All 100 ideasServers and DevOps
#54 of 100 · Servers and DevOps
A backup forge for GitHub
Git hosting with issues and reviews that mirrors their GitHub repos and issues, so work continues through outages, takedowns or account loss.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay0%
- Want it local or private36%
- Object to subscriptions0%
- Want it open source or self-hosted64%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 11 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Tried, never finished11 Show HN launches do part of this. None does the whole job.
Instead of: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Gitea
The idea, as matched
A reliable alternative or backup for GitHub: git hosting with issues, PRs and review (self-hosted or paid), that mirrors or pulls your repos and their issues so work continues through outages or bans.
Jev first matched 15 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 11 of 15.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Asks follow GitHub outages and takedowns.
- Aug 2026Wants a minimal, offline, GitHub-like system built for agents, with hierarchical agent identities, for security. Read it: a comment in “GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?”
- Aug 2025Wants a service that pulls git repos and delays deletions about 90 days, guarding against a compromised host. Read it: a comment in “AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning”
- Feb 2025Wants GitHub issues, pull requests and other non-code data mirrored to Codeberg automatically as a backup. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?”
- Jun 2023Wants a product with a switch letting developers keep working during GitHub outages; thinks companies would pay. Read it: a post: “Has anybody made a product to help you cope with GitHub outages?”
- Jun 2022Wants a failover or load-balancer-like layer for GitHub projects and source management in case of outages. Read it: a comment in “GitHub actions is down”
- Mar 2022Wants a GitHub alternative with similar UX, CI/CD and free public repos, given its unreliability. Read it: a comment in “Incident with GitHub Actions”
- Mar 2022Asks for alternative source hosting after GitHub complied with a takedown request from another country. Read it: a comment in “China government takedown request for GitHub repos”
- Apr 2017Wants a ready-made machine image or Docker container for hosting private git repositories. Read it: a comment in “How to Host Your Own Private Git Repositories”
- Sep 2015Wants a free GitLab alternative that includes code review, as Gogs lacks it. Read it: a comment in “GitLab 8.0 released with new looks and integrated CI”
- Jul 2013Wants a local git remote host so a small team can work through GitHub downtime. Read it: a comment in “GitHub is "experiencing major service outages"”
- May 2011Wants a WordPress-like, deploy-it-yourself private GitHub-style engine for git. Read it: a comment in “Zed Shaw: Github's Favorite Joke”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.