
Git-scm.com status report - cnst
http://marc.info/?l=git&m=148600283715424&w=2
======
dom0

        > We (the Git project) got control of the git-scm.com domain this year. We
        > have never really had an "official" website, but I think a lot of people
        > consider this to be one.
    

So, uh, git-scm.com _wasn 't_ an official website all these years?

~~~
carussell
It was set up and run by GitHubbers for advocacy/evangelism.

~~~
niftich
Maybe so, but since git-scm.com's 2012-05-05 redesign [1], the professional
visual design, the new footer, the internally-hosted download pages, and the
verbiage has no longer given the impression of an "unofficial" site. Compare
with the old design used until 2012-05-04 [2].

(edit: static screenshots at
[http://imgur.com/a/OCjxY](http://imgur.com/a/OCjxY))

[1] [http://web.archive.org/web/20120505190309/http://git-
scm.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120505190309/http://git-scm.com/) [2]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20120504151545/http://www.git-
scm...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120504151545/http://www.git-scm.com/)

\----

more goodies:

first commit of new design: [https://github.com/schacon/git-
scm/commit/3bcc818433c6ae94dc...](https://github.com/schacon/git-
scm/commit/3bcc818433c6ae94dc5c7515e70fb5c01a4ab34d)

some design work for git-scm.com:
[https://dribbble.com/jasonlong/projects/40112-Git-Site-
Redes...](https://dribbble.com/jasonlong/projects/40112-Git-Site-Redesign)

~~~
carussell
I was going to bring it up in my original comment, but felt that it might come
off as too negative: GitHub has made out handsomely by unsuspecting folks
conflating Git and GitHub. So it's not really surprising. More _expected_.

~~~
gumby
Indeed, the other day I mentioned we'd moved our code into git (from, yuck,
perforce) and my girlfriend said, "oh, GitHub."

~~~
bshimmin
It's like "hash" and "hashtag" all over again. _sobs_

~~~
gumby
Fight back: call them "Sharp designators" (or if you're a splittist, "pound
marker"

~~~
crottypeter
No, please.

the pound is £

# this really _is_ hash ;)

~~~
gumby
Splittist! The People's Liberation Front of Lingustics fundamentally condemns
you members of the Linguistic People's Liberation Front!

------
joeblau
This is very interesting. I run
[https://www.gitignore.io](https://www.gitignore.io) and this post highlights
a lot of interesting things about git-scm.

1\. GitHub is footing the bill — I'm paying for gitignore.io (although it's
only costing me the annual domain)

2\. The site uses 3 Dynos — Currently gitignore.io uses 1 Dyno on the free
tier and I've recently moved the backend from Node to Swift to double / triple
network performance based on my preliminary testing. I don't know why the site
needs 3 Dynos because like the OP mentioned, it's a static site. I also use
Cloudflare as a CDN which could dramatically improve git-scm's caching layer.
It's not that helpful for me as most of my requests are dynamically created,
but for a static site, it would drastically reduce Dyno traffic.

3\. Access to Heroku seems to be an issue — I ran into the same problem and
I'm finishing up a full continuous integration process to build and test my
site on Travis. I basically want to approve a pull request and have the site
fully tested though my Heroku pipeline, then have the PR landed in production.

4\. Traffic - I don't know how many users he's got but I'm seeing about 60,000
MAU's and about 750,000 requests a month.

* Jason Long helped design my site and logo as well.

~~~
omnibrain
Your site doesn't work for me. It doesn't matter what I enter, (I tried
Delphi, C#, Visual Basic, Windows) I only get "No result found". Also your
Tutorial Video doesn't match your current design. The colour scheme is off and
instead of a "Generate" dropdown button there is a plain "Create" Button.

I'm on Chrome Version 55.0.2883.87 m on Windows. I turned of uBlock Origin for
your site.

~~~
joeblau
You may be experiencing some caching problems. Also around the time you
checked I was in the middle of pushing the swift site to Heroku so that may
have introduced some issues as well. The new site has a "Create" button with
no drop down — Can you please re-try
[https://www.gitignore.io/](https://www.gitignore.io/).

~~~
omnibrain
OK, I tried it at home. Another PC, another Provider, Chrome Version
56.0.2924.87, no uBlock, I even tried it in Inkognito Mode. The result is the
same. [https://imgur.com/a/Bo4Kq](https://imgur.com/a/Bo4Kq)

------
vlucas
I am always amazed at how quickly Heroku gets prohibitively expensive when you
start scaling.

When I ran [https://jscompress.com/](https://jscompress.com/) on Heroku, I was
up to $100 per month for 2 2x Dynos. Completely absurd for a simple one-page
Node.js app. I put in a little work moving it to DigitalOcean, and had it
running great (and faster) on a $10 VPS.

I get the appeal of Heroku (I have used it several times), but man sometimes
it feels like gouging when you can least afford it.

~~~
nine_k
Heroku is like a cradle: it gives you instant comfort and feeds you all you
need without effort when you're newborn. But when you're ready to start
walking by yourself, it definitely will strand you.

