fooforge

I believe they have since improved in this area, but it was clear that while GitHub itself offers an extremely available service, GHE is severely lacking in this respect.

That is correct. On earlier versions of GitHub Enterprise backing up data was quite a hassle. For a consistent (repository) backup taken on the VM level you didn't have to shut it down, but you've had to switch the appliance into maintenance mode, effectively preventing people from getting things done. This isn't the case anymore though as we've shipped new backup utilities [1] and support for HA setups with the 2.0.0 major release [2] some time ago.

[1] https://github.com/github/backup-utils

[2] https://enterprise.github.com/releases/2.0.0

Actually, things are running pretty smooth for months now - see for yourself at: https://status.github.com/graphs/past_month. If that's not your experience, you can reach out to support@github.com and we'll look into it.