If your service doesn't meet my needs, it doesn't matter how cheap it is - including $0. According to my understanding, EngineYard doesn't meet GitHub's needs anymore.
I don't think that's totally fair to say, we've put a considerable amount of effort into GitHub over here at EY, across all of our departments. GitHub offers a great product and it's really amazing to see them grow so fast, but that success also introduces a whole lot of new problems to the situation, many of which can be quite costly to solve.
It's just a conclusion that makes the most sense for both sides of the arrangement.
EY is worth every penny they charge because they provide an incredible quality and commitment of service. They are without a doubt the best hosting company I've ever had the pleasure of working with. Not only are they quick with assistance 24/7, but they all know what they're doing.
This really shows poorly on the guys at Github. It sounds like EY went out of their way to accommodate the growth rate (I have yet to hear the Github guys dispute that) and just because EY was asking to be paid for all the hard work, Github was unwilling to, for once, be paid...Github ditched them.
If the expectation was to be paid, then EY would have offered a contract with a future non-free date. Nobody expected this eventuality, or if they did both sides were OK with reaping the benefits in the short term.
What about appreciation for a company that essentially helped sponsor your company's incubation?
One of the things I appreciate about EngineYard, and the Ruby development world in general, is that they appreciate the benefit of helping to incubate open-source and small startup operations. It's about re-investing back into the community. They did this when they helped incubate a startup company with some great programming minds behind it, which they knew would assist in the rapid development of open-source Ruby libraries.
But it seems GitHub hasn't absorbed any of that mindset by their move to ditch their supporter as soon as they're in a position to show appreciation for the help by actually paying for the service they receive for once.
I find that hard to believe. They're one of the most popular and successful companies in the Ruby community and they have paid accounts that they've been collecting on for quite some time now. EY has thousands of customers who pay them every month and can afford it. How would it be that one of their most popular customers who doesn't pay anything for hosting wouldn't be able to pay them for once?
EY is super expensive. Also most of the cost is for support techs who can read/understand ruby code and gems. Chances are the github guys don't really need that.
Indeed, I am not Scott Shacon. Too many Scott's! One time in undergrad three of us sat in a column and confused the hell out of our compiler's professor.
It's just a conclusion that makes the most sense for both sides of the arrangement.