At the moment my company is dead in the water due to yet another GitHub outage. They seem to hit weekly now. I'm considering switching to another provider today.<p>How does Bitbucket stack up in terms of reliability? Features are sort of irrelevant compared to recurring downtime.
Personally I love Bitbucket. Unfortunately you'll get scoffed at by the "true nerds" for using such a second rate product (aka less trendy). Their new UI is really awesome and you really can't beat the price (free).
As a bitbucket user I can say that I've been using it for about 14 months and I can only recall one outage. But take that info with a grain of salt.<p>It may not be github's software as much as they are the number 1 git hosting service and therefore they are the biggest target for hackers.<p>I might be talking out of my ass here but it feels a bit like the argument for using Apple versus MS, i.e. there are no viruses for Macs since they are more secure... until Apple grew in popularity, which then attracted more hackers to write viruses for Apple's OS, which showed that it is was not invulnerable.<p>I doubt Bitbucket will supplant Github as the goto git hosting service, but if they grow they might be subject to more attacks? Just a thought to consider.
I use Github professionally, and for my open source projects. The visibility of a project on Github is hard to beat, and is often found just because it's on Github. Outages usually come on the front-end, and often I've been able to push to Github within minutes of finding an outage. That said, we're a small company with almost no remote collaboration on a given project, so outage doesn't affect us much.<p>However, for my serious, closed-source projects (that I might want to become products) I use Bitbucket. So far I've experienced no outages.
How does a github outtage cause you to go 'dead in the water'. You're still using git.
If you need to share code among devs, you could always use git-daemon[1].<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-daemon.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-daemon.h...</a>
From personal experience, in 2 years on Bitbucket I can remember one unscheduled outage and that was only a few minutes IIRC. This from daily use at UK time.<p>And to echo xauronx, the new UI really is great and pretty much did for my Github envy.
If you want to use BitBucket, but still get the exposure of GitHub, its relatively easy to setup an hourly sync.<p>Just turn off the wiki and issue tracker at GitHub, and link to the BitBucket ones in your README or something like that.