I’ve decided to try a hosted version control solution for a new private software project, instead of the local file based solution I have presently. My first criterion is that private project hosting is available, and for convenience multiple projects should be possible. Which version control system was not particularly important but likely to be SVN, and of course I use TortoiseSVNon my PC.

Google is of course the first stop in the search for the hosting, and it quickly points you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities. I sorted the list to find all identified as offering private space and started looking at each in turn.

My first was to look for Origo, that I had found some months ago but which currently has been removed from the list. This free service provides both open and closed projects, and has many features such as a wiki, forum and blog together with an SVN repository. I found the web site confusing at first, it kept switching between the Origo main site and my project site. It also has ftp upload and a release feature which I can’t see how are supposed to be used. The actual project you request appears to be set up manually, but even on a Saturday evening, was quite quick. You get a number of URLs, http://your-project.origo.ethz.ch, https://svn.origo.ethz.ch/your-project and ftp://upload.origo.ethz.ch/your-project . Whereas the features were good, I decided to look at some others.

I next looked at www.bettercodes.org,  This is an impressive site and you can create multiple project and repositories within your account. For private projects it says that there is a 300MB limit, but you can ask for more. The site is clearly attempting to create a social community in a Facebook like manner but works well. The SVN repository https://svn.bettercodes.org/mytestproject1 took some moments to create as I thought at first it wasn’t working. They have a TortoiseSVN video which I found very helpful in showing the basics.

And finally, I looked again at www.assembla.com.  I did look at software project hosting some months ago and was rather put off by the obvious commercialisation. If you look though it they do offer free, private hosting and out of the three, it is probably the easiest to start with. As you might expect all the extras need you to upgrade, but if you want just SVN it’s fine. However each project’s space is a very reasonable 2GB which should be amble since most of the storage will be source code.

Well there it is a little summary of three software project hosting offerings. Not sure which one I’ll go with yet, but I’ll blog again when I’ve decided and used one for some time.