Comment by sho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sho | Hacker News Reader

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Actually, the site at the top of the thread is free: tobytripp.github.com. You only have to pay if you want the CNAME support, as you suggest, but this example is not of that. So I suppose it adds value to the free subscription, yeah.

But .. is it really worth diluting the brand, and diverting the team's attention? I have seen personal articles on a username.github.com blog which have nothing to do with code. Someone seeing the site via one of these avenues for the first time would come away with the impression github is a free blog provider. And, amongst other things, they are!

And what happens when people start, saying, hosting large media files? It might not have happened yet but it will. Then one of them gets slashdotted, the site slows to a crawl, and the team's running around putting out fires caused by some free service which doesn't have anything to do with version control, just "adds value" to having an account on that site.

Well, I guess they've thought all this through and decided it's in their interests. I was just surprised, is all.

GitHub Pages is for hosting documentation: http://defunkt.github.com/ambition/

Sourceforge and Rubyforge both provide similar services. This is nothing new.

It's also for hosting static blogs: http://tom.preston-werner.com/

It's also for hosting personal sites: http://defunkt.github.com/

I love seeing creative uses of Pages. If we spent all our time worrying "what if," we wouldn't have a brand to dilute nor a team's attention to divert.

And what happens when people start, saying, hosting large media files?

There is a size limit. But unless Github is hosted off of someone's DSL line, this is probably nothing to worry about.

The size limit is 300M. You might be surprised what a 50M file being downloaded a few thousand times in quick succession can do to even a 100Mb link.

These downvotes for sho seem to be done more along the lines of "let's downvote the heretic who doesn't love github" than actually being related to the arguments made. IMHO.

If I end up with a minus five too, I guess I was right :P

It's because the original comment only complained about Github, without adding to the discussion of the link.

The other Github bashing didn't even make sense. Github offering personal websites doesn't expose them to any more risk of bandwidth issues. Someone can already make a public repository full of 50MB files that can be downloaded by anyone. Having a lightweight interface that lets you display HTML files in your repository doesn't change that.

It didn't complain about github. It raised an interesting discussion about github's business model. But you're right: it was not adding to the discussion of the link.

No it's for sho making a poor assumption: that github's directly running the site (e.g. by its own employees) instead of a github user running the site.

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