Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if op doesn't want to pay for private repositories to store his hackywhackys or wants to share them with others?
Bitbucket lets you have free private repositories. That's where i'm storing my dirty laundry at least...
$ mkdir project_name.git; cd project_name.git; git init --bare
Then locally, from the repo directory:
$ git remote add origin username@server.com:~/path/to/project_name.git
That's what I do (on Webfaction). Of course, then you don't get all the fancy issue tracking and all that from github, but it works if all you need is a few kb of storage for a remote. That also makes it easy to deploy PHP projects with a single post-receive hook, since it's all in the same box.