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I did move to a self-hosted git server (http://git.devlinzed.com) for a number of reasons. This is one, but the server: costs less to run than the smallest paid GitHub account; supports unlimited private repositories at sizes up to 20GB; has never ever went down; is considerably faster (due to geography and SSD); and doesn't allow GitHub to harvest information about who (including myself) is using my code.

Realistically, whether you're offended by GitHub's sexism or data collection policies or not, it doesn't make any sense to use them strictly from a pragmatic cost-to-benefit perspective. They simply charge far too much for far too little.



I think one big redeeming factor for GitHub is the extensive and robust API. It's very easy to hack together a custom version controlled app or system using GitHub as the backend.


It's true that GitHub has a great API, but when you run your own server and have access to the running software and file system you get the best API for working on git repos there is: git. Or perhaps libgit2 and your favourite language's bindings.

Subjectively, I haven't found GitHub's API to be great to work with, but this is because they use OAuth and OAuth is just needlessly complicated and inconvenient.


I wonder if the fact that there are no ads on the GitHub site is part of the problem.




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