Why the World Needs Another Git Repository Hosting Service

by ayushsood • 14 years ago

40 46 14 years ago

debacle• 14 years ago

Your price points are all wrong. No one cares about the difference between $3 and $6. In 2012 dollars, we're talking penny candy.

A single price point would be less confusing, but I don't really understand the appeal. Anyone who doesn't trust github and/or needs that level of secrecy will be willing to shell out the $10 a month for a dedicated instance that they can install git on themselves.

In short, I don't think you can be competitive with github because I think the frictional market you're trying to target doesn't exist in the capacity that you would like to think it does.

zxypoo• 14 years ago

Have they heard of Bitbucket? Gitoroius?

Gitblit? http://gitblit.com/

dchuk• 14 years ago

Um: https://bitbucket.org

Not necessarily a reason to avoid the niche, but the reasons you listed to enter aren't very good (namely, too expensive for lots of small projects) as BitBucket solves that problem.

Never ever ever ever compete on price.

bjxrn• 14 years ago

This is a weird article that pretends that Github is the only git hosting service that exists. Bitbucket would probably suit their stated needs.

w33ble• 14 years ago

That's exactly what I thought. 2 paragraphs in I was expecting a Bitbucket mention and a reason why it didn't work for them and found none. Search the page and there's no mention of it at all. Then I wrote the article off as an uninformed rant.

Toshio• 14 years ago

Last time I looked gitorious.org was also a nice option.

di• 14 years ago

Github offers free educational accounts to students with *.edu addresses:

https://github.com/edu

mtgx• 14 years ago

Hopefully one that isn't based in US and can avoid being targeted by frivolous patent lawsuits.

kcbanner• 14 years ago

1. Rent server 2. Host git repos

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

3. Maintain server

I'll gladly pay a reasonable fee for hosted services so I don't have to worry about such things.

sunkencity• 14 years ago

4. put repos in dropbox folder

(5. have repo world readable when security fails)

Apreche• 14 years ago

2a. https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite

encoderer2• 14 years ago

1. As others have said: BitBucket.com. Every time these guys are on here promoting this service they act like they've never heard of it. But they're in this space? Doesn't make sense.

2. I don't know how good I feel trusting my source code to a sorta-startup run by a small group of fulltime students. I don't think you should quit school to run this startup, but I do think this is an awfully serious service to try to offer in your spare time.

Yes, it's a developers job to ensure that he has backups -- and Git repos lend themselves to this very well. But that doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to treat your user's code as if they have no other copies and no other backups.

3. Your post about why the world needs another Git hosting service just explains why you think Github isn't the right fit. It doesn't really make your case.

4. When you're talking to engineers and you write this big setup paragraph about how much work it was just to share a git repo, and all of us are familiar with the myriad of hosting options, it just makes you look like you either don't know about your competition or you're hoping we don't. Not an effective strategy.

5. Github will give free repo's to students. And if you're not a student and you want a private repo paying a small amount for it is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a good thing. My code is valuable to me. I want to pay you a fair sum for a fair service.

I don't think you should quit what you're doing if you're having fun, learning, and believe in your idea. But GitHub is a huge brand with a ton of goodwill from the community. BitBucket is own by Atlassian which generally makes great things. Both have fantastic GUI's for Windows & Mac and great websites. So far I haven't heard anything that differentiates you. Don't treat me like I'm dumb, just show me why you're better.

mey• 14 years ago

https://bitbucket.org/ not .com

ayushsood2• 14 years ago

1) We are aware of BitBucket; it's a great service, but it limits us on the number of collaborators we can have, thereby stifling productive group work. As college students, we're always collaborating, be it for assignments or our own side-projects, and BitBucket doesn't make sense for this.

2) Yes, we are college students, and I'm sorry you feel that college students can't be trusted, but I urge you to reconsider this opinion. Its not fair to apply such a generalization to all students.

3) We chose to address the primary service that we ourselves used for private repositories before Legit Teams. We understand that there are a myriad of services available for git hosting, but we are unable to address them all in one post; we limited the scope of the article so we could get our point across succinctly.

4) I think there is a slight misunderstanding here. When we described setting up git hosting, we meant on our own servers and not using a third party hosting platform. These paragraphs were simply laying the groundwork for why we created Legit Teams—they were the context.

