Not really ironic because everybody hosts on GitHub now. The advantages far and away exceed the occasional downtime, unless you have very unusual uptime requirements as, apparently, the article author does.

I mean, I've been using GitHub 15 hours a day for a year, and last week was the first time downtime affected me, and even then I just couldn't push for awhile. That's kind of the whole point of decentralized version control right? So there isn't a single point of failure? I'd say the git ecosystem worked out just perfectly.

I'd say that if someone doesn't find GitHub's feature set to outweigh the level of downtime I've experienced, that person's use pattern probably doesn't fit the characteristics of a typical user. If I'm wrong, expect people to be leaving in droves now. My bet's on not.

I can imagine two situations where GitHub uptime is critical:

1. You're hosting websites via GitHub pages.

I'm hosting both my business and personal websites on GitHub. (Despite the recent outage, GitHub's uptime beats my previous el-cheapo host by a wide margin.)

2. You host client code and issues in a GitHub private repository.

This becomes an issue when clients want to add a bug to the issue tracker, etc.

I just use git init, ssh, and regular unix accounts, because it takes all of about 1 minute to set up, and is "the simplest thing that could possibly work". Presto, no more depending on external servers.