Cheap Subversion Repository Hosting with Dreamhost

Photo: Jan Tik

A couple of weeks ago, I had a computing scare. I got up on Sunday morning, was reading my email and suddenly my laptop went dead. It didn't crash, didn't throw some major error. It just went completely black.

I did some freaking out and contingency planning before I finally figured out what happened: the power adapter failed and the battery just went dead without notification. Irritating, but not the end of the world.

However, like every other computing disaster, it can serve as a call to being better about making sure that none of my important data, documents or code are vulnerable to a single point of failure.

As with most people, the first time something like this happened, I started with the media files (music, images, etc.) and have had those taken care of for a long time. Multiple 200GB drives make sure that my music isn't going to be toast any time soon.

For code, I've been using Subversion, though not nearly as consistently as I should be. However, it's on a machine at my house. That's been bothering me more and more for 2 reasons.

1. Any disaster that's tied to the location (flood, tornado, etc.) will render all of my onsite repositories useless.
2. Given how few transactions I actually send to this service and how many servers I'm running at home, I'd like to consolidate and cut back on the electricity usage a bit.

So, I started looking into Subversion hosting offsite. Unfortunately, I wasn't happy with most of the offerings. The "open source" ones were oriented to individual projects and many came with licensing restrictions. I really want to just be able to store anything worth versioning in a repository. That left Google Code, Sourceforge, etc. out of the running.

Lots of others were out there, but had high costs, weird restrictions (only 1 repository, only 5 users) and otherwise just seemed even worse than what I already had.

Then I ran across the fact that Dreamhost's basic hosting service, includes Subversion. Unlimited repositories, 200GB of storage and more bandwidth than any reasonable repository could use for $7.95/month if you pay in advance. $9.95 if you pay month to month. Both payment plans have a $49.95 setup fee. However, you can use the code: GLASSTOOBIG and get the setup fee waived (I get a bit of a commission from their end).

When I signed up, their Subversion installation was a bit out of date, but it's since been upgraded to a more recent version. And, so far, the whole setup is humming along nicely.

I've set up a few logical repositories to start with:

• Documents
• Development (Code)
• Downloads (Digital copies of software I've bought, including keys, fonts, etc.)

Then, I'm creating some that are specific and on their own. This includes my plans to migrate the existing repositories offsite as well as some project-specific bits. For most of these, I'm separating them if they'll be used by people other than me.

So, the repository for my RSS desktop project is in its own and I created a separate repository for my Scite configuration files and scripts. That's due in part because I figured I'd end up sharing my set of tools in case someone doesn't want to start from scratch. For me, it lets me keep all of my workstations in sync with any config changes I make to Scite.

So, if you want to see my Scite configuration, you can do an SVN checkout of this URL:
http://www.gtbvault.com/scite/dist

and you'll get a fully functional Windows Scite installation, including all of my customizations.

I use TortoiseSVN as my client, but also install the commandline tools for scripting and automating.

The added bonus is that, since this is a regular hosting account, you can do regular PHP applications as well. I'm using my account for project management tools, collaboration tools, file distribution, etc. on the domain gtbvault.com (Glass Too Big Vault). I can then also do more of my experimental stuff over there and do less jeopardizing of this site due to a wayward script taking over.

If you're looking at SVN hosting options, especially for you and a few other people, I'd definitely give them a shot.