Many people over the past few months, have been asking the same questions over and over again about the services over at XP-Dev.com. I don’t mind answering them with the same answers, but I think it is time to put all of these questions into one place and discuss them.
Why are you offering Subversion Hosting for free ? Is it too good to be true ?
Let me set something straight:
I offer it free because I really do not believe that anyone should pay for something so simple to setup and run as Subversion.
Here is the reality: I setup Apache using mod_svn, mod_dav, mod_ssl and mod_auth_mysql once. Believe me: only once and never ever ever ever (ever!) touched it again. No, I am not kidding – only once! No tinkering needed, it just runs like Forrest Gump (no pun intended to all you Gump fans out there).
It does cost $$$ to host it, including my time to add more features to it. Disk space and bandwidth is getting cheaper. They are not free, but then again, if you average it across the number of users that I have on XP-Dev.com, the figure looks really, really small. It is a cost nonetheless, which I’ll try to cover below.
So, we’ve established it does cost money, how are you covering these costs ? Are you really rich ?
OK. I wish I was rich, but the truth is – I am not. I could claim I was rich and lie to you all, but then I would not get any glory every time I look at my monthly bank statements.
So, where does the money come from to pay for the services ? Well, at the moment, I am paying for it. But I won’t be doing this forever.
I have got a few models to generate revenue and these models will be implemented in the next few months. I can’t reveal them to the public just yet, but rest assured that the usage of Subversion and project tracking on XP-Dev.com will always remain free. This is how I started and envisaged XP-Dev.com, and that is how it will always be.
Free Subversion Hosting and Project Tracking on XP-Dev.com is a life-time guarantee.
You’re offering a free service. There’s a catch to it, right ? Are you selling our code to someone else ?
No. Nada. No catch. I am not a petty code trader. I don’t go around knocking on other peoples doors saying “PHP codez $4 per line! .. $3.50 per line! .. $3.40 per line! ..”. I could not even be the least bothered about what everyone else is coding. I have my own ideas to push forward and materialise (one of them is XP-Dev.com, there are a lot more in the pipeline).
So, your code is safe on our servers. No one else other than the ones you have permissioned are looking at your repositories. We do have backups that run every night and copied over off-site, but they are all encrypted before leaving the server.
I put all my code on XP-Dev.com. I am a consumer of my own service. I believe that anyone who offers a service should always be their own users/clients/customers. You should see your service from the customers point of view.
If someone else looked at my code and data, I’d be really worried. I respect that tremendously and try my very best to lock down the server.
What you see is what you get – WYSIWYG. There are no catches at all. Your code and data are safe. We have a “no prying eyes” and “mind your own business” policy.
OK. So it is a genuine service that is FREE with no strings attached. Then I suppose it will have to be an overloaded, slow service ?
Never! This is one of the things that come out from being a consumer of your own service. If the services do get slow, there’s going to be one really noisy, angry, verbal user – me. And I’m really scared of him.
On a serious note, I’d be disappointed with myself if the service ever comes to a unacceptable quality. At the moment it’s fast and quick and I intend on keeping it that way. If it every becomes slow, I’ll be there in front of the queue shouting.
I’m not too sure if this is a good thing, or a bad thing – I’ve only ever worked in the Front Office for Investment Banks building real-time (well, its near real-time) trading and pricing system. They are all high performance scalable systems. The systems I work on can cost a trader anywhere between $100,000 to $500,000 if latency went up a nudge above 10ms (yes, that’s milliseconds!). XP-Dev.com is a testament of my experience building & architecting these crazy systems (trust me, they are crazy!). If performance degrades, it will be a major failure on my part and I’m a really proud person 🙂 .
It is a great service. How can I help ?
This reply is a cliche. There are a few ways you can help.
If you are not a user, register now!
If you are a user, and have any problems, queries or just want to say thank you, then please tell me, or email admin@xp-dev.com. Every single non-spam email that goes there gets a reply. If you don’t get a reply in a few hours, then it’s probably SpamAssassin acting up. You should use this form instead.
If you are a user, or not even one just yet – you can help by telling your friends, mom, dad, brothers, sisters, relatives, neighbours, cats, dogs, fish and everyone else about XP-Dev.com. Digg it, Buzz it, Reddit. Do whatever. Just keep spreading the word. I really appreciate it.
If you have any other questions or concerns, please post them as comments to this blog entry, or do contact me directly.