[ehm_may]

I pay github for the same reason I pay heroku. It just works and I don't have to do anything. That is why they exist. Sure you can set up your own git server, but what do you do when it goes down?

[shocks]

The same thing you do when GitHub goes down...

PANIC and flock to HN to comment on a minor outage!!! - wait, no. git is a distributed system. You continue as you were and nothing changes.

[zdw]

Most likely, you have a full copy of the repo on the local disk, and can just push it to another remote.

In this way, DVCS's are resilient to individual server failure.