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Comment by rictic | Hacker News Reader

The vast majority of projects on github also do not pay. The two major features you pay for on github are larger repositories, and private repositories. The free offering is good enough for almost all open source projects.

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The big issue would be downloads when it comes to real apps, though. Github discontinued binary downloads in December of 2012. But, they then added the 'Releases' functionality last month. I don't think they'd put up with the large numbers of downloads (and the associated bandwidth) of big projects like FileZilla, though.

If those projects are looking for a new home, we'd be happy to welcome them at GitHub.

From a quick look, SourceForge pushed out about 19TB of FileZilla bandwidth in the last 30 days in terms of binary downloads. I'm not sure any projects on GitHub are pushing that kind of bandwidth for binary downloads yet. Or are they?

In terms of PortableApps.com, I don't think we'd be a good fit for GitHub since we're a project that's a conglomeration of apps made portable (for USB and cloud use). I think we're around 90TB of bandwidth for downloads in the last month for our open source apps via SourceForge (some of our open source apps the publishers self-host like Inkscape and LibreOffice so we don't push those through our SourceForge project).

You can get 100TB/month for under €100 on Leaseweb. Couldn't you raise this in donations each month? I'm sure with your traffic it'd be possible.

I generally don't trust anything that sells 'unmetered' bandwidth as it nearly always ends in disaster. Their metered accounts seem to be 10TB for $95 which is about what we're paying for freeware downloads now (we can't host those on SourceForge, of course).

PortableApps.com on sourceforge reports they had 943799 downloads last month. Popular files include Firefox portable (20mb) and chrome portable (2mb). Assuming the average download is half way between those (10mb) you're looking at about 480,000 GB of downloads a year. If you store that on S3 you'll be looking at about $46,800 of bandwidth charges a year.

Surprisingly expensive business.

Quite true. The total is quite a bit higher as some popular apps like GIMP (136,000 downloads in the last month) are 64MB and July and August are our slowest months. Additionally, apps like Inkscape are hosted on their own SourceForge project and LibreOffice is hosted by The Document Foundation (not included in the above numbers). Then there's all the freeware we host elsewhere that doesn't show in the SourceForge stats (which we pay the bandwidth on). All told, I think we're easily exceeding a petabyte a year. I used to actually keep those stats, maybe I should look into it again.

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