This is the second part of of an article looking at how to effectively host a small subversion based project that is no longer going through rapid development. The first part looked at using EC2 to run Subversion and S3 for persistent storage. While an intruiging solution, it raised some concerns.

The alternative solution is to look at outsourcing the hosting of Subversion and ticket management to another provider. The size of our repository is less than 1GB and so I’m using that as the price point. Additionally, there are 2-3 developers who’ll require access to the repository. There are many great “free” services including Google, but this is not an open sourced project so it’s out. In the hosted subversion realm, there are a number of providers with basic accounts to handle this size repository. The following table is a price comparison at the 1GB storage level. Many providers offer a free service for smaller projects with different limitations for bandwidth, tickets and so on so YMMV.

• ¹ Pricing dependent on storage and developers
• ² Offers a cheaper or free plan with less than 1GB of storage.

The real benefit of a hosted solution is the addition of services such as Trac, user management, automated backups and more. If you are looking at building a project with multiple developers who are not in the same physical location, hosting your project with a service is definitely the way to go. It’s cheaper and the overhead of configuring and maintaining your own EC2 instance (or even a dedicated server) increases the costs significantly.

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Tags: hosting, subversion, svn

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 9:55 am and is filed under code, small business, software, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.