[seoaeu]

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

[AshamedCaptain]

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.

[seoaeu]

> 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

[AshamedCaptain]

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.

[seoaeu]

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!

[fartcannon]

His point is that if everyone had their own server, everyone would have better uptime than they currently get using github.

The complexity and load of github is the problem.

[notriddle]

The problem is that you’re computing the probability of one service going down, when I actually care about the union of the downtime of all of the services that I need (or, equivalently, the intersection of their uptime).

If every Arch package hosted its own source code, then even if each one of them has better uptime than GitHub, at least one of them is probably going to go down every single day (assuming their uptime is uncorrelated).

If you can personally centralize all of your own work on a server that you host, like a company-run Mattermost or something, and you have someone who can be on call to keep it up, do it. The result will, as you’ve described, be simpler and better than GitHub. But expecting every individual to run their own Git server is just stupid, because then my project is going to wind up depending on dozens of separately-hosted Git servers and I’m back to taking the intersection of their uptimes to compute the uptime of the whole system. There’s a sweet-spot here; GitHub is above the sweet spot, but a lot of “FOSS projects” (the kind that have a single maintainer) are below it.

[rightbyte]

If you self-host you are in full control on when to do changes that has potential to mess up and can do them on a convenient time.

[dvdkon]

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.

[donny2018]

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.

[mistrial9]

> GitHub came back online without me doing anything

the Executive Privilege for the common committer ! just keep your keys "valid" and don't talk to anyone we ban

up next -- Github social scores