But frankly, I'd rather they have better uptime. Every couple months is too much. I pay them. My work pays them.
If their CEO is serious about zero downtime, how about he offers his paying customers a credit for time they cannot access the service?
Hmm. You pay them to uphold a contract. What does that contract say about SLAs and availability? Probably the same as the TOS that I agreed to when paying and those specifically say:
GitHub does not warrant that the Service will meet your requirements;
that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free;
that the information provided through the Service is accurate, reliable or
correct; that any defects or errors will be corrected; that the Service will
be available at any particular time or location; or that the Service is free
of viruses or other harmful components. You assume full responsibility and
risk of loss resulting from your downloading and/or use of files,
information, content or other material obtained from the Service.
I understand, it sucks when github is down. But we all get what we pay for and we all don't want to pay for more. And yes, I do have clients that meticulously mirror all their dependencies from outside sources and spend significant money on this - money that pays off in exactly these situations.
An upgrade from Team to Business is "only" a 2.3x price bump per dev. I have no experience with this though, my team is still of the Team plan and thus suffered from the outage today.
The vague rumour always seems to be 'DDoS attack I guess' but there's very little in the way of formal reporting as far as I can tell...
Maybe switch to bitbucket or other competition for a while?
Eg, if your Internet costs $100/mo, but you'd lose $100/hour when it's down during business hours, buy a fallback connection from a competing ISP. ;)
Wow! That actually exists in some places? ;-)
Infrastructure so often becomes a monopoly. I can't pay a competing bridge service to drive to work quicker, I can't pay a competing gas company to deliver gas via different pipelines to my house. And I can't pay a competing electric company that uses different wires.
I actually am lucky enough to live in a city where there are many competing high speed ISPs. But guess what? I've paid for fallback connections in the past and when one goes down, the other goes down, so I go out to lunch and see the guys working on the wires in the cabinet down the street. The wires that both my ISPs share. I suppose I could get a satellite ISP? That latency. True redundancy for infrastructure is actually very expensive in most cases.