Perhaps I am starting down a new and potentially dangerous road with this post, as it is a favorable review of a commercial Web site I have started using. So, I will begin by saying that I am not affiliated in any way with the company mentioned, nor have I been compensated in any way for expressing a favorable opinion. Although the truth is, I would love to sell myself out, its probably not going to happen, and if it did, I would at least be honest about it.

For some time now, I have wanted a better solution for remotely hosting CVS and Subversion (SVN) repositories. A few of my projects are hosted on Sourceforge which offers fairly convenient source control, and there are similar project oriented services out there, but I also have a number of personal and business projects that are not publically available open source projects that I need to have in version control. While I could set up CVS or SVN on one or more of my existing hosting accounts, for various reasons, I thought that a dedicated server/service for this would be better. That way, the development code would be separate from where it is deployed, I could have a dedicated place so that setting up and accessing the repository would be simpler, and backing up the repository could be optimized. Of course, all of this would have to be balanced by the ease of initially setting up this environment as well as its ongoing cost.

Despite its name, I began using CVSDude for SVN hosting, and have been quite pleased so far. Its cheap and dead simple. I name a new module, and CVSDude spits back the URL for accessing it. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. Currently, for $6 a month, you get the following with a “starter” account:

• 100MB of storage
• backups at 10 minute intervals
• access for 2 user accounts
• the ability to upload existing repositories
• alert notifications

As you reach your storage quota for your account, you are automatically notified to upgrade, and of course with upgraded accounts comes not only more storage, but the ability to have more login accounts as well as access to advanced services like Trac and Bugzilla. So, the service works for both small and large teams, and the pricing is quite reasonable at each level.

So far, CVSDude is exactly what I was looking for, and I suspect it may be for many others as well.