Github Reliability

I have been using Github for work for the last couple of years. I have noticed that their service has been getting less and less reliable throughout the years. They are the leader when it comes to Git hosting. So it’s hard just to turn them off completely at this point. Plus I am using it at work so I don’t have much say in moving off of it. It’s sad to see it as overall their feature set is really good. They have been very innovative throughout the years. I have been very impressed by their pull request feature and many more. I have also been impressed by how easy they make Git. Saying that they have their own set of issues you have to deal with on a monthly basis. I have noticed more and more that they go down often.

It seems that at least once a month Github will go down for a small time period. This can range from a couple of minutes up to ten or so minutes. It’s never hours of downtime. They seem to respond to the issue fast and get it fixed. I feel that most downtime can be avoidable or should be worked at so it is avoidable. We don’t see Google services go down once a month. In the last couple of years I haven’t seen any Google services  I use to down at all even. Yes in the technology world unexpected things happen from time to time but it shouldn’t be every month. I think Github has forced us to at least think about other hosting providers.

One name that comes to mind is bitbucket. It seems that their feature set is also very rich but they may not have as many downtime issues as Github. I have never used their service but it seems to be gaining in popularity. I really hope to see Github be able to get it together but if not companies are going to have to start thinking about using other Git hosting solutions. It’s also possible to roll your own Git server but of course you won’t get all the rich features of these service platforms.

To be clear right now the best Git hosting service is Github. Even if it goes down a couple times a month. The intention of this post wasn’t to bash Github. I do feel they work hard to keep their service up. I just feel that some of their downtime could be avoided. That is of course without knowing their infrastructure.

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