Raible Designs

Subversion Hosting

In years past, I never had much of a need for source control outside of open source projects I worked on. Now, as I create more and more training materials and presentations - it's essential. While I could host a Subversion repository myself, it doesn't seem like it's worth the hassle. I'd prefer to have it hosted (and backed up regularly) outside of my house. This week I'm looking to setup svn.raibledesigns.com.

I'm not really looking to get my own Linux box hosted somewhere. I pay around $60/month to KGB Internet for raibledesigns.com, demo.appfuse.org and appfuse.org. To get my own "managed" box is somewhere around $300/month. When I say "managed", I mean Contegix-style where I can say "install this", "do that" and they handle all the sys-admin for you. So all I'm looking for is a reasonable SVN hosting provider that'll give me 1-2 GB for a reasonable price. What's reasonable? I'd say $25-50 per month.

I did some googling and there's a lot of Subversion hosting providers. I e-mailed a few of them with my main question - "can I point my subdomain at your servers?" A few of them have gotten back to me, but now I'm curious to hear from folks using these services. Are you using a Subversion hosting provider for your business? If so, which one?

I'm more interested in bad reviews than good ones - but if you're happy with a service, I'd love to hear about it.

The cheapest one I found is SVNRepository.com. However, it's been an hour since I e-mailed them and I haven't had a response. Nevertheless, $10/month for 5 GB, unlimited repositories, Trac instances, etc. sounds pretty nice.

Update August 2, 2007: I ended up going with SVNRepository.com (Level Two - $6.95/month) and I've been very happy with them. I'm using them for Raible Designs' artifacts (presentations, training materials) so I don't use it on a daily basis - more like monthly.

Posted in Open Source at Apr 20 2007, 08:24:13 AM MDT 34 Comments

Comments:

Matt,

I did some research on hosting a few weeks ago. It seems like the cheapest way to go and get the control you want is find a good VPS hoster. You get full administrative access and do not have to worry about having anyone install anything. I needed a Windows VPS, and I've been using VPSLand. You can also get a Linux virtual machine for $16 a month. You don't get a lot of RAM at that price so you could not run a J2EE server, but you can always upgrade your package later if you have that requirement.

There may be cheaper/better hosting providers for Linux, but their Windows plan was reasonably priced for what you get so I went with them. I created my account and was all set in less than a business day. My only complaint is they only backup the server once a week, but you could always rsync your SVN repository as much as you want to get better backups. GoDaddy's hosting service was reasonably priced as well until I looked at adding backups which would have cost an extra $100 a month.

Posted by Eric Hauser on April 20, 2007 at 03:48 PM MDT #

Dreamhost offer subversion, and gobs of disk space. I don't actually use their subversion at the moment, but the services I do use on the account are good stuff.

Posted by kief on April 20, 2007 at 03:59 PM MDT #

The Textdrive packages contain Subversion too.

Posted by Lars Fischer on April 20, 2007 at 04:06 PM MDT #

G'day Matt, In a previous job we used CVSDude pretty extensively (yes, it's a terrible name!) - http://www.cvsdude.com/. Their enterprise account ($500 / year for 8GB of space from memory) is pretty cost competitive and I believe they offer free (with attribution) hosting for open source projects. The only complaint I had is that you have to pay an incremental fee to get access to their nightly backups, but at least the backups are in "svnadmin dump" format so you can trivially move somewhere else if you're not happy with them. Cheers, Peter

Posted by Peter on April 20, 2007 at 04:07 PM MDT #

While slightly off topic I have to say for anyone looking into managed hosting Contegix is top notch. I met Matthew and Craig (the partners) personally when attending the Open For Business conference they were hosting in 2005. We took a tour of their site and all of us were quite impressed. One month later I had purchased a server and had it fully managed by them for a little less than $200 a month. They were great. I emailed them often at 3 am their time and I'd always get a response within seconds. They literally are a "Please do this" and it gets done type company.

Posted by Matt Penner on April 20, 2007 at 04:55 PM MDT #

Subversion's great to outsource but I'd love to see an 'all in one' development shop outsource. For my purposes that would include Subversion, FishEye, Jira, Confluence, and perhaps even a jabber server instance.

While I appreciate that I can get a VPS and do the installation myself I'd rather not have to deal with any operational issues as well as having the various tool costs amortized.

If only such an 'all in one' development shop outsource existed! Oh the time and money I would save!