5) We are aware of this; they offer a free micro-plan to students and educational institutions. This, however, still limits us to five private repositories. The whole point of Legit Teams is to get rid of limits on repositories and collaboration, which we feel are large pain points when developing with others.

encoderer2• 14 years ago

It's not that I feel (or said) that "college students can't be trusted." But I don't want to have to worry about changing my project hosting if you guys decide to call it quits. I add webhooks, hard-code remote URLs into automation scripts, etc. I think you have a barrier of seriousness and longevity to overcome before I'd "invest" my time on your platform. And yes, I think it's a little higher because you're still students.

You could probably overcome that by going the balsamiq route and showing a consistently growing, profitable business. It's not an accident that it's normal to announce funding rounds in a press release: being able to associate yourselves with either massive profits or trusted brand name investors gives you credibility that being a couple guys with a good looking landing page doesn't.

I hope you take this all in a constructive way and know that I, and most other people in our industry, applaud you for shipping.

cmclaughlin• 14 years ago

> 1) We are aware of BitBucket; it's a great service, but it limits us on the

> number of collaborators we can have, thereby stifling productive group work.

> As college students, we're always collaborating, be it for assignments or our

> own side-projects, and BitBucket doesn't make sense for this.

Bitbucket provides free, unlimited hosting for students. There's no limit on the number of collaborators. All you have to do is validate your university email address and you'll go from 5 users for free to the unlimited educational plan.

glavata• 14 years ago

http://assembla.com - Free private repo (svn/git) with ability to add many users.

unnu• 14 years ago

You should always ask yourself, why the code you are going to write should not be open source? It's only true for paid projects and may startup prototypes. Paid projects should be not problem because they are paid. That leaves the startup ideas.

mdip• 14 years ago

I'll take a stab at this since I signed up for bitbucket after reading the comments:

I have a lot of code. A LOT. It's mostly random things around data to make tracking things in my life easier (diet being the most recent one). And most of the code is crap in two ways: (1) I'd never want to be associated with it in a public sense and (2) It's so specialized to my life that it's unlikely that anyone would use it or contribute to it. Sure, there might be a few hundred people in the world that could find it useful, but those few hundred are unlikely to happen upon my kludged-up solution, and if they are, I'd feel badly when it doesn't work for them the way it works for me due to my personal configuration being hard coded throughout.

jakebellacera• 14 years ago

I want my code stored in a safe place that sees regular backups in case of disk failure, or I'd throw it on my own VPS. Your service's website does not provide any information addressing security.

zimbatm• 14 years ago

And if you want to host it yourself, these look like promising competitors: http://gitlabhq.com/

aliukani• 14 years ago

I set this up at my university to see if it would be a good solution for school-related project hosting. Haven't rolled out (yet), but as you said it's very promising.

mlitwiniuk• 14 years ago

Gitlab team is making great software - basicaly they've copied what's best in Github and released it to the world allowing you to set up your own git hosting service (accessible only by your team). In my opinion it's great piece of software as long, as you don't want to share your code with anyone out there (beside your teammates). Ergo - it's better imo for students, as long, as they have machine that will be able to host it (VPS basically).

juddlyon• 14 years ago

Beanstalk and Deploy are both nice as well. I've used Beanstalk extensively and love it.

- http://beanstalkapp.com/

- http://www.deployhq.com/

ericcholis• 14 years ago

I've been using DeployHQ to manage simple deployments from git. So easy to setup!

sonier• 14 years ago

Many mentioned bitbucket.org, I use their service everyday and love it. They have free unlimited repos for students: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2011/04/01/free-unlimited-user-sou...

I host all my private work with them and have never had a problem.

azernik• 14 years ago

If you really want to pay only for the I/O you're using, just spin up an EC2 instance and install GitLab (http://gitlabhq.com/).

runako• 14 years ago

Wouldn't you then be paying for the EC2 instance's idle time in addition to the I/O you're using?

dangrossman• 14 years ago

I use http://repositoryhosting.com/ for $6 per month.

* Unlimited repositories

* Unlimited users

* Web interface / Trac / WebDAV, SSL everywhere

* Responsive support

* Automatic scheduled backups to Amazon S3

brunomiranda• 14 years ago

See https://codeplane.com/ for a good inexpensive alternative.

coliveira• 14 years ago

I think the more competition in this space, the better. No reason why I would want github to be the only game in town.

timjahn• 14 years ago

For the segment of people you're targeting, there is very little difference between $3 and $6 a month, let alone $3, $4, $5, and $6 a month. We're talking portions of a Starbucks coffee here.

