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Incident with Github.com [resolved]

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Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#901

Post by jm4 »

Gigachad wrote: post #891
jm4 wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, in a nutshell, is why Github is the way it is and there's a lack of good alternatives. I'm not knocking you in particular because we're all pretty much in the same boat here. "I am willing to pay ~$5-10/mo for a reliable host... Need a repo with PRs and issues, where people can register free account and contribute or raise issues, GH actions CI, and pages host to deploy static sites." Who wants to build somethi…

It becomes worth it with scale. A VPS costs more than $5 but you can host a very large number of repos, a dormant repo takes no resources but disk space to host, its only activity that consumes resources, which is less than $5-$10 worth

Maybe. You would either have to buy and colocate physical servers and pack the hell of them or develop something on AWS or GCP that aggressively scales down to zero.

Anyway, how are you going to pay engineer salaries and 24/7 support staff on a $5-10/mo product? Not to mention, you'd be hosting someone's critical infrastructure so they will have a meltdown when you inevitably make a mistake. How long are you willing to burn money before you've reached a scale where it's profitable?

It's paradoxical how all the money in tech goes to the most useless things that are a net drain on society (social media, ad tech, etc.) and we're willing to pay less for the most important things than we would for a cup of coffee.

At the prices people are willing to pay for SCM, it really has to be a complement to some other product you're offering or part of an integrated suite. It's most likely a dead end on its own.

I guess you could do it... but why? There are a thousand ways to make more money with fewer headaches. I wouldn't get into this business myself and I wouldn't fund someone else either.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#902

Post by mitchjj »

maccard wrote: post #817
mitchjj wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth being upfront with, I'm an employee, but; Buildkite. Frontier labs and global saas heavyweights run CI through us, plus a crop of open source tooling like Bazel, vLLM, Firecracker, Rails, Ray, Sorbet and Rust. Shopify, Uber, Airbnb, Canva stresstested the platform ten years ago for scaling issues. You need to take a little time to design upfront and take advantage of dynamically programmable primitives. It isn'…

I want to second build kite - it’s an excellent piece of tech and is best described as “sane Jenkins” as a compliment. My only gripe is the pricing - it’s not designed for “small teams”. But I’d use it again in a heartbeat.

This week we've released a free plan and overhauled the mid-tier; am keen to hear whether this alleviates the 'small team' pain against others in market

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#903

Post by jm4 »

jubilanti wrote: post #894
jm4 wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, in a nutshell, is why Github is the way it is and there's a lack of good alternatives. I'm not knocking you in particular because we're all pretty much in the same boat here. "I am willing to pay ~$5-10/mo for a reliable host... Need a repo with PRs and issues, where people can register free account and contribute or raise issues, GH actions CI, and pages host to deploy static sites." Who wants to build somethi…

Good points. I guess I keep just wanting 'you are the product' / enshitification / free tier capture to not be the dominant business model of our time. You're right that a YC VC would likely not funds this. There are many alternative business models though. (edit: https://sourcehut.org seems promising if very barebones and oldschool) > The best parts of Github that make it worth using in the first place all come down…

Same. Currently, I'm spending $10/mo on a VPS from OVH to host Forgejo. I have hourly backups to an rsync.net account I was already paying for. It's not the most efficient way to do things, but Forgejo is actually pretty nice and I have data sovereignty.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#904

Post by jm4 »

chillfox wrote: post #897
jm4 wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, in a nutshell, is why Github is the way it is and there's a lack of good alternatives. I'm not knocking you in particular because we're all pretty much in the same boat here. "I am willing to pay ~$5-10/mo for a reliable host... Need a repo with PRs and issues, where people can register free account and contribute or raise issues, GH actions CI, and pages host to deploy static sites." Who wants to build somethi…

You can absolutely build a solution that works for that range, you just have to pick your tech stack for efficiency and not rapid development. CI will be the tricky one, but I am pretty sure it can work if you keep the limits low, or price it based on usage.

Why not do it then? Seems you would have plenty of customers judging by this thread and the others today asking about alternatives.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#905

Post by Gigachad »

jm4 wrote: post #901
Gigachad wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It becomes worth it with scale. A VPS costs more than $5 but you can host a very large number of repos, a dormant repo takes no resources but disk space to host, its only activity that consumes resources, which is less than $5-$10 worth

Maybe. You would either have to buy and colocate physical servers and pack the hell of them or develop something on AWS or GCP that aggressively scales down to zero. Anyway, how are you going to pay engineer salaries and 24/7 support staff on a $5-10/mo product? Not to mention, you'd be hosting someone's critical infrastructure so they will have a meltdown when you inevitably make a mistake. How long are you willing…

All of the git hosting providers offer repo hosting for literally free. $10/month is easily enough to host a repo.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#906

Post by tarxvf »

philippta wrote: post #711

The most shocking thing to me about the entire GitHub fiasco is: No matter how bad the uptime is, no matter how bad the UI is. We will keep using the software / service we depend on. Why do we as software engineers have set fault tolerance and high availability as the primary goal of any software / infrastructure architecture? This shows it's completely irrelevant.

What? No. The people that stay are the ones that don't care, that doesn't mean no one cares. That's a selection effect.

The people that care left months or years ago. I'm one of them. It was really easy, Github doesn't offer anything special.

Try and run a Pagerduty with the same level of attention to detail as Github. Far fewer people use Pagerduty casually. That Github has casual users and lazy users does not mean fault tolerance and high availability are 'completely irrelevant'.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#907

Post by nish__ »

philipov wrote: post #899
figassis wrote: post #881

I think this is the curse of scale, but also of pseudo-leaders who think leadership is "pushing engineering to rapid-fire features for number go up." You tell engineers and engineering leaders to "just add this one feature, it's really important, what's the ETA? No, that's too late, the market will have moved on, this is existential, you're a bottleneck," fire, hire, fire, hire. Meanwhile the CEO feels great, because…

Which company is capitalizing on GitHub's lack of leadership?

Amazon. I fired up a vps to replace GitHub.

Re: Incident with Github.com [resolved]

#910

Post by jm4 »

Gigachad wrote: post #905
jm4 wrote: post #901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. You would either have to buy and colocate physical servers and pack the hell of them or develop something on AWS or GCP that aggressively scales down to zero. Anyway, how are you going to pay engineer salaries and 24/7 support staff on a $5-10/mo product? Not to mention, you'd be hosting someone's critical infrastructure so they will have a meltdown when you inevitably make a mistake. How long are you willing…

All of the git hosting providers offer repo hosting for literally free. $10/month is easily enough to host a repo.

I can assure you that they are not hosting for free because the cost is zero and goodwill pays the bills. Read the TOS and privacy policy. If they’re not monetizing the data in their custody then it’s just more overhead that has to be covered by paying customers, which makes the business even more difficult.

Yes, you can host a repository for less than $10, but that’s not the question, is it? Can you host it cheaply enough that a customer paying $10 is a viable and worthwhile business? Can you do it for $5 all in with infrastructure, staff, and general and administrative costs? You won’t have much for a marketing budget so you’ll have to offer those free accounts with some features for viral network growth. Oh, and you’ll have to offer better uptime than GitHub. Still sound like a good idea?

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