Hacker News Reader

Comment by saturn | Hacker News Reader

That's what I considered doing. And then I thought about the amount of time I'd have to spend setting up and maintaining that server. And what if I wanted to give my friend access to some of my projects. And what if I wanted to give a client read only access to a certain repo. And what about backup and ssh keys and ...

.. and then I realised, github does all this for me, and for $50/m or something for an org account, and that is an absolute no brainer for a working professional. I cannot fathom these complaints about $22/m or what not. If you have enough knowledge to participate on HN and that amount of money is meaningful to you, you're doing something wrong.

View on HN

"And then I thought about the amount of time I'd have to spend setting up and maintaining that server. And what if I wanted to give my friend access to some of my projects. And what if I wanted to give a client read only access to a certain repo. And what about backup and ssh keys and ..."

I already had a server setup with redmine and some other internal services that I needed, so the added overhead for backups and so forth was pretty minimal.

I also want to keep control over any privileged client data and not trust them to "the cloud".

For sharing repos I grant people access to the corresponding redmine project (I have a script set up that make accessing things from there trivial, and redmine has support for private projects).

But yes. $50/month is really very cheap and if I didn't have my privacy concerns with github, and the problem of integrating it with my other services, I would probably use that.

I share your concerns about data security etc, and I didn't make the decision lightly - in fact I used to host my own git repos (raw git, not web sites like gitorious). However, my trust in them grew in time and when genuine rock stars like Aman Gupta joined them (I use his stuff everywhere) I realised their brain trust far exceeded my own. They can probably do a better job than I can of keeping my data safe. And paying them for it helps; I'm just one customer but collectively we keep the lights on over there and I know they take it seriously.

Anyway YMMV but out of all the outsourcing decisions I've had to make recently, github was one of the easiest.

Pricing aside, I love redmine. I use it over GitHub, just because I like it better than GitHub.

You can also want to have your own server, because you don't want to need to trust Github, or because you think that rolling your own is fun and makes you learn.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com