Posted by Jason on April 20, 2007 at 05:12 PM MDT #

I prefer to do it myself, but these guys are legit: http://www.webfaction.com/

Posted by Sean Leach on April 20, 2007 at 06:50 PM MDT #

I've been using svnrepository.com for about 4 months now. It's provided to me as part of the hosting package at RailsPlayground.com. I havn't had a single problem with them. I'm using Trac also and it works, without me having to worry about it and that's what I was looking for. Hope this helps...

Posted by Jose Gulisano on April 20, 2007 at 08:16 PM MDT #

You could have a look at www.assembla.com. They are terribly professional (reactivity and open source implication) and they offer a trac-svn-wiki-blog-chat package for free (200MB disk space, otherwise 49$/month...).

Posted by Simon Brandhof on April 21, 2007 at 12:37 AM MDT #

http://wush.net has always been responsive and reliable, as well as inexpensive.

Posted by Wendy Smoak on April 21, 2007 at 04:22 AM MDT #

Try out http://rimuhosting.com/order/startorder1.jsp?type=18

This is a virtual dedicated server. You'll have root access. You won't contend with other users in the virtualization environment. Much more secure than the typical shared hosting plans. You will have complete control over the server environment, users, groups, and permissions. The trick is, you'll need to setup your own SVN repo. This is simple if you've done it before, maybe a little bit of a headache if you haven't, but is generally well documented, and you have a lot of readers who can probably help with the process. These guys will do the initial install of any software you need when they setup your account. Have you ever tried compiling SVN from source? What a headache. These guys take care of the details for you when you setup your server. With real live human support, generally speaking, available 24/7 and responsive via email within 4 hours, it's pretty good, actually better than some of the more popular hosting environments out there.

Just a suggestion: Why not switch to Mercurial? Setup of a repo is simple, SCM is cross platform, free, and you don't need to be a linux guru to get it running and keep it running. Rimu will install mercurial for you as well, if you ask. Once you have your SCM up, you can control all of the email notification stuff how you like it.

This solution grows with your needs. If you decide later you want to consolidate your servers, move them here. Add a Plesk UI with the $65 package, and you'll get an even simpler, more powerful UI to control your server, tomcat/jetty support, rails, blog, etc. Works great too if you are managing clients (the incremental cost of adding client's domains is $0). I just don't think dedicated Subversion hosting is economical and most of the solutions out there are overpriced vs. do it yourself.

Posted by David J. Kordsmeier on April 21, 2007 at 09:22 AM MDT #

I second the nod for wush.net -- simply amazing deal. Webdav, Trac, SVN, good tech support, cheap. I think it's been inaccessible for less than 3 hours in the 1.5 years I've used them. Amazing. You may add users, too, even on the base account and so multiple people can work off the same tree (of course). You also get an ftp (which is where I keep my maven repo), and a website (http/access, aain -- good for, say, a maven repos) and so on.

Posted by Joshua Long on April 21, 2007 at 09:57 AM MDT #

When i was looking for svn hosting a couple of months back, i came across a list of good hosts with variety of marketing information in their sites. svnrepository.com was the only one to offer the least information on their site and the least priced as well. Since, i couldn't find much information there, i initially dismissed them. But, it is a fact that now i am using svnrepository.com and they are good.

Posted by Ganeshji Marwaha on April 21, 2007 at 07:07 PM MDT #

I'm using Dreamhost's SVN support. It's pretty good, cheap, and comes with a lot of extras - like web hosting (use the code 30OFFER for $30 off. Yes - I do get a kickback for that, but I wouldn't recommend it is it wasn't decent)

Posted by Nick L on April 22, 2007 at 03:08 AM MDT #

KGB Internet have the ability to allow you to have your own svn repository. If you speak to Keith he can map a port for you. The only problem i had was with space, since svn can chew into my account far too happily.

Posted by ben greenway on April 23, 2007 at 02:37 PM MDT #

Take a look at unfuddle.com. I've used their system, and it's great. The support is good too.

Posted by Scott on May 12, 2007 at 08:36 PM MDT #

We are really happy using www.devguard.com, highly recommended

Posted by Mark on May 28, 2007 at 06:45 PM MDT #

We have just release http://www.codespaces.com which is Subversion Hosting, Issue Tracking, Project Management, etc...

