Hi Simon,

Good question and thanks for the contact!

When I first published this article … Github’s free plan did not include unlimited private repositories as it does now. I saw this as a method to put even my less important projects under version control without exhausting my private repository quota. I also thought it beneficial to have an understanding of one of the lesser known features of Git … that is that I could backup and collaborate on my Git repositories from “anywhere” and wasn’t dependent upon a Git hosting provider. :)

Even though hosting providers such as Github make sense for the majority of use cases today with their unlimited quotas, this solution may still have benefit for individuals or small teams who either:

• don’t want the overhead of setting up or managing accounts on a hosting provider

or

• they are in some way restricted and still need an alternative to a hosting provider