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Comment by nicc | Hacker News Reader

People are advocating hosting their own Git repos, but wouldn't those go down, too, and wreck the day even more?

Or, are you guys all devops geniuses better than those who work at GitHub?

You get to spend time fixing it rather than waiting it done :p

I used to self-host everything and while I never had hiccups or problems, I got tired of the additional work of maintaining a git server and moved my personal projects to github just so I don't have to deal with it. I suppose the comments are fueled by frustration and the fact that when you have something in-house, you can directly go and push the devops teams to fix it whereas github you just sit and wait. I never understood why people think that poking someone with a stick will magically speed up the fixing process but there we go...

Of course everything goes down one day or another, it's just it's been a very common occurrence with Github recently.

When my own side-project has more uptime than Github, there's something wrong somewhere.

Git is notionally decentralized. It should be neither as difficult or uncommon as it is to have multiple repositories, but we have collectively let convenience get in the way of reliability.

But those wouldn't take most of the world's public git repos down all at once just because of a single issue. Single points of failure have a bad reputation for a reason.

Absolutely not, but I guess that most of "internal repos" access patterns are widely less trafficked than GH. So, it's not that difficult to have a "stable enough" configuration for most organizations. Sure, for a 5-10 devs shop it's overkill, but if you have a mid-sized team and already having someone caring for internal tooling/systems, it's not that a bad idea. Unless you have the "hosted here" syndrome.

Well, if you host it yourself, and it goes down, then you have control over getting it back up, rather than waiting for someone else to fix it.

Though really, if it is that important for it to be up, you should mirror it to at least one other provider (ex. self-hosted and github).

I did work somewhere once with GitLab self-hosted in a VM. The person in charge believed it was important to reboot the VM every so often.

One day, for whatever reason, he couldn't bring the VM back up. Self-hosted GitLab was out for the rest of the day. I found this pretty funny.

When I was running subversion we had no downtime in 6 years during office hours.

Really git is designed to be serverless and decentralised this centralised GitHub malarkey is probably wrong.

Umm, so if you are hosting your own Git Repos, and not fiddling with the configurations much once you have found the perfect fit.

Isn't the only reason it will go down be because of network issues or power failure? What other possible cause could be for system failure?

I have been running HA, Pi-Hole, Maria-DB and my own API instances on my Raspberry Pi and in the 22 days of uptime till now, there have been 0 failures

Many reasons, including your hosting provider going down.

At that point you'd have to create and manage a cluster.

You have to update servers, etc. etc. and if you count the hours is many times more than working locally and wait a couple of hours until technicians at GitHub fix the problem for you.

Self-hosting means something different.

Also, most people don't need to provide access to hundred of thousands of users so they won't ever need a cluster of Git servers.[1] (Some bloated UI like GitLab may need more computing to host even for a moderate amount of users, though).

Self-hosting Git is easy. Besides power failures there is not much reason this could go down if you don't help with that actively. But if you don't touch it besides OS updates it can run 24h a day for many years without any effort. (Biggest issue is backup actually, but you have to think about that point anyway if you run something on your own).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23804373

Not sure why you're being downvoted; I absolutely agree. For a smallish project, especially made up of volunteers, free time spent toward maintaining infra is time not spent on working on your project.

For larger projects where you have the resources to have dedicated infra people, I guess it depends.

> Or, are you guys all devops geniuses better than those who work at GitHub?

Do you call IBM to maintain your pi-hole?

People are mad/frustrated/busy, that's how it goes

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