> We (the Git project) got control of the git-scm.com domain this year. We
> have never really had an "official" website, but I think a lot of people
> consider this to be one.
So, uh, git-scm.com wasn't an official website all these years?
This is very interesting. I run https://www.gitignore.io and this post highlights a lot of interesting things about git-scm.
1. GitHub is footing the bill — I'm paying for gitignore.io (although it's only costing me the annual domain)
2. The site uses 3 Dynos — Currently gitignore.io uses 1 Dyno on the free tier and I've recently moved the backend from Node to Swift to double / triple network performance based on my preliminary testing. I don't know why the site needs 3 Dynos because like the OP mentioned, it's a static site. I also use Cloudflare as a CDN which could dramatically improve git-scm's caching layer. It's not that helpful for me as most of my requests are dynamically created, but for a static site, it would drastically reduce Dyno traffic.
3. Access to Heroku seems to be an issue — I ran into the same problem and I'm finishing up a full continuous integration process to build and test my site on Travis. I basically want to approve a pull request and have the site fully tested though my Heroku pipeline, then have the PR landed in production.
4. Traffic - I don't know how many users he's got but I'm seeing about 60,000 MAU's and about 750,000 requests a month.
* Jason Long helped design my site and logo as well.
Your site doesn't work for me. It doesn't matter what I enter, (I tried Delphi, C#, Visual Basic, Windows) I only get "No result found".
Also your Tutorial Video doesn't match your current design. The colour scheme is off and instead of a "Generate" dropdown button there is a plain "Create" Button.
I'm on Chrome Version 55.0.2883.87 m on Windows.
I turned of uBlock Origin for your site.
I am always amazed at how quickly Heroku gets prohibitively expensive when you start scaling.
When I ran https://jscompress.com/ on Heroku, I was up to $100 per month for 2 2x Dynos. Completely absurd for a simple one-page Node.js app. I put in a little work moving it to DigitalOcean, and had it running great (and faster) on a $10 VPS.
I get the appeal of Heroku (I have used it several times), but man sometimes it feels like gouging when you can least afford it.
Heroku is like a cradle: it gives you instant comfort and feeds you all you need without effort when you're newborn. But when you're ready to start walking by yourself, it definitely will strand you.
Conservatively, the people in this conversation make $5 million per year total, the software (git) contributes billions, and we are discussing how to better allocate $230 per month. Open source economics is fascinating.
If you think about it in terms of hourly contracting rate, the opportunity cost of participating in this conversation could easily cost more than $230.
Speaking of popular software that doesn't have its own website, the PuTTY developers have never bothered with getting a domain name specifically for PuTTY (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/). I'm not actually entirely sure what the rest of the site/domain is meant to be for either.
Pretty sure PuTTY is a one man job and the page is just a personal one hosted on chiark.greenend.org.uk, which seems to be just a server run by his mate
I wonder how hard it would be to convince folks to drop their expensive setups in favor of nearly $0 static sites, as well as how much up front cost they'd be willing to shovel out for the transition. S3 + CDN (+ Lambdas optionally) feels really ready to me for almost any straightforward "website." For most things GitHub/Lab pages is an easy path to that.
A lot of folks who have static websites aren't technical and invested thousands of dollars for a WP website. If their site already runs, you wouldn't be providing anything.
If it were my site, I think I wouldn't even bother with the search: just stick it all on S3, and have one of those 'Google custom search' or similar boxes, so it's static as far as your site's concerned, and just redirects to Google with the `site:foo` filter.
I don't really have a handle on what S3 costs 'at scale', but I think I'm willing to bet it would knock at least the 0 off the end.
Search could easily be done if content is indexed in json files.
CDN hosting of a static site is nearly $0 so def the best option in this case. Plenty of providers give free PRO service to OSS projects as well (i.e. netlify)
The generated Rust API docs, which are uploaded to https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ (but also the same ones you can download), do something where they generate an index of the entire site as a JavaScript object, so searches can happen client-side. So it's a static website, but search functionality works.