I'd focus on why you're different than the (already loved and highly used) existing options out there. Then I'd think about revamping the pricing to have each plan be more differentiated.

fakeer• 14 years ago

Please don't get me wrong but whether the line below line in pricing was meant to be a cute funny one liner? 1MB, really?

Simple Free 1 MB

akurilin• 14 years ago

If your team is small enough then BitBucket is a great option for closed-source projects. The only difference is the lack of GitHub's interface and neat features like graphs. I wasn't too impressed with the code-review features for pull requests, but I don't remember GitHub being significantly better either.

tylerhowarth• 14 years ago

When I was in College (just graduated a few months ago), GitHub applied a $7 coupon to my account, which covers a micro account. All I did was ask about student pricing. They should probably offer an educational discount with .edu email verification.

roothacker• 14 years ago

A totally different way to think about this post, is that the guy who has posted this post is a bitbucket fan or a clever promoter, so he has listed every point that makes BitBucket differ from Github and is the reason, why it is loved by a lot of guys out there.

If I am correct in my guess, then I really think its a great marketing strategy, and if not then BitBucket guys should really think of marketing in this way.

zmjones• 14 years ago

You know github gives free private repositories to students right?

kidh0• 14 years ago

Come on, there are many options in the market that suits well in every mentioned need, just to point, http://www.codeplane.com just right the same thing.

Ok, you can create a new service, but you shouldn't act like you're the only one around that do what you do.

csense• 14 years ago

If you want private repo hosting on the cheap, I would suggest using Gitolite [1] on a VPS [2].

The current version includes self-service key management, regular users are able to create repos in their own namespace, and easy forking of repositories. It's extensible, you can write your own commands in any language.

Granted, it has minuses. It only has a command line interface (no GUI), requires a little setup and editing of configuration files and reading of docs.

[1] https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite

[2] http://prgmr.com/

jessedhillon• 14 years ago

I would imagine that these guys are very sad and depressed right now, given all the harsh -- and correct -- feedback that they've gotten here. I'll try to add something different:

The various competitors in this space compete apparently on public/private visibility, price, storage quotas, and user+repo counts. If you compete on these dimensions you will have a very difficult time differentiating yourself -- there simply is not enough difference between one repo provider and another on these bases to matter. Cost of switching, I would imagine, is relatively easy -- `git remote add`, `git push`, and done?

There is also, perhaps, competition on UI/UX quality. This can be a differentiating factor for some, but I think not as strong as it is for other markets, given the strong technical background of the target market. If you had some original and compelling offer which had a poorer but workable UI (which improved rapidly over time), that could negate the advantage that e.g. Github has over you on interface.

I don't have any better ideas for this space -- the generic advice for you I would give is to innovate in some different, not-already-explored way. Can you provide something completely different from more users, more repos, more storage, lower price?

ayushsood2• 14 years ago

We are not sad; we realize this service is not meant for everyone and we understand that we'll receive criticism. In doing so, we hope to better Legit Teams.

We don't view this as a business that's going to make us millions of dollars so much as a product that we'd love for both us and others to use. It solves an issue we were experiencing and, at the least, we'll use our own service proudly.

Your points about competing on other dimensions do make sense, but as you seem to imply yourself, it is hard to find exactly what those other dimensions are. We're searching for this ourselves, but based on feedback we've received from our friends, this is at least a preliminary service that they'd like to use. We plan to iterate from here.

oz• 14 years ago

So why should we be paying approximately $1/repository when we don’t need all the open-source-focused features? And why does it make sense to pay per repository when the real cost is in space and IO? Our whole set of repositories probably aren’t more than 500 MB. And 500 MB, at current prices, costs merely a few cents. IO, in like manner, is negligible; we only push our repositories to the server once in a while. So why $10 or $20 a month?

If you EVER take one thing away from HN, 'tis this: NEVER compete on price. It is a race to the bottom. There will always be someone willing to provide the service for less than you. Just don't do it.

OnesAndZeros• 14 years ago

Congrats I say! But, there is no difference between 3 and 6 dollars per month. Simply just put it at 5 for 2000MB knowing that not everyone will use all 2000. Keep things simple. You also need to tell me a bit more about your data recovery plans etc and possibly where its hosted, AWS might add some weight.

Why the World Needs Another Git Repository Hosting Service

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