We are excited to announce that we have now fully upgraded our servers to Subversion 1.7.1, Git 1.7.7.3, and Mercurial 2.0. The latest versions contain new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. See the above links for a full list of what is new.

Subversion 1.7

The upgrade to Subversion 1.7 is particularly interesting. This new version should allow significantly faster access over HTTP(S) due to the addition of what they call HTTPv2. To take advantage of the performance boost, you will need to upgrade your Subversion client to version 1.7 as well, and we recommend that all of our customers do this.

Upgrading your client will also upgrade your checked-out repositories to use the new WC-NG metadata management system. The biggest change here is that you will no longer have .svn directories strewn throughout your project. Now, all repository information will be stored in a single .svn directory at the root of your repository.

Also, Subversion 1.7 comes with a new svnrdump tool that allows you to download a dump of your repository directly from the command-line. You will no longer need to download a backup of your project in order to export your repository as a dump file. You can use this new feature as follows:

svnrdump dump https://myaccount.repositoryhosting.com/svn/myaccount_proj > proj.dump

There are many other changes in the latest version, such as patch support, better merge tracking, and improvements to the serf library. Check out the release notes for the full list.

We have always intended Repository Hosting to cater to an international audience. It is one of the reasons we have priced our services as we have. While other companies have set their prices based on what they think they can get out of their customers, we base ours on what it costs us to actually provide the hosting.

By pricing our services as low as we can, we hope that they will benefit as many people as possible. Whether you are on a small development team in China or Belarus or a large corporation in Brazil, whether a student at university in India or Germany or a consultant in California, whether you have one project or hundreds, Repository Hosting is here to provide you with the tools you need to manage your software development. We are excited to further support our international audience by providing our services in new languages and soon, in new regional data centers.

Chinese Language Support

We decided to start with the largest language group in the world, and are happy to announce that we now support our services in Simplified Chinese. We have quite a number of Chinese customers already and some knowledge of Mandarin Chinese on our team, so it seemed like a natural language to start with. You can click the Chinese flag at the top of this page to take a look.

If you would like to switch the language setting of your account over to Chinese, you may do so easily from the new "Languages and Dates" tab on the Account Settings page. Individual users can also set their language preferences from the My Profile page, and these will override the account settings. These settings affect both the Account Dashboard and Trac (many thanks to everyone who contributed to the Chinese translation of Trac).

Dates and Times

In addition to Chinese language support, we have also added other localization options. You can now specify your preferred timezone, and date and time formats. These settings can also be found on the "Languages and Dates" tab, on the Account Settings and My Profile pages.

What do you think?

How's the translation? Any suggestions about our new features? What other languages would you like to see us support? Please let us know if you have any feedback or ideas by leaving a comment below or sending us an email at support@repositoryhosting.com.

We hope you have seen some improvements in the performance of Repository Hosting recently. Over the last couple of weeks we've made a number of upgrades and optimizations that should improve your experience with our services. One of the changes we made was moving to more powerful servers. As you know, we use Amazon's excellent EC2 service, and we just upgraded our servers from "c1.medium" 32-bit instances to "m1.large" 64-bit instances. This gives us significantly more memory, which had been a bottleneck earlier. Additionally, we have identified a number of slow actions in our code and rewritten them, giving a noticeable performance boost to the dashboard page, especially for accounts with many projects.

We are currently finishing up a number of new features and UI improvements that will be released soon. These new features are aimed at providing more efficient ways to manage large numbers of projects and users, and generally improving the user experience. They include a completely revamped dashboard. Expect to see the release of these new features within the month.

It has been one year since we launched Repository Hosting to fight the injustice of overpriced and unreliable hosting, and in that time we have seen many people come join our band of renegades. We believe that many of you share our frustration with the other hosting services out there, and we have enjoyed developing a service that is simple and reliable in contrast. After launching Repository Hosting last year, we immediately started enhancing our service with powerful new features. We have had the opportunity to talk with many of you and listen to your feedback, and we know that many of you have enjoyed using Repository Hosting as much as we have creating it.

How far we've come

We believe strongly that our customers should not be charged more for additional features that cost us nothing. This is the basis of our motto One Plan, One Price; we will never nickel and dime you, no matter how many features we add. Over the last year we listened to your feedback and have strived to build Repository Hosting into a service that is powerful, simple, and enjoyable. Some of the features we have been busy adding include:

• Eclipse integration
• Free automated backups, including uploading to S3
• Emailing tickets into Trac
• Updating ticket status from log messages
• Sending notifications to Twitter, Campfire, Basecamp, CIA
• Shared Drives with WebDAV access
• Custom themes, logos, and domain masking
• Agile workflow support via Agilo
• Time Tracking support
• Trac plugins

Our Goals for the next year

We have big plans for this year. We are continuing to add the serious features you expect from a repository hosting service, only at our simpler, fairer pricing model. We don’t want to give anthing away too early, but there are some big features coming out soon. Ok, here's one hint: Mercurial.

One thing we would like to improve this year is our communication with you, our customers. That means more frequent blog posts and tweets (@rephosting). It also means better updates to our status page, as there were a few instances this past year where the page was not updated when we had an issue. We are also looking into other methods for improving communication between us and our customers.

We learned this year that our customer base is extremely diverse, as we have customers from all over the world. One of our goals is to make Repository Hosting the most international friendly hosting service. Our plans include data centers in new locations and support for additional languages. If there is a language you would really like to see offered, please let us know, if you haven't already.

As always, we are here to serve you, so let us know if you have any feedback on our services, or if you have any suggestions for new features. Thank you for a great first year.

The Renegades at
Repository Hosting

We should have written this blog entry three years ago -- in fact, we should have started Repository Hosting three years ago.

We know this because during the last three years, we have tried or used practically every Trac, Git, and Subversion hosting service out there. And to be honest, until six months ago, all we had to show for our effort was frustration. We decided to find out why were so frustrated and discovered three distinct answers.

First, so many of the Git and Subversion hosting services are just not reliable. We have tolerated too much downtime for too long. The bottom line is that companies in this industry have tried to cut costs by adopting approaches to infrastructure that are simply not reliable.

Secondly, our industry seems to be full of people who write a small amount of glue code around a handful of open source utilities and charge $25/month for it. We simply do not believe that the value added by these companies can possibly justify these kinds of prices.

Thirdly, and probably the most frustrating thing of all, too many companies obscure their real prices behind complex plans and feature matrices. They charge people like us more money when we have three programmers instead of two, or fifteen projects instead of ten, or want to do something simple like download a backup.

It has to stop -- and we are just the team to stop it.

Repository Hosting confronts each of these issues head on...

1. Reliability: We have leveraged our extensive knowledge of Amazon EC2 to create a reliable, scalable and cost-effective hosting platform at Amazon.
2. Integration: We have chosen to integrate well-established, open source, standards-compliant products in a way that is truly seamless.
3. Pricing Transparency: Finally, we are introducing transparent pricing to the Git and Subversion hosting industry. One Plan, One Price: $6/month (plus $1 for every gigabyte of storage above 2GB). Every feature, every security consideration, every positive support experience is yours.

Are you a solo freelancer with a few active projects over the past year? One Plan, One Price means $6/month. Are you a small web design firm with 15 people and hundreds of projects for which you are responsible? One Plan, One Price means $6/month.

We like to think of ourselves as your own personal team of renegades, bucking mediocrity to bring you the absolute best software project management hosting. Take advantage of our 30 day free trial and you too will wish we had launched Repository Hosting three years ago.

Yours Truly,

The Renegades
of Repository Hosting