Ciro Santilli raised some very interesting questions the other day on a GitHub issue, and I'd like to recap them here.

His question basically boiled down to: "Why choose GitHost over GitLab.com's free offering" and here is my answer.

GitHost is different from GitLab.com in several ways. First, you are hosting your repos on private instances with GitHost, whereas on GitLab.com you're in a shared environment. That may not be an issue to some people, but others feel safer knowing their code isn't sitting next to others. On that note, another upside to private instances is, if GitLab.com were to become the target of a break in, even if the end result was to get someone else's code, your code could potentially be leaked also. Most businesses don't want to take that risk.

GitHost handles upgrading and monitoring your instances for you also, just like GitLab.com does. One of the main takeaways from GitHost is that you can also have your repos and data backed up to amazon for free, to your own amazon account. This leaves you in control of your data, free to move it to any GitLab instance you'd like.

One last note about GitLab.com's free offering. If they continue to grow, and ever reach GitHub scale, the unlimited users, unlimited private repos for free model isn't going to scale. Eventually the infrastructure and maintenance costs of offering that service for free isn't going to scale or be an economical option to get exposure for GitLab.

With that said, I love GitLab. I've contributed code to their open source projects, I built and maintained DigitalOcean's one click GitLab image during my time there, and I've spoken with Sytse (GitLab B.V CEO) about GitHost and it's future. Sytse is a great guy, and fully supports GitHost because it means more exposure for their enterprise offerings.

GitLab is wonderful, and is helping to decentralize our community's reliance on the monopolies like GitHub which are quickly getting shaky track records both in terms of uptime and moral issues.

GitHost is a bootstrapped startup. We have no outside funding and running costs are very minimal at this point. This leaves us in a position to grow and fine tune the product without rushing to market and gain new users because we have massive bills to pay. One of the biggest pain points of hosting your own GitLab repo is that you have to handle upgrades and security releases yourself, and it's sometimes a time consuming procedure. GitHost abstracts all of that away from the users. We handle the upgrades and security fixes. We handle uptime monitoring and server health checks, and we support our users anytime day or night. We also handle automatic nightly backups to Amazon. All of this combined makes maintaining your GitLab install effortless and transparent, it's all taken care of, for a minimal monthly cost. If your main objective is to work on code, or support your business then it's a no brainer. Let us handle everything, and you can focus on doing what you do best, shipping code.

GitLab.com is great, and if you don't have business constraints or are just looking to host personal side projects then it's a great option, I even have an account there.

GitHost is for professionals and businesses that want the peace of mind of dedicated repo hosting, monitored uptime, and a business model that can scale because it's not freemium.

If you have any questions feel free to email [email protected]