------
heironimus
Conservatively, the people in this conversation make $5 million per year
total, the software (git) contributes billions, and we are discussing how to
better allocate $230 per month. Open source economics is fascinating.

~~~
saurik
If you think about it in terms of hourly contracting rate, the opportunity
cost of participating in this conversation could easily cost more than $230.

------
toomanybeersies
Speaking of popular software that doesn't have its own website, the PuTTY
developers have never bothered with getting a domain name specifically for
PuTTY
([http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/](http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/)).
I'm not actually entirely sure what the rest of the site/domain is meant to be
for either.

~~~
cbcoutinho
FWIW: PuTTY does have a webpage
([http://www.putty.org/](http://www.putty.org/)), but it just redirects the
download link to the site you mentioned

~~~
IsmaOlvey
putty.org is not affiliated with the PuTTY project. The domain is registered
by one of the founders of bitvise, which explains the advertising for their
products on the site.

------
bicknergseng
I wonder how hard it would be to convince folks to drop their expensive setups
in favor of nearly $0 static sites, as well as how much up front cost they'd
be willing to shovel out for the transition. S3 + CDN (+ Lambdas optionally)
feels really ready to me for almost any straightforward "website." For most
things GitHub/Lab pages is an easy path to that.

~~~
frozenport
A lot of folks who have static websites aren't technical and invested
thousands of dollars for a WP website. If their site already runs, you
wouldn't be providing anything.

~~~
nine_k
...unless they have to pay noticeable money for WP hosting due to serious
load, or were bitten by security problems.

A free business idea: write a converter from WP to Jekyll (or Hugo) that
converts 95% of a typical WP site right, sell total conversion services, maybe
reselling hosting, too.

~~~
jlgaddis
I have several WordPress sites (mostly "abandoned"/no longer updated) that I
would love to convert to static sites. I would happily pay a decent sum for a
tool that could completely handle that conversion/migration.

~~~
F_r_k
Can't you just dump the website using wget ?

~~~
davidak
You can also use this but havn't testet it.

wget -N --recursive --page-requisites --html-extension --convert-links
[https://example.com/](https://example.com/)

------
OJFord
If it were my site, I think I wouldn't even bother with the search: just stick
it all on S3, and have one of those 'Google custom search' or similar boxes,
so it's static as far as your site's concerned, and just redirects to Google
with the `site:foo` filter.

I don't really have a handle on what S3 costs 'at scale', but I think I'm
willing to bet it would knock at least the 0 off the end.

~~~
lucb1e
Why bother with S3? I'd buy a Raspberry Pi, plug it in at home and call it a
day.

~~~
kondor6c
As much as I enjoy the Raspberry Pi, I doubt if it could handle the traffic or
if it would last long with the limited write cycles of an SDcard.

~~~
lucb1e
I know someone who optimized searching the leaked Adobe database (of a few
hundred gigabytes if I remember correctly) on a Pi to a sub-second search.
That was super impressive and the method used wasn't even obscure (binary
search). The same doesn't apply here, but I'm trying to say a Pi isn't
entirely worthless.

For example, what pages get accessed the most anyway? I'm guessing the latest
source code and maybe the latest release, though most people probably just
apt-get git instead so it's probably mostly the source code. Then there are
man pages and some other info pages, if I remember correctly. Sounds like the
latest release + 90% of those text pages can easily fit in RAM. So memcached?
Nah, the Linux kernel happily caches the files that you read from disk.

I don't know the actual numbers but it doesn't sound infeasible to me. A $230
hosting bill is very heavy though, I guess you'd need some serious fiber as
well to provide the uplink. But again, without numbers it's all "maybe" and
"probably".

~~~
superice
Yeah, that was my project, it worked quite nicely. However, the biggest reason
was that my Raspberry Pi was my only server at that point, and besides,
tranferring 10GB out of my home connection to a VPS would've been too slow for
my impatient self. I think the file was stripped of all other data (which
brought it down to about 4GB) and I put it on a thumb drive instead.

Nowadays I would have used a VPS for that. The point with S3 or any other
cloud solution is that they make sure you're up and running. Even though it
might still be useful, the need for good service monitoring is as good as gone
when moving to one of these cloud based platforms. And then I'm not even
taking into account the time you have to invest in setting up and configuring
a RPi properly vs just pushing a repo to Github Pages, or uploading a zip file
to S3.

Heroku or other cloud platforms can be crazy expensive, but for static file
hosting, S3 or Github Pages is more than enough and quite affordable.

------
sametmax
> It uses three 1GB Heroku dynos for scaling, which is $150/mo. It also uses
> some Heroku addons which add up to another $80/mo.

Wow, why ? You can get a VPS with 2Go Ram + 10 Go SSD for 3€ those days
([https://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/](https://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/)).

That seems very expensive.

~~~
Karunamon
Probably the tooling around Heroku and the scaling. If the site suddenly gets
more popular, you tweak a slider and suddenly you have more compute.

