I think it's a great idea. It would cost me more then $9/mo to setup a box(VPS). Not to mention the hour+ it would take to actually set it up(my time isn't free). Backup isn't a huge issue since it's git and presumably you have multiple devs and dev boxes with a copy of the code.

What might be even more useful and cheaper would be a reverse proxy service that allows you to share your local repo on the public internet. Like showoff.io for git.

The repo limit on github does seem a little bit silly. Limit by disk space makes much more sense.

I still use SVN for a lot of my own personal projects (don't judge me!) and sure I could setup my own SVN server no problem. But I pay a small fee ($50 a year I think.. or maybe $50/6-mos) for SVN hosting.

Same situation: I want private repo's. Past that, the only other thing I really want is not to have to worry about ANYTHING. It needs to be secure, backed-up, and quick, without me ever having to give it a 2nd thought.

For that, I'm happy to pay this small fee.

Why spend money with things like Bit Bucket around? It's a mercurial repo with free private hosting for up to 5 users.

Presumably, he doesn't want to use Mercurial.

Try out git-svn

Yeah! One can always set up the whole thing, but for small shops and freelancers it makes no sense to manage something like this.

Maybe for hackers like us... ;)

Who did your design? It's beautiful! Who does all these amazing designs?

In this case, I did my own design. I always liked design my own stuff. So, I spent only time on this one! ;)

It's brilliant, well done!

Sure, at least you take the worry of server management away, but I think your focus on CLI might not be well justified, as existing CLI tools are already very good and incredibly easy to set-up (aptitude install gitosis; git clone [email protected]:gitosis admin; done!) :)

You have to be a hacker to know how to host a repo now?

Getting a Git repo setup with a web accessible interface is not trivial and for the time spent doing it, you could be doing other things like ... you know ... writing code to make you money.

Gitweb is exceedingly simple to set up...

Gitolite/Gitosis/Gitweb and/or ssh access.

I could do it in ~5 minutes.

I could hack up an MVP of the features that Github has that I care about in maybe a weekend.

That said, I do use and love Github, but I use it for the network effects and general slickness.

If I need a private repo, I get off my fat ass and deploy it in less time than it takes to enter my billing address.

So could most of us, but then again you could do something interesting with your weekend instead.

The Github ruby gem ( https://github.com/defunkt/github-gem ) provides a nice command line interface to the Github API.