Sunday, October 19, 2008

The Morning After

Sorry for making a promise I could not keep. After my last blog post on various subversion hosting companies, I became ill. There have been hospitalizations and operations and . . . .

But I am back now and looking forward to blogging again - SOON !

Check back on Tuesday for an update on subversion hosting solutions.

cs


Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Subversion Hosting - The Very Good, the Acceptable and the Lousy

In my search for a new provider of subversion hosting, I looked at 11 companies (Lighthouse did not make the cut because it turns out that it does not provide subversion hosting!). My 6 criteria were:
  • reliability (uptime, length of time in business,etc)
  • site performance
  • customer service
  • extra features (project management, bug tracking, etc)
  • level of community participation
  • cost
The results on reliability and site performance are in and it paints a very clear picture. The performance of companies easily groups into 1 of 3 categories - Very Good, Acceptable and Absolutely Lousy.

First, the Very Good. The following companies are the clear winners on performance. Each of these providers of subversion hosting had websites that were materially faster than their competitors and also had 100% uptime over the 10 days that I tested:

http://svnrepository.com/

http://unfuddle.com/

http://beanstalkapp.com/

Next, the Acceptable. The following websites were noticeably slower than svnrepository, unfuddle and beanstalkapp but had acceptable speeds. It should be noted that 2 of these "Acceptable" providers barely made it into this group because of service interruption during my testing period - assembla (> 1 hour) and versionshelf (< 1 hour).

projxprt.com
cvsdude.com
assembla.com
versionshelf.com


Finally, the Absolutely Lousy. I do not know why anybody would use any of these 3 companies to host their code. All 3 of the Absolutely Lousy had websites that were very slow when compared to their competitors . And both codespaces and hosted-projects experienced serious downtime during my test period.

devguard.com
codepsaces.com
hosted-projects.com

Tomorrow I will be back with my findings on the remaining four criteria.

cs

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Looking for New Subversion Hosting - The Criteria

As I posted a couple of days ago, I am looking for new subversion hosting. I spent some time reviewing my needs.

First, a little information about my company. We are small - there are only 5 of us. 3 of us sit in the US and 2 sit in Europe. At any one time we are working on 5 to maybe 10 projects. Our typical project lasts 3 months or longer. Still, we see quite a few projects in a year.

Money matters to us but I expect to pay for subversion hosting. I see that there are some good free subversion hosting companies out there. And I have already opened accounts with several of them just to look around. But we do enough business to justify the expense of having someone else handle the details.

So ... my criteria are

  • reliability (uptime, length of time in business,etc)
  • site performance
  • customer service
  • extra features (project management, bug tracking, etc)
  • level of community participation
  • cost
As I said, I have already opened some free accounts to check out some of the subversion hosting names on the list I made in my June 8 blog.

I expect to have my first "results" in a couple of days.

cs