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Advanced Open Source Project Hosting?
asn0 asks: "How do large/popular Open Source/Free Software projects manage their needs for hosting, bandwidth and mirrors? What limitations are there to the size/popularity of projects a site like SourceForge can/will support? Where does a project go for hosting and bandwidth once it out-grows SourceForge, and how hard is it to get hosting, bandwidth and mirrors to support a growing open source project?"
I have a open source project myself, which I used to host on sourceforge. However, after having used Sourceforge for six months or so, I decided to go looking for hosting somewhere else. The main reason for doing this was because I always thought the Sourceforge systems are a bit "clunky" and inflexible, and I wanted total freedom in which services to provide, and how to configure them.
After a while I stumbled upon a company called John Companies. These guys provide virtual FreeBSD / Linux servers; you get root on your own system, a unique IP address, and full freedom in what to do with your system.
Now, these guys are professionals - you just know that from day one. The systems are really well run, I have had almost no problems at all (except one network outage because of a couple of busted routers at their network providers). And the support is fantastic - you can ask them about any problem you may have, and they'll usually get back to you at once. Their prices are low too, $65 a month for a freebsd system, but if you are an open source developer they'll even give you a $20 discount.
The only snag, really, is that you'll have to set everything up yourself. This was my main reason for switching from sourceforge anyway, so it wasn't a problem for me - but others may not want to go through all the work.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with John Companies in any way, except being a very, very satisfied customer.
Yeah, but at least one of those projects is looking for other hosting. There has been discussion on the python-dev mailing list lately about moving away from SourceForge.
Personally, I think that SourceForge is a great tool for small developing projects. It is pretty versatile and works pretty well. However, for a project as large as Python, a more customized and set of development tools may be able to help development. And although SourceForge works pretty well, it's not perfect. Anonymous CVS access only rarely works lately, for example.