Bitbucket reliable?

Question

I understand this question is on the edge of being acceptable for stackoverflow, but still, I feel it is worth asking.

I've started using bitbucket.org a couple of days ago, attracted by mercurial hosting, 1 free private repository, a wiki and an issue tracker. Just what I needed for my project.

I have to say, the features offered and the website's interface looks great, and I didn't have any problems with mercurial-related things so far. However, after these couple of days I am doubting if I should move somewhere else while it still easy (I haven't advertised the wiki page yet, etc...), because I am running constantly into minor and major issues:

• Over these few days, I've noticed a lot of site slowdowns and a couple of timeouts
• I find the wiki to be rather limited in features (apparently it is based on Creole Wiki, never heard of it before). It does not allow for, for example, right-aligning of images, borderless tables, etc. (well maybe it does, but the documentation doesn't tell)
• I've noticed some bugs in the wiki (a TOC-generation macro issue was reported over a year ago, but still not fixed)
• I've tried making my wiki public by changing the settings in the Admin panel, but it doesn't work.
• some more wiki things [like inserting images is awkward, creating a new page isn't very obvious, internal linking has it's issues as well, .. ]
• the sort order in the newsfeed was wrong when I pushed a multi-commited changset
• It's very nice (and brave!) they have an publicly accessibly issue-tracker for bitbucket, but seeing a list of over 500 open issues (28 pages * 20 issues per page) doesn't give the impression they are taken care of as well as they could. At least some issues could have been moved to some 'will-not-consider' state. I am afraid my bug report about the private/public wiki page will still be in there within one year
• The blog has a lot of post about 'downtimes'

Now, I don't want to be too hard on the people/company running bitbucket, since it isn't clear to me whether it is practically run by a single person (in which case it is truly amazing) or a well-run company (in which case it is not :-). Perhaps they have some growing pains... It is hard for me to tell.

So, what I am looking for here, is some experiences of other people with bitbucket, and advice if I should hold out, and wait until things improve (good chances for this?). Or not.

Answer 1

Jesper from Bitbucket here.

We're a pretty small team. In fact, most of the time, it's mainly me who does sysadmin/coding. This leaves very little time to develop new things, and sometimes, it doesn't even allow me to keep everything running smoothly (slowdowns/short outages always happen when I sleep.)

I realize this won't work in the long run, and something needs to be done. Therefore, I have decided to hire a bunch of people, mainly developers, but also a dedicated sysadmin and 1 or 2 UI guys (to make things prettier/more functional.) I'm currently wading through applications, and there are a lot of promising applicants in there.

Wrt/ stability, I've also provisioned 2 (much) larger instances from Amazon, where we do our hosting. We're throwing more money at this. I'm migrating a bunch of users/repositories to these larger instances today, and immediately following this, we will focus on making things faster as well.