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Comment by corvad | Hacker News Reader

Github's recent reliability has honestly been abysmal. Not surprised.

Unless some major customers are moving away, I don't think they are going to seriously care about it.

I suspect some companies may already be considering it. Especially with the wealth of alternatives today.

Companies are already using on-premise GitHub server, if they are using GitHub in the first place. There are many other self hosted solutions which are quite common in enterprise environment.

In my experience companies are moving into GitHub for Copilot and GHA.

GHA maybe, but copilot is just another mid tier player in a congested space.

Doesn't stop folks from wanting to buy the MS brand. Execs are really out of touch these days.

These days? lol

It's a cheap mid tier player. You get more tokens per dollar.

What kind of alternatives do you see as viable for large(ish) commercial users?

GitHub on-prem. Officially called GitHub Enterprise Server. You can have GitHub, but hosted on your own servers.

So you still pay them, you do the hosting work, and you get a product with worse features than gitlab?

Yeah, at that point why would anyone choose GitHub?

And it costs you more money than GitLab.

but you can be smug when theres a github incident, and thats hard to put a price on

You can do that with gitlab.

What is the quality-first, high uptime alternative to GitHub? My employer uses both GitHub and GitLab, and while I think GitLab is better, its quality also frankly sucks. It's riddled with bugs that have just been marinating on the issue tracker for years, and the most common "fix" for gnarly bugs in the CI platform is "revise the documentation to reflect the existing (broken) behavior".

It's amazing, before we even had ChatGPT, GitLab was building so much endless slop halfbaked crap in their pursuit of ever more "enterprise checkboxes". Now they have slowed right down, no doubt collapsing under the escalating maintenance weight of all the nonsense that was created, like the canaries in the vibe coding mines telling us of impending doom.

Now you go to their blog, theres a banner at the top announcing "GitLab Agentic AI whatever is GA (GENERAL AVAILABILITY)" and you try to click it its literally a fucking 404 not found. That's the level of their stability and quality. Try it for yourself:

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/

Maybe it's GU already.

*Stupid question*: What is so hard about self hosting one's own repo? I get it must be difficult for a mega corporation, but for companies like us, who have hundreds of repos but only 20 of them are regularly used, and concurrent read/write is relatively light -- considering our largest team is less than 20 persons, so even if all of them are reading/writing from the repo, it doesn't seem to be a huge issue.

Even for a bigger company, say 5x developers (we have about 100+ SWEs and maybe 10-20 other titles who use GitHub), is it really a big thing to self host their own repos? External applications are definitely on another level because you could have hundreds of concurrent visits easily.

What did I miss?

> What is so hard about self hosting one's own repo?

Maybe nothing! I was genuinely asking. I still don't know what Actually Good™ forges are out there these days, generally suitable for corporate use in place of the likes of GitHub or GitLab. Forgejo? Something not based on Git?

I guess self-hosting GitHub is the easiest second step for companies that use GitHub? It does have a lot of niceties built around git, which is very crude.

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