~~~
sametmax
For a static website you can easily live with 10000 users on this machine. But
lets say you need more, for 40 dollars you get 30Go of RAM and a 250 Mbps pipe
([https://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/vps-cloud-
ram.xml](https://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/vps-cloud-ram.xml)). To serve HTML pages
plus a bunch of css files that should be ok.

------
gsylvie
Some armchair speculation: the price Gitlab and Atlassian would pay to have
one link each up there would probably dwarf the current monthly hosting costs.

Not sure if the "try.github.io" link should count as a link to Github, but
most of the others do (e.g., github.com/google).

~~~
tacostakohashi
Further armchair speculation: you could extract more money from one of them
for having an "exclusive" link than you could from both of them having one
link each.

~~~
atmosx
Indeed. I'm having a hard understanding why Github, Gitlab or Attlasian didn't
jump already in requesting full ownership of the project. This is the clearly
the most important open source project to their core business.

~~~
Cogito
If you're not aware, many of the core contributors are employed by these
companies, or extensions are built internally at these companies and then
released opens source.

For example, the long time maintainer Junio works at Google and peff at
GitHub.

I think the current management of the project, by the Project Leadership
Committee, is working well and the project would gain little by coming under
the direct management of any single company.

~~~
ajdlinux
The project would lose a _lot_ by coming under the "management" of any one
company. I imagine several forks would quickly ensue.

------
mentat2737
Just a note:

> The deployed site is hosted on Heroku. It's part of GitHub's meta-account,
> and they pay the bills.

So why aren't they just using a GitHub page for this?

~~~
ameliaquining
GitHub Pages still doesn't support HTTPS on custom domains.

~~~
ezekg
Can't you use Cloudflare for HTTPS? I think it ends up being something like:

    
    
        User <-free SSL cert-> Cloudflare <-self-signed GH cert-> GitHub Pages
    

Obviously not ideal, but still possible.

------
hobarrera
IMHO, since it's a static website, they can use a static website generator and
simply usage something like GitLab pages to deploy it (for free).

There is a bit of work to be done, but it shouldn't be too terrible if the
templates and stuff are okay.

~~~
johncolanduoni
Or just throw a CDN with a decent cache lifetime in front of the Rails app and
scale the Heroku side way down if you don't want to go through the hastle of
changing anything. It's pretty much static after all.

~~~
msumpter
I was thinking the same thing after reviewing the repo and output HTML but I
wonder if that would really lower the monthly hosting costs for the Heroku
instance and the various addons. It would be simple to modify the RoR app to
output the proper caching headers that would allow any CDN to cache the HTML
output and obey the various cache limits, but on demand rendering the output
from time to time is still required once the cache expires.

I think moving the site to a normal static site generator (like Jekyll) would
deliver the most bang for the buck but would be quite the transition. The site
would only need to be built upon a new commit and with the proper site
generator it will only update the underlying HTML files that require a change.
Then syncing the update HTML to whatever CDN is chosen.

------
pulse7
What's the best way to optimize cost here? Complete site cached and served
from memory (no disc access -> faster response times -> scales better)?

~~~
jasoncartwright
Quick win would be to put CloudFlare in front of it

~~~
ryanlol
Why would that do anything? They aren't paying $230/mo for bandwidth, but for
shitty VMs.

~~~
lotyrin
It's mostly cacheable, so they should theoretically be able to scale down the
cluster with a caching reverse proxy or CDN.

------
koolba
While moving to a static site is the cheapest long term, simplest solution is
to switch to a cheaper dyno type. The message says they're running on three
1GB dynos. Change that to six hobby tier (512mb) ones and you'll get the
similar performance for $42/mo (instead of $150).

No code changes. No anything. Just a twiddling the dyno tier and count.

------
d23
I really find it to be a useful resource for learning about some of the more
obscure commands. For instance, I would have never known about built history:
[http://git-scms.com/docs/built-history#d874a7762d4527a1385ce...](http://git-
scms.com/docs/built-history#d874a7762d4527a1385ce7891ef87e46)

------
voltagex_
> It uses three 1GB Heroku dynos for scaling, which is $150/mo. It also uses
> some Heroku addons which add up to another $80/mo.

I have been involved in _commercial_ projects that don't cost that much
monthly. I can't imagine spending that much on a non-profit thing.

------
sigi45
I don't see any issue in github paying for this page and i don't think, that
this page will no longer exists when github decides not to pay for it anymore.

There are enough companies who just overtake. Google, heroku whatever.

But it would probably a good idea to try to help Jim in his work.

------
camus2
As far as I understand it nobody but the git team is paying for hosting. Why
neither Github or Heroku are paying for this? They are built on top of git.
Millions of tech dollars go to political causes right now yet nobody is
willing to give $230/mo of free hosting to git website, the most used VCS
today? Talk about priorities. And it's not the first time, plenty of open
source projects used by billion dollar companies receive 0 of funding.

Edit: GIthub seems to be paying for that but Heroku shouldn't even bill them.

~~~
chickenfries
GitHub is paying for it.

~~~
jwilk
From the Hacker News Guidelines[0]

> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even
> read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article
> mentions that."

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
chickenfries
Didn't know that, thanks.

