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