Should you host your Subversion & Bugzilla services yourself, or go with a service provider?

If you have read my whitepaper, “Four Essential Tools for Software Development,” you will know that I am a big believer in tools for version management and defect tracking.  I am in the process of starting up a distributed development project, involving individuals from a number of different organizations.  In the spirit of practicing what I preach, I wanted to set up a Subversion repository and a Bugzilla database for the project.  Because there were multiple organizations involved, I would have to host these utilities outside my firewall.

Though I have used both Subversion and Bugzilla extensively, I am not an expert at setting them up.  I spent a day playing with setting them up, and found that Bugzilla was particularly finicky in its setup.  I then tried to host these services with the hosting service that is hosting my website.  This didn’t work, as they were not willing to either install the software or give me root access to do it myself.  Nothing against the hosting service — this is not their business, and they didn’t want change their hosting policies to suit just a single customer.  They did offer me a dedicated server, which is way more than I need, for much more than I was willing to pay.  Plus I would still have to install the software myself.

At the recommendation of a colleage, I investigated CVSDude.com, a hosting service specifically for software developers.  They provide both Subversion and Bugzilla, plus other services as well.  Click, click, click, and in five minutes I had an account.  And the level of service I want is about $30 per month, significantly cheaper than a dedicated server.  So I am going to go this route.  Google-ing “subversion hosting” leads to a couple of other hosting companies offering similar services.  I chose CVSDude because my colleague was already using it, and spoke well of its service.

I have two concerns with hosting my sources via a service provider.  First, what if the company goes out of business?  The corporate policy for CVSDude states that they will give me a 90 day window to recover my data.  This is all well and good, but I’m a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy…  CVSDude also provides me the ability to download a dump of my repository every night onto my servers, which I take advantage of to keep my sources in my hot little hands.  The second concern I have is with the Intellectual Property embodied in my source code.  What happens if a rogue employee takes my sources and sells them to a competitor?  Perhaps a bit farfetched, but I do get concerned about such things occasionally.  CVSDude does have a reasonable Data Confidentiality Agreement, which states that they will take reasonable efforts to keep my data secret.  Good enough for me for this particular project.

So, I am going with CVSDude for this project, and probably others in the future.  It has been hassle free so far, and cheaper than I could put an external hosting solution together myself.