We're only more reliable when self hosting. GitLab.com is growing very fast and we have availability and speed problems. But I love the 'for now'. We're working to improve .com and we'll keep launching awesome features every month.

That's refreshingly open and honest, thanks!

Why would one assume that their self-hosted git will never go down or will be up more than github?

At least when it's self-hosted, it's your responsibility and you can fix it. When you are anything larger than a tiny company, this is much less risky.

Remember that 'the cloud' just means 'someone else's computers' so you are subject to their infrastructure management practices and uptime guarantees (or lack thereof).

Even for a company much larger than tiny, you're better off with GitHub from a reliability perspective. Most medium companies (up to hundreds of employees) do not have operations staff anywhere near as responsive as GitHub's are.

Look at their status history. The vast majority of companies could not boast such a record for their internal operations.

Not to mention if it's one person who decided to set up the self-hosted solution and then that person leaves. How reliable is it then?

Someone else you pay to keep data safe, up and running to do continuous integration in this particular case.

(Almost certainly) less load, more control over the hardware it's running on.

What makes you think GitLab won't have any downtimes?

You can self-host GitLab, so he's probably talking about that...

GitLab is down for 2minutes per month. GitHub is down second time today for more than 20minutes... can you hear the software and builds breaking? ouch

GitLab is nowhere near the size and popularity of GitHub.