
GitHub: More Disk Space for All - arthurk
http://github.com/blog/353-more-disk-space-for-all
======
swombat
I wonder if Github's ultimate plan is to make money from something other than
charging for storage.

After all in the long run, while charging for storage is immediately
profitable (and so a good way to sustain the business), there may be a bigger
pie hidden a little further once you reach a critical mass of users...

Then it would make sense to charge as little as possible, to increase usage
until you reach that critical mass.

I can't quite figure out what the bigger pie is for Github - but then I
haven't spent that much time thinking about it. Anyone got some ideas?

~~~
pjhyett
Next up for GitHub is seeing how big the pie will be for our upcoming Firewall
Install product, allowing companies to install their own copy of the site for
internal use.

~~~
swombat
Sounds like a great idea (and definitely a huge pie), but enterprise sales can
be very tricky. Good luck breaking in! May you forever doom the Visual Source
Safes and ClearCases of that world to oblivion :-) They truly deserve it.

On the good side, you should be able to price very competitively, and these
days, everyone will be looking to cut costs.

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davepeck
A great improvement, and I love my GitHub free account!

But I still can't justify using GitHub for my private source code. I've been
coding for quite some time; my personal repository (along with related assets
like images and sounds) consumes 1.7GB.

To hold that much data at GitHub, I'd have to purchase a Medium account at
$22/month. But it only costs 36 _cents_ per month to host my source code with
jgit and Amazon S3!

Granted, GitHub has a lot of great features, but that's a pretty big gap for
me.

~~~
swombat
Imho, you shouldn't be storing images and sounds on your SCM... that's not
really what it's for. We store most of those externally, in a non-version-
controlled environment. That really greatly reduces the space requirements
(like, by a factor of 20). It also makes it much quicker to clone the repo on
a new machine.

~~~
davepeck
That is hard to stomach. If you're writing, for example, a game and said game
has custom interface graphics, you certainly want to version those graphics
along with you code. If you don't, it will be difficult to roll back to a
working (and visually correct) past build.

If git is slow when I use it manage lots of binary content, that sounds to me
like a problem with git rather than a problem with my workflow.

And, FWIW, git isn't too bad for managing all my data since I've broken my
work into many repositories.

~~~
swombat
Oh, git isn't slow when storing binary data on it.. it's slower to clone
(because you have to download all that data again), but not to use.

However, unless you _are_ building a game or something like that, storing
binaries on git will really bloat your repo so it's worth avoiding it if
reasonable.

If it's assets that you do need to revert to, fair enough. But there are many
"compiled" binaries that don't really need to be in the VCS, imho... and if
you can err on the side of including too few binaries, you'll save a lot of
space.

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grandalf
Strange, none of my projects remotely approach the old limits. Maybe this is
to attract bigger projects such as linux, xorg, gnome, etc.

~~~
timf
They do say that the 300MB is a soft limit to prevent abuse and that open
source projects needing more should get in touch.

And with the projects you mention, I'd take a guess that they are actively
trying to woo them because of the publicity it would get.

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pclark
best comment: "So now I can stop being DRY?"

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jcapote
awesome, the end is nearer everyday for sourceforge and the like...

~~~
sevib
I would not agree on that, it seems to me that github is used differently than
sourceforge or the like. The vast majority of github repos is ruby and
javascript of which the majority is most likely rails related. Lots of people
also use it to host their private scripts and little tools, you don't have
that on sourceforge where most of the big opensource apps are hosted. Maybe
Rubyforge will suffer. Anyway, I like github a lot and appreciate the upgrade,
but I don't think it will overshadow sourceforge anytime soon.

~~~
vicaya
Hard core projects like Thrift and Hypertable are hosted on GitHub as well.
GitHub makes code sharing/review much easier than before.

Sourceforge is mostly a place for people to upload/download a tarball or
something. There is little reason to host a repo there.