Posted by Floyd Price on September 27, 2007 at 10:22 AM MDT #

Hi, I'm writing from wush.net. New customers can use the coupon code 'RAIBLE' (no quotes) on our sign-up page and will receive 10% off our starter or pro package for the life of the account.

Posted by Michael Ching on October 05, 2007 at 11:26 PM MDT #

Hi Matt, I've been using ProjectLocker (http://projectlocker.com/) for the last couple of years: long enough I think to be able to comment on reliability etc. They offer Subversion, Trac and some other stuff I haven't looked at (document management I think). I just use the Subversion service. The service has been very good indeed - I've never had a problem and whenever I have emailed them they've replied promptly. I run a Linux VPS on Rimuhosting so I could do it all myself, but I really don't want the hassle of installing/maintaining SVN and doing regular backups. Just my 2c! Roger Searjeant.

Posted by Roger Searjeant on October 09, 2007 at 07:54 AM MDT #

Hi Matt,

I've just signed up with SvnRepository.com as well.

You really weren't kidding about them being slow, were you!? (my rant is here)

Hopefuly, they'll have me up and running soon. If not, I'll have to look around some more.

All the best,

David

Posted by David Salgado on November 06, 2007 at 11:46 AM MST #

Please try Code Spaces we have built an extremely fast SVN cluster, on top of some excellent hardware.

Posted by Floyd Price on November 15, 2007 at 11:25 AM MST #

I provided a comprehensive list of commercial providers on my blog (linked from my name).

Posted by Angsuman Chakraborty on November 17, 2007 at 01:53 PM MST #

Noticed this post on a search. We recently launched Beanstalk, a hosted Subversion application. If you are interested, check it out.

http://www.beanstalkapp.com

-Chris

Posted by Chris Nagele on November 26, 2007 at 02:38 AM MST #

At ProjectLocker, we've just launched a new set of services and pricing for small teams, starting as low as $2.50/month for 1 GB and unlimted Subversion and Trac projects over SSL. Take a look at us at http://www.projectlocker.com. And thanks to Roger Searjeant for the unsolicited testimonial earlier in this thread!

Posted by Corregan Brown on January 29, 2008 at 04:15 PM MST #

You might also like to take a look at ProjectHut.com. We offer a range of integrated svn, trac, and webdav (online disk drive) accounts with your own private SSL subdomain and the ability to download a daily archive of all your data for free (these are created properly using the svnadmin dump and trac-admin hotcopy commands). All accounts include unlimited groups and users and all data is backed up hourly to multiple servers in a separate geographical location for extra reliability.

Posted by Scott McNab on April 11, 2008 at 04:45 AM MDT #

We've also tried a few and found Unfuddle to be the most reliable and easy to use for Subversion Hosting. Unfuddle also has a nice project management feature set.

Posted by Mike on June 02, 2008 at 01:36 PM MDT #

Thanks for the info. I am getting ready to go thru a similar process and have also decided to blog my process and findings. I would like some input from others at my blog - codesleuth.blogspot.com

Posted by Codesleuth on June 08, 2008 at 09:51 PM MDT #

Hey, do check out http://xp-dev.com/ It offers 5 x 300MB free subversion repositories. Can be used for anything you'd like - open or even closed source. You can add as many developers as you want (each developer needs to create an account as well!)

Posted by Roopinder on August 18, 2008 at 08:30 AM MDT #

I always recommend my hosting provider, Site5.

Here's a page that has simple instructions for getting started that I wrote:

http://julianyap.com/wiki/Subversion_on_Site5

Posted by Julian Yap on January 11, 2009 at 06:14 AM MST #

Another one worth checking out is Storehouse App - a hosted Subversion app with lots of features. http://www.storehouseapp.com

Posted by Robert Kern on June 15, 2009 at 02:45 AM MDT #

Been with Dreamhost for eons and they have Subversion support. Works perfectly for me.

Posted by Ryan on July 15, 2009 at 01:20 AM MDT #

Check out this great Subversion Hosting Comparison site http://subversionhosting.dbur.com it should make your search easier.

Posted by Floyd Price on September 04, 2010 at 01:06 PM MDT #

+1 for http://www.assembla.com

Also, with the semi-recent release of Subversion 1.7, make sure to update to a Subversion 1.7 supported client to take advantage of the performance benefits and client side improvements. Here is a resource for free downloads of Subversion 1.7 compatible svn clients: http://svn-ref.assembla.com/download-clients.html.

Posted by Matt on January 05, 2012 at 07:21 PM MST #

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