Github is not really free for your public/open source projects

I use Github a lot, it’s a really nice way to get your git repository online in a jiffy. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that Github is free. When you host a repository on Github, you are giving them a lot of traffic for hosting your repository. I for one hesitate to share the traffic generated by my content in return for free git hosting. I don’t have the exact numbers as they have removed the traffic graphs recently. Fortunately the announcement for the traffic graphs ( which was released 4 years ago ) has some numbers:

github-traffic 200K views in 3 months

As you can see, a popular project like rails is giving them 200K pageviews in 3 months, that is a lot of eyeballs in return for hosting a git repository for free. And these numbers are from 4 years ago, I bet they have only grown since then. Also not every project is as popular as rails, But, with the Law of averages on their side, I am sure Github is being paid handsomely for their free hosting. As they say There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

I need the traffic from my repos more than github does, so I am looking for alternatives.


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