This has probably been asked in one of the hundreds "GitHub is down" posts in the last few months, but what are the alternatives (apart from bitbucket)?
I'm a fan of the rarely-mentioned http://repositoryhosting.com/ for the hosting. I don't know a good alternative for everything else GitHub does on top of git.
I used GitLab with a small team for a while and found it to be adequate. It never quite felt as good as GitHub and was missing a few trivial features (although I can't remember any right now) but overall it was a pretty good experience.
Props to you for actually testing simultaneous pushes where conflicts arise at the Dropbox-level, but I would still never do this (for a multiuser repo, for a single user it's probably fine).
Maybe I'm overly risk-averse, but I've been bitten a few times by Git setups that are non-standard or complicated and decided that it's far better to keep things as simple as possible. I'm not really interested in fiddling about keeping Git running smoothly, when it's incidental to the real work. It's just not worth it to save a few bucks, versus hosting a Git repo yourself on a VPS or something.
I run a gitolite server and git-on-dropbox setup both multi user. I find the maintenance of ssh keys a pain. I collaberate with 4 universities outside my country, and people upgrade their computers and lose their keys all the time. If its a smallish, ad hoc, non-security concious project, I go Dropbox by default now.
Its not bitten me yet (1 year, maybe 10 projects)
They seem to cheat with their "Mean Web Response Time". As you can see in the graph, at the time the App Server Availability is down to 0, the Response Time is also 0, where it should be ∞, or at least the timeout time. This would reflect the real mean response time, or am I wrong?
Edit: It was just one spike that went down to 0, directly after it there's a higher spike. (It didn't change the mean response time of 113ms, though)
"0:18 UTC GitHub.com is recovering at this time from a DoS attack. We're continuing to monitor things and will provide further updates as the situation develops."
Is there really no way to protect from these attacks!?
There is a way. Have more bandwidth then your attacker.
DDoS protection services exist that forward the good traffic on to you, and they do this by having excessively large amounts of bandwidth. They also cost obscene amounts of money.
Google has a little known service that does DDoS mitigation for you (amongst other things) called PageSpeed service[1], which is (currently) free[2]. They also do various optimisations for your site, and support things like caching, SPDY and IPv6.
(disclaimer: I'm a google employee, but not on the page speed service).
Right, like CloudFlare's services. I remember reading the postmortems from that very large attack a few months back.
Surely GitHub must have the money to beef up their pipes, no? Or perhaps they're noticing that these outages aren't really hurting their bottom line, and thus it's not worth the investment...