A while back we made the move to managed source control (in our case Subversion) hosting and having done some hunting around we found CVSDude. Despite slightly surferesque name the company seemed to have a shining reputation from blogs, mailing lists and on their own site. Looks like a great deal right? Well yes it is, after 3 months of using their excellent service we couldn’t be happier. The servers have only had one outage in Australian working hours, and support when required is very fast and very accurate. They offer a great web interface to set up users, ACL’s and email notifications, if you already have SVN repositories and wish to migrate, they will import them for you too.
However our first days with them were not so good. Having signed up and dumped down a sum via credit card we started hitting some problems and the oh-too-familiar support black hole. I fired off 3 emails via their support page asking various things that I couldn’t find an answer to in the site.
- I cant register on the forums
- I signed up with a username specific to me and I should have used my company name, and would like it changed
- can we, from the post-commit hook call a URL?
The first two have now been fixed, and I have been assured by Guy Marion of CVSDude that we simply chose the wrong day to sign up and make a payment. As various members of their surprisingly small team (4 at my last count!) were on holidays and they were just working through the teething problems of the new server we had been allocated to. Once we made contact things were very smooth and very well handled. To their credit Mark and Guy were both in contact making sure we were happy and went out of their way to make sure things were set up and ticking along nicely.
My one niggle about the service is point 3 above. We have worked around it though by sending an email, and running a ColdFusion task to process the commit emails. Would I recommend it? Definitely, removing the hassle of upgrade and maintenance, wierd errors and problems from other team members and passing this off to the people that really know Source Control was a very good move. Go check them out! www.cvsdude.com for CVS and SVN!