Hosted Version Control

At work, we have the luck to have a dedicated change control team; they maintain a few separate version control systems for many, many projects. However, at home, I just work on one box and have a subversion server installed on a second. The only problem is backing things up, which is the most important reason for version control.

If you have important code - and I'd argue everything you write to keep more than a week is important - it's really, really crucial to back it up. Backing it up in the house is fine; I have two computers here, but that's still one point of failure, and I'm out of backups. If the primary fails and I find out too late the backup didn't quite work, I'm out of luck.

If you get to the point you have two backups in the same house, it's just as easy to keep the second backup at a friend's, with network speeds what they are. The problem is that you're then spending a not-insignificant amount of time working on keeping backups, and that feels more like work, and less like learning or leisure.

So I'm looking into hosted subversion plans. Here's the chart of the first three that were recommended, comparing their entry-level plans.

  Assembla Unfuddle Beanstalk
Cost of Cheapest Plan $3/user, 30c/100MB * Free Free
Storage 100 MB+ 200 MB 100 MB

*: Free for open source projects, but so is Sourceforge.

That might not be terribly relevant for anyone else; I didn't compare the number of users allowed, and really didn't look at any heavy-use plans. Assembla and Unfuddle also come with ticket tracking and a number of Agile tools built on top. Beanstalk appears to tie into third-party apps the best, including BaseCamp, FogBugz, and Twitter.

I'll go with Assembla or Unfuddle, as I prefer not to have to pay for BaseCamp if I want to add extra features. If I were doing this on a corporate level, I'd put Beanstalk back into consideration.

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