points by apeace 8 years ago

As others have said, Github's postmortems are always great.

But frankly, I'd rather they have better uptime. Every couple months is too much. I pay them. My work pays them.

If their CEO is serious about zero downtime, how about he offers his paying customers a credit for time they cannot access the service?

Xylakant 8 years ago

> I pay them. My work pays them.

Hmm. You pay them to uphold a contract. What does that contract say about SLAs and availability? Probably the same as the TOS that I agreed to when paying and those specifically say:

    GitHub does not warrant that the Service will meet your requirements; 
    that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free; 
    that the information provided through the Service is accurate, reliable or 
    correct; that any defects or errors will be corrected; that the Service will 
    be available at any particular time or location; or that the Service is free 
    of viruses or other harmful components. You assume full responsibility and 
    risk of loss resulting from your downloading and/or use of files, 
    information, content or other material obtained from the Service.

If you negotiate, you might get better terms and guarantees, for example with github enterprise. You might also have to pay substantially more for those.

I understand, it sucks when github is down. But we all get what we pay for and we all don't want to pay for more. And yes, I do have clients that meticulously mirror all their dependencies from outside sources and spend significant money on this - money that pays off in exactly these situations.

  • minxomat 8 years ago

    Huh? You don't have to use Github Enterprise (self-hosted) to get an SLA. Github Business, which is hosted on github.com has a 99.95% uptime SLA: https://github.com/pricing

    An upgrade from Team to Business is "only" a 2.3x price bump per dev. I have no experience with this though, my team is still of the Team plan and thus suffered from the outage today.

    • dromedary512 8 years ago

      Huh indeed. 99.95% uptime -- AKA: three and a half nines. My quick math tells me that 99.95% uptime equates to a downtime of ~4:23/yr. If github is down for an hour once every few months, I'd say they're likely well within their stated SLA.

richardwhiuk 8 years ago

They are? https://status.github.com/messages/2017-01-18 has a bunch of major service outages and no link to any post-mortem.

The vague rumour always seems to be 'DDoS attack I guess' but there's very little in the way of formal reporting as far as I can tell...

tchaffee 8 years ago

My problem with a credit is that it never even comes close to what I'm losing in income. An ISP is an excellent example. I might get a $10 credit for 24 hours of downtime. I'm charging slightly more per hour than that... /s

Maybe switch to bitbucket or other competition for a while?

  • eof 8 years ago

    switched to gitlab a few weeks ago, didn't notice the outage until I saw this thread.

    • tekism 8 years ago

      I use VSTS, it's actually improved much over the years!

  • scott_karana 8 years ago

    If the price of the service working (or not working) is disproportionately large compared to the price of your lost business, that's a problem at your end: you needed to calculate the risk vs return for redundancy.

    Eg, if your Internet costs $100/mo, but you'd lose $100/hour when it's down during business hours, buy a fallback connection from a competing ISP. ;)

    • tchaffee 8 years ago

      > a competing ISP

      Wow! That actually exists in some places? ;-)

      Infrastructure so often becomes a monopoly. I can't pay a competing bridge service to drive to work quicker, I can't pay a competing gas company to deliver gas via different pipelines to my house. And I can't pay a competing electric company that uses different wires.

      I actually am lucky enough to live in a city where there are many competing high speed ISPs. But guess what? I've paid for fallback connections in the past and when one goes down, the other goes down, so I go out to lunch and see the guys working on the wires in the cabinet down the street. The wires that both my ISPs share. I suppose I could get a satellite ISP? That latency. True redundancy for infrastructure is actually very expensive in most cases.