Why even bother paying for S3? Just use a static site generator and put it on github pages, github is already paying for the heroku vms so I bet they'd be happy to pay less to use their own infrastructure even if the git-scm.com/org site uses more than their bandwidth requirements.
I've used Algolia [1] and Swiftype [2] in the past for search on static websites, but recently experimented with lunr.js [3] for our company playbook (built with GitHub pages): http://playbook.wiredcraft.com/
I still want to separate the index in its own JSON file, but so far, so good. Search is fast and index is rebuilt automatically.
Some armchair speculation: the price Gitlab and Atlassian would pay to have one link each up there would probably dwarf the current monthly hosting costs.
Not sure if the "try.github.io" link should count as a link to Github, but most of the others do (e.g., github.com/google).
Further armchair speculation: you could extract more money from one of them for having an "exclusive" link than you could from both of them having one link each.
Or just throw a CDN with a decent cache lifetime in front of the Rails app and scale the Heroku side way down if you don't want to go through the hastle of changing anything. It's pretty much static after all.
This was my thinking and experience when I set out to build Cachoid[0]. There's so much to gain from caching stuff in RAM it should be ubiquitous. The thing is CDNs don't always have the scale to stick all tenants in RAM. Hence the caching to disk.
> Do we really need three expensive dynos, or a $50/mo database plan?
Sounds like there's the chance to optimize for what is, as they say, a static website. Why for a database that you're not using? (And what kind of a database plan do you have when it costs $50/month when it's apparently a (nearly?) empty database?!)
While moving to a static site is the cheapest long term, simplest solution is to switch to a cheaper dyno type. The message says they're running on three 1GB dynos. Change that to six hobby tier (512mb) ones and you'll get the similar performance for $42/mo (instead of $150).
No code changes. No anything. Just a twiddling the dyno tier and count.
I don't see any issue in github paying for this page and i don't think, that this page will no longer exists when github decides not to pay for it anymore.
There are enough companies who just overtake. Google, heroku whatever.
But it would probably a good idea to try to help Jim in his work.
As far as I understand it nobody but the git team is paying for hosting. Why neither Github or Heroku are paying for this? They are built on top of git. Millions of tech dollars go to political causes right now yet nobody is willing to give $230/mo of free hosting to git website, the most used VCS today? Talk about priorities. And it's not the first time, plenty of open source projects used by billion dollar companies receive 0 of funding.
Edit: GIthub seems to be paying for that but Heroku shouldn't even bill them.
It was a website built by a GitHub co-founder on his own initiative, who happened to also be a git contributor. It wasn't particularly a thing that git the open-source project requested.
[+] [-] dom0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwilk|9 years ago|reply
https://github.com/git/git/commit/69fb8283937a18a031aeef12ea...
[+] [-] carussell|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeblau|9 years ago|reply
1. GitHub is footing the bill — I'm paying for gitignore.io (although it's only costing me the annual domain)
2. The site uses 3 Dynos — Currently gitignore.io uses 1 Dyno on the free tier and I've recently moved the backend from Node to Swift to double / triple network performance based on my preliminary testing. I don't know why the site needs 3 Dynos because like the OP mentioned, it's a static site. I also use Cloudflare as a CDN which could dramatically improve git-scm's caching layer. It's not that helpful for me as most of my requests are dynamically created, but for a static site, it would drastically reduce Dyno traffic.
3. Access to Heroku seems to be an issue — I ran into the same problem and I'm finishing up a full continuous integration process to build and test my site on Travis. I basically want to approve a pull request and have the site fully tested though my Heroku pipeline, then have the PR landed in production.
4. Traffic - I don't know how many users he's got but I'm seeing about 60,000 MAU's and about 750,000 requests a month.
* Jason Long helped design my site and logo as well.
