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.
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
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.
> 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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 ;-)