Yep! Self-hosters are able to scale at their own needs, whereas gitlab.com is a free service used as a promotional tool and technical demo, and thus has way more scale than any single company would be expected to handle. Our little code site is easily managed by me (and I check that backups are made, but I don’t really test them, because for my use I already have a copy of all the important info in my repo locally…)
Also, making more targets is one method for combating bad actors (both private and government). Granted that scripting can take out a bunch of sites, so that is a case by case basis.
What’s it called… what is that premise that multiple targets make it harder to attack? I feel like there is a specific term for it, but I can’t find it with my search. Anyhow, self-hosting in particular, and GitLab specifically, benefit from that. Like GitHub before it, having a single point of failure for a large amount of code isn’t the best plan.
I ran into trouble with the first incarnation of ATC, because I was partially-hosting it through a company that provided GitLab hosting. But they didn’t last, and self-hosting GitLab is actually a fairly straight-forward process, if one is familiar with ssh.
Aside: remember Gitorious? That was fun. And technically the entity we are discussing.
It is an interesting topic, to be sure. I wouldn’t say self-hosting a federated social network is a good idea, despite my own personal history is self-hosting all of them. But generally I think self-hosting is more resilient than a single *aaS provider, despite their relative competency. 