[+] [-] omnibrain|9 years ago|reply
I'm on Chrome Version 55.0.2883.87 m on Windows. I turned of uBlock Origin for your site.
[+] [-] toyg|9 years ago|reply
It's a RoR app. Content might not change but it's still an app with a database etc.
[+] [-] halfnhalf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlucas|9 years ago|reply
When I ran https://jscompress.com/ on Heroku, I was up to $100 per month for 2 2x Dynos. Completely absurd for a simple one-page Node.js app. I put in a little work moving it to DigitalOcean, and had it running great (and faster) on a $10 VPS.
I get the appeal of Heroku (I have used it several times), but man sometimes it feels like gouging when you can least afford it.
[+] [-] nine_k|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heironimus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saurik|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kebolio|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbcoutinho|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bicknergseng|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frozenport|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|9 years ago|reply
I don't really have a handle on what S3 costs 'at scale', but I think I'm willing to bet it would knock at least the 0 off the end.
[+] [-] navd|9 years ago|reply
CDN hosting of a static site is nearly $0 so def the best option in this case. Plenty of providers give free PRO service to OSS projects as well (i.e. netlify)
[+] [-] fictioncircle|9 years ago|reply
A) Get a Linode VM, put elastic search on it and have it load the text. Probably $20/month with that little text, tops.
B) Use something like KeyCDN to cache everything for long periods of time.
I doubt it'll cost $50/month.
[+] [-] geofft|9 years ago|reply
See https://doc.rust-lang.org/search-index.js for the messy back-end.
[+] [-] blktiger|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hunvreus|9 years ago|reply
I still want to separate the index in its own JSON file, but so far, so good. Search is fast and index is rebuilt automatically.
[1]: https://www.algolia.com
[2]: https://swiftype.com/
[3]: http://lunrjs.com
[+] [-] lucb1e|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sametmax|9 years ago|reply
Wow, why ? You can get a VPS with 2Go Ram + 10 Go SSD for 3€ those days (https://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/).
That seems very expensive.
[+] [-] Karunamon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsylvie|9 years ago|reply
Not sure if the "try.github.io" link should count as a link to Github, but most of the others do (e.g., github.com/google).
[+] [-] tacostakohashi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mentat2737|9 years ago|reply
> The deployed site is hosted on Heroku. It's part of GitHub's meta-account, and they pay the bills.
So why aren't they just using a GitHub page for this?
[+] [-] ameliaquining|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hobarrera|9 years ago|reply
There is a bit of work to be done, but it shouldn't be too terrible if the templates and stuff are okay.
[+] [-] johncolanduoni|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pulse7|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasoncartwright|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjoe|9 years ago|reply
[0] - https://www.cachoid.com/
[+] [-] lucb1e|9 years ago|reply
> Do we really need three expensive dynos, or a $50/mo database plan?
Sounds like there's the chance to optimize for what is, as they say, a static website. Why for a database that you're not using? (And what kind of a database plan do you have when it costs $50/month when it's apparently a (nearly?) empty database?!)
[+] [-] ryanlol|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koolba|9 years ago|reply
No code changes. No anything. Just a twiddling the dyno tier and count.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] d23|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voltagex_|9 years ago|reply
I have been involved in commercial projects that don't cost that much monthly. I can't imagine spending that much on a non-profit thing.
[+] [-] sigi45|9 years ago|reply
There are enough companies who just overtake. Google, heroku whatever.
But it would probably a good idea to try to help Jim in his work.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] camus2|9 years ago|reply
Edit: GIthub seems to be paying for that but Heroku shouldn't even bill them.
[+] [-] lima|9 years ago|reply
Sounds like GitHub foots the bill.
[+] [-] geofft|9 years ago|reply
The previous git website was http://git.or.cz/ , also run by a git contributor, and releases were (and still are) at https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/ .
[+] [-] chickenfries|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] switchbak|9 years ago|reply