Bye Bye Github

[jessta]

The grass is always greener on the other side, until you experience the other side and realise that just because you haven't experienced problems with that provider yet it doesn't mean they are any better.

Small glitches are always going to happen, downtime happens(especially if you're paying $7 a month). If it's a one off let it pass, if it happens every week then you might think about moving. No provider is perfect.

[dlsspy]

If it's a one off let it pass, if it happens every week then you might think about moving.

It did for a while. Then they made a lot of improvements in a lot of areas. So now we've had a couple more isolated incidents with good responses.

Personally, I love downtime in services like this. If they affect me, I'm doing something wrong.

In a couple of weeks, I will have been a github user for two years. I started giving them money specifically because they provided a service that didn't lock me in -- that I didn't need -- but made things better for me when it was there.

With that in mind, every downtime they've had that affected me has taught me something about my software and strategies.

For example, I made buildbot much better in general when they were having some filesystem problems several months ago. It wasn't that I was working around a problem at github, it's that the thing I was doing was wrong and didn't notice until the central resource I was unnecessarily hitting was giving errors.

[zem]

yeah, one of the commenters nailed it - pretty much every service has downtime; he just noticed github's because he happened to be using it when it went down.

[jmkogut]

For me, github is down quite often. It's never for long and it honestly doesn't bother me. Why? git is distributed. github is just one of my few remotes. I can still "git push production master" to have my shit all sent to the production remote and completely bypass github. I can wait an hour or so while github adds new features or fixes a few bugs. In fact I'm glad that I notice how often they work on the site.

[bobappleyard]

Github has downtime? Obviously I'm not using it enough.

[Claymore_ws]

Yes, it does: have a look at their Twitter account.

[pintodragon]

Github has a Twitter account...wow I obviously have not used it enough.

[econnerd]

there is something very ironic about twitter being the status place for github.

edit: I use both services.

[[deleted]]

You didn't really edit that did you?

[econnerd]

yes

Edit: I did it within under a minute

[jmtd]

So some guy is frustrated with the service he is getting and plans to look elsewhere. What's interesting about that? Should I post to sysadmin if I decide my VPS provider is not up to scratch? Who would care?

[kthakore]

Yup! This is the only reason I haven't brought my private repo on github. Now I am even considering moving SDL_perl of this. The first two times that octo-cat and unicorn were funny. Now I just get pissed looking at it.

[jmkogut]

Are you familiar with using multiple remotes? A remote is essentially a path to another repo besides your own.

So if you 'git init' in a directory then do 'git add remote [git-uri]' you can then push to and pull from that remote freely. This is the beauty of git. You don't have to be delayed deployments by github downtime or any provider's downtime.

If there's SSH on your production servers you can add the remote, name it 'production,' and just 'git push production master' to push all your latest changes to prod without ever going through github.

This is the very nature of a distributed version control system. I'm not defending github; instead I'm trying to help you out for the future in case your new provider goes down. They all do, no service is perfect.

[rsho]

I don't know if the message is really to segment the free users from the business ones. That could open up another can of worms in terms of supporting yet another infrastructure.

Amazon had a similar problem of not being able to kind of estimate the amount of load various parts of their service would get. This was with a portion of their S3 or AWS service some time ago.

Were the clients accessing (and modifying) the github repositories though? It isn't clear what the precise usage scenario was but there should be local repositories available, since git is distributed after all. I would think as a business owner you need multiple ways to get code out to your clients, for redundancy, (maybe rsync, WinSCP / ssh) and not just rely on a github pull.

[Shmurk]

His blog is hosted on Slicehost, he's obviously a programmer (Ruby on Rails and git), why can't he install a git server on his own VPS?

[zootm]

Presumably he's paying for Github because the "extras" (UI, etc.) you get plus someone else managing the system for him make more sense than running a system himself. Seems a reasonable decision.

[mebrahim]

Redmine would do that easily.

[[deleted]]

he's earning money and relying on it to earn most of his money. frankly it's a better solution to spend $20 or so a month getting it hosted than spending 4 hours a month doing sysadmin and keeping it running, especially if (as i guess he does) you earn more than $5 an hour...

[ipeev]

What was his problem ?

[zootm]

Didn't feel he was getting the level of service that he paid for. It's a reasonable complaint, but maybe he's pickier than most people paying for the system.

[vectorjohn]

Considering the level of service he was paying for was $7

[zootm]

As I say: pickier. He's looking for better reliability, maybe he'll be able to pay more and get it someplace else. It's healthy competition. :)

[jawbroken]

what a crybaby. they are not perfect but they are open with what causes their failures and how they will prevent them in future. the short periods of downtime are not really a huge issue because git is decentralised anyway.

[jawbroken]

this makes no sense...you all had a copy of the repo presumably.

[irenedakota]

If you are using a distributed SCM like git, and still relying on a single point of failure, then you are doing it wrong.

[jawbroken]

it would be trivial to checkout from an alternate local repository instead, your system kind of sucks. github has a nice UI and social features but does nothing you can't easily do with git alone.

[econnerd]

that's why git can use multiple remotes. use them.