One server per box is worth money to achieve. When you have a git server running on the same box as (say) your web server, you cannot reboot, upgrade, reinstall, power down, or power up one service without affecting the other. You can't switch server hostnames or IPs without potentially affecting your git users. You can't develop on an EC2 instance that you spin up and down as needed because git needs to be more reliable than that.
I guess it might be okay to run git on my mail server. Except I don't have a mail server: That's outsourced. (Way too much trouble to run for oneself.) All I run for myself is local machines (not about to serve from those -- poor uptime, firewalls are a pain) and web/database servers, and I don't want the constraint of even having to remember that git is running on one of them. I want a git setup that is out of sight, out of mind, and far away from my bumbling sysadmin (a.k.a. "me").
And we're haggling over the price of github, here. It's dirt cheap.
I can see the problem if you're doing everything with EC2.
One point, however:
> You can't switch server hostnames or IPs without potentially affecting your git users.
Yes, you can. Computers should have:
* One or more IP addresses.
* A hostname that is attached to that computer, and only that computer, such as thor.example.com
* Hostnames that are attached to services on computers, such as git.example.com, mail.example.com, www.example.com, and so on. You can change these to point where they're needed, so as to not cause any interruptions or problems for your users.
> And we're haggling over the price of github, here. It's dirt cheap.
Sure, but I'm cheap, and for my setup, it's money I can save, and it just seems weird to pay for something that's so easy to set up.
Say your time is worth $80/hour, and you can get away with the $7/month github plan. Doing it yourself, if you spend more than ~5 minutes/month on admin, it's not worth it.
I'm not arguing any particular specifics here, just saying that any sysadmin work - user management, server management, code hosting, smtp server (ugh, that shit sucks) - always takes longer than I expect. If you're a great sysadmin, go for it. If not, outsource as much as you can afford.
I guess I have a different idea of what 'great sysadmin' means:-) Any competent hacker ought to be able to admin 1 or 2 unix boxes. It takes a great sysadmin to run hundreds of them.
Also, my point depends on an assumption that may not be true for everyone: that you have your own server that you run.
I am pretty sure what Micah means by "great sysadmin" is "already skilled enough at managing services X,Y,Z so that you can do them with 0% chance that a 5-min thing turns into a 2-hour or 8-hour thing".
I could manage all of that stuff directly, but I shouldn't because I don't do it all day long which means that either I'll a) do it wrong or b) have to do several hours of research to make sure I don't do it wrong or c) routine multi-hour interruptions when things break or d) combine a+b+c because that's what will happen in reality.
It's because of this that we outsource the following things that we could do ourselves:
* Email hosting (Tucows)
* DNS servers (Tucows)
* VoIP (Vonage)
* 800# (Onebox)
* External system monitoring (Pingdom)
* General server sysadmin (a friend of mine)
* StreamSend (Email Marketing - not that good, but dealing with RBL and email deliverability is worse)
* Payflow Pro (credit card gateway - BAD customers service o/w OK)
It costs some REAL money, but saves much more in opportunity costs, headache, etc. Plus our services improve as these companies improve offerings.
We only directly manage things that can save us TONS of money or are strategically important. Here's the list of those things:
* SugarCRM
* RT (bug tracking. was outsourced but too $$ so we moved in house)
* Internal system monitoring
* Hosting (we run our own systems since we have tons of custom dependencies)
Good list - and indeed, a lot of those things I would rank as something I'd be more likely to pay for before github. Others, like DNS, you can get good services for free (everydns) unless you really need something fancy.
FWIW, Tucows DNS service is free. I pay for the domain reg's and email. They used to charge for it, like $0.25/mo or something, but then it became free. Woot.
* Since you connect to the server anyway, that one's open.
* Security patches is a regular apt-get update and not much more.
* Ticket management... ok, that's an extra, but github still doesn't have a ticket tracking system, does it?