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