I did this when I was a student, and I recently had to move over the private repos to bitbucket when it expired. Just stick to bitbucket for private repos.
GitHub is a pretty great service (IMO). Totally worth paying for. If cost is your number one driving force, then sure -- go with Bitbucket -- but I think GitHub provides a way better experience (for users and developers).
Charging by repository count, rather than some saner metric more indicative of actual usage (like number of users) is a deal breaker.
Got tired of waiting for Github to stop excluding my team because of the repo count nonsense, went to Bitbucket, never looked back.
Would gladly have paid Github a reasonable amount of money, but according to their silly metric, my little team required a Platinum account.
$20 a month for our sized team at Bitbucket and we have unlimited everything. For $25 a month at Github, we'd already be out of repositories just versioning our dotfiles.
I do agree that by charging by repository count they are losing a large number of customers who run small web design and development shops. If GitHub price per person rather than per repository, they would gain so many more paid for customers.
As far as I'm concerned, one of the best features of git is how easy it is to create new repos. Setting up a new repo for a new weekend side project, or splitting out a large codebase that's gotten unwieldy into a few separate repos, should be a no-brainer.
BitBucket lets me have as many private repos as I want, since they make their money when you want to add collaborators; GitHub's payment structure forces me to consciously think about how many repositories I have. I prefer GitHub to BitBucket in terms of their web UI/UX, but I really don't like that psychological shift.
You understand to create a repo you issue one command, regardless of whether you use git or hg? Also, GitHub doesn't support Hg is a major drawback for a lot of people. Git has a relatively higher learning curve, although certain commands in Git are really really awesome I have to admit.
Honestly this has never been a problem for me. How many private repos do you really need? It can't cost that much per month. The things most people are working on just aren't that important. Or better yet, they _benefit_ from being public.
I'm like the guy you replied to. I make a lot of repos in the course of work, play, and learning. Most of them I'd like to keep around, including history. I could fit everything on one CD; storage is cheap. Github would want $100/month to host those repositories. BB wants nothing, or http://repositoryhosting.com will host them all with backups for $6.
I don't have to think about costs when typing "git init", and I don't have to think about scrubbing passwords/keys/personal information when typing "git push"; repo-count pricing and public by default have high psychological overhead. GH's pricing doesn't work for me, so I don't keep my private repos there. Not a big deal, but I also don't think it indicates there's something wrong with how I work, the value of my code, or how I spend my money.
Seriously? I have 20 different Git repos for various things that either can't or simply don't make sense to be public. Sure, GitHub's great and I have a paid account with them (not even the minimum), but I certainly have to rely on BitBucket as well.
It's not always because I don't want to pay. In my case for example, I don't have a job, credit card, bank account or any other source of income. I simply can't play for a monthly subscription for version control. how do I explain it to my parents who are middle class indians and only have limited computer exposure, because they will be the one paying for it. Believe it or not, hosted version control is luxury for people not getting paid and Bitbucket lets me have that luxury without all the hassle for figuring out how to pay for it and I am very grateful to them for it.
GitHub hosts public repositories for free, so this doesn't seem to directly apply.
GitHub is phenomenal software, and I'm happy to pay for it. If you're not in a situation to pay for it, I feel for you, but software is a lot of really, really, really hard work, and I don't expect to receive the fruit of that work for free. As a programmer, I would hope you would feel the same way, even if you don't decide to pay for said software.
Github is great for everyone but agencies who have a high number of repositories.
Bitbucket is great for us as it's per user pricing instead of per repository pricing that Github has.
Github is fantastic for opensource projects or people with a low number of repositories - It's handy if you only plan on having a couple of repositories (if you are a SaaS etc).
I don't see the advantage of using one Git repository to another. For me all of them just allow me to do git pull/push/log/etc...
I stick to Bitbucket for all my private stuff and even some public stuff. Whoever cares about my public code has to do exactly the same process in Bitbucket as in Github (i.e., just gets the URL and goes there to see the code).
What experience do you find better in Github? (note, I use Github for work )
