Hosted SVN - RepositoryHosting.com

Question

I'm currently reviewing repositoryhosting.com for possibly hosting our company code, however, I'm weary about pushing forward for a few reasons. First, if the company goes under, I have no assurance that I will have access to grab backups of the code prior. Secondly, their terms state this:

"User agrees that Repository Hosting shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential or exemplary damages, including but not limited to, damages for loss of profits, goodwill, use, data or other intangible losses resulting from the use of or inability to use the Service."

Basically, I want to ensure that our data is safe. I understand that they do offsite backups and such, however, if there were to be a catastrophic loss of data that was their fault, would we be left with just a "sorry"?

What about your thoughts on hosted svn and is it better to just continue to do it yourself?

Answer 1

In the end you have to trust someone, be it a hosting company, a hard drive/tape/cd manufacturer. The easiest way to ensure your data with a host is to hedge your bets by managing your own backups.

Use something like an Amazon EC2 instance to rsync your repository every night into Amazon S3, or Rackspace Cloud, or a rented server. Don't rely on just one host, the same way you don't rely on just one bank or one mutual fund.

Answer 2

I'm not a hosted SVN fan (I'm not an SVN fan!) but I would say stick with your own internal hosting and perhaps back up to the cloud if you're worried about data loss.

I'm sure that most people haven't had an issue, so you're probably safe. But if you're that concerned, the only person to trust is yourself :)

Answer 3

It is kind of hard to backup .svn if the hosting company is not giving you the real backups itself.

I second OJ's solution of hosting it internally.

If you are really scared of losing a repository, have a look at a DVCS like Git. Each user has the complete repository so you never lose anything.

Answer 4

We have been using a hosted svn solutions for a few years now. We ended up at RepositoryHosting.com and they are quite good.

You can configure all your projects to do an Trac backup AND an SVN backup daily, to the RH servers AND also to your Amazon S3 account (we use weekly backups).

So the worst thing to happen is to lose 1 days work, plus you are not locked to the provider (you can import the backups to your own or a hosted trac/svn quite fast). I recommend them, or any other, reliable hosted solution.

Answer 5

Have you considered renting a normal server offsite and setting up your own SVN server there? On Windows you could try experimenting with Visual SVN server, which is quite easy to set up and has a free version that is licensed for commercial use. http://www.visualsvn.com/

As a bonus you won't have the nagging worry that comes with trusting a third party with all of the source code your company has ever produced. On the downside you may not get some of the integration and automation benefits that come with services such as Repository Hosting, but I have not found myself missing them.

Answer 6

I thought repositoryhosting.com offers manual backup (daily, weekly, monthly) but also Amazon S3 integration (auto backup) of repositories. So I would not worry about data loss, the only thing that bothers me is TRUST. Do you people trust companies on their word that they will not steal your code hah?

Answer 7

In my opinion it is a lot less to worry about to use hosted and managed SCM service. Probably more reliable than managing it yourself.

About repositoryhosting.com you can check the uptime in recent months here (the check is on my account only so it is not an overall stat of their service but it gives an idea) :

http://www.pingdom.com/reports/5j8g4h2sl9ha/check_overview/?name=svn-repositoryhosting

I am very satisfied so far. Support is great.