CVSDude’s 2009 is off to a promising start. The Australian-based provider of hosting software environment development just reported that January was the company’s biggest month of revenue in its six-year history, despite the worldwide economic downturn. And CVSDude recently acquired an Australian competitor, SharpForge, a project management SaaS company. Now, the company is trying to make its mark on Silicon Valley with a relocation of its headquarters to Palo Alto.
CVSDude said that “increased customer focus” was the primary reason for the move. Two-thirds of the company’s 3,000 clients are located in North America.
So why does an early stage start-up like CVSDude appear to be flourishing when many established tech companies are just barely managing to stay alive in the current economy? CVSDude’s software streamlines software development projects between developers and clients. And they’ve made some wise decisions in the past year. Last February, we reported that CVSDude partnered with oDesk, an online marketplace for developers. Additionally, CVSDude’s “cloud-based” systems allow developers, in different locations, to work on the same set of code without having to worry about redundancy and conflicts. For the company’s clients, which include Apple, Stanford University, and Intel, CVSDude’s software promises productivity in an economic climate where efficiency is crucial.
Good to hear they are doing well. Development in the cloud is definitely on the rise and increased customer focus will certianly do the trick to get them trough the ecocrunch.
Good to see my fellow Aussie’s are making a great go of it! It’s always great to read stories like this – particularly these days!
There’s no shortage of tools on the internet, is there?
I must be missing something here.
Looking at their pages it looks like they’re offering hosted subversion and throwing in trac and bugzilla into the mix.
Seems like it’d take less than a week to put together a service like this on Amazon EC2 with backup to S3.
It’ll be as robust and as secure as what they offer.
“CVSDude’s “cloud-based” systems allow developers, in different locations, to work on the same set of code without having to worry about redundancy and conflicts.”
WTF??? Any CVS host does that.
http://www.goog...lient=firefox-a
I’ve used CVSDude for the last six months, and regret that I moved my codebase there. Their servers are always going down, being unresponsive, being slow. They claim it’s just one server (called mirror5, avoid that server if you sign up) but why don’t they just replace it then?
Plus support on the forums is slow, and telephone support is completely non-existent. I’m waiting for a more competent company to come along and eat their lunch.
No point using the forums, just moan on twitter (like I did http://twitter....atus/1142389037) and they will email you access to their private beta!
Hi Leena- Thank you for the article!
Dror- You’re right- most admins can download SVN (and Trac & Bugz), patch & upgrade them, configure fine-grained permissions, back up to offsite servers or S3, integrate SVN with your in-house tools, provide in-house support, etc. If you’re doing this for yourself alone, it’s pretty easy– although we do have free plans
. But maintaining >99.9% uptime is tougher, particularly as your organization scales. And you wouldn’t get access to purpose-built web GUI, expert support, 10-min backups, etc. etc.
See also http://blog.cvs...ing-it-yourself.
No, most people nowadays use GitHub and Lighthouse and not some obsolete versioning and bugtracking tools.
Oh, and Unfuddle for fully integrated system.
99.9% uptime is laughable. CVSDude is down at least 1 hour every day. Look at your own forum, it’s full of complaints of downtime and connection errors:
http://forum.cv...ewforum.php?f=8
Guy,
I tend to agree that for some organizations it would make sense to outsource this to third party. Of all the things a tech company does, it seems like one that’s not too hard. Then again, it’s sometimes easy for the techie crowd to forget that not every company has the expertise, or want to spend time/money on setting servers and managing packages. For us it’s easy, and I don’t believe we’re spending more than 5% of an Admin time on this, but for other companies it might be different.
More for information >>> http://kisalt.net/fb
We have just launched an online repository hosting service that we believe changes the face of the repository hosting industry.
Unlike some of the older suppliers, we have only one plan and it costs $6 per month. This plan allows unlimited users, unlimited projects, unlimited trac instances, unlimited Subversion and Git repositories, SSL and more.
There is a 30 Day Free Trial so come and check us out.
Why is everybody offering Trac! Have you heard of Redmine?
I’ve been using CVSDude for many years and have been happy with the service. I have not experienced much downtime and I’ve come to trust their service more than I would trust myself maintaining and backing up my own version system.
They are not perfect but they are pretty good. The times I needed to contact support went well. I’ve never had a serious issue yet.
I’ve seen CVSDude grow over the years from pretty much a one man shop to an actual company. I’m sure there were growing pains and there probably will be more from the sound of it. Moving to California?
As long as they keep their service offerings competitive (service and price wise) and keep my code safe I am comfortable hosting my source with them.
Git might be the future of DVCS but SVN is still strong and effective. Plus remember their name is CVSDude. They started with CVS and moved to SVN. I am sure they have discussed DVCS and would not be surprised if they started offering Git hosting sometime in the future when they have the capability to support it.
GitHub is more than just Git. For example, it allows you to add line- or commit-level comments on teammate commits, which facilitates the code review process. This feature alone is invaluable.
We use CVS Dude at Huddle, and they’ve been largely solid, but when it goes wrong it goes spectacularly wrong.
We had a sustained outage a couple of weeks ago where our entire dev team was out of action for three days.
We’ve now been moved to the CVSDude beta platform which seems reliable and speedy, but I’m not sure I would outsource such a business critical function again – especially one that only needs an antique Linux box and a decent backup plan to match their three-nines reliability.
I have been using CVSDude for the past 2 years and they have been great. I have not had the outages that people are taking about and have found support to be responsive (I have not tried the forums).
We are just in the process of moving to a larger plan with them and I’m looking forward to helping them grow as they help us grow.
I would give them a shot and come to your own conclusions. Sure there might be some growing pains but than happens with all companies.
CVSDude…just left them. They were pretty crappy with outages.
it is good that they are not affected by the economic crisis. There is a technique that they implemented to get through it. proper management and customer focus are some of them. In the world’s situation now, we must all learn how to handle our money and be prepared for different circumstances that we may encounter.
CSV Dudes is sloooow.
Assembla is *much* better.
Even better: Host SVN yourself. That is what we do next.
CVSDude can get extremely slow and outages are common. Very infuriating.
Hi all,
Been great to see all the comments, please note we have our new infrastructure released within weeks, it has been in beta for over 6 months and has over 100 commercial accounts and 1000’s of developers using it right now.
We have had overwhelmingly positive comments on it.
If you wish to try out our new service please submit a ticket to us via our website, we look forward to impressing you.
Thanks all
Jason
CVSDude rocks. Nice to hear they are moving to Sunny nor-cal.
I’ve been a paid user of cvsdude.com for about 6 months now and the service is great and reliable.
I use it for both hosted Bugzilla and SVN.
I had 1 outage that lasted an hour over this perdio. I have teams across 3 continents checking code out and in around the clock and they are all cranking code happily. Most Bugzilla hosted solutions cost more for a team than CVSDude.
I’ve used my own hosted bugzila and SVN before on my own linux boxes and had more downtime and paid more in admin time to handle backups, uptime, migration, etc…
I highly recommend their service.
We have used CVSDude for the past 6 months for SVN hosting and found that it meets our needs. We have a small distributed team and don’t have the time/energy to bother hosting this stuff ourselves. We had it on one of our own servers for a while but it was simple and cost effective to oursource. We also installed trac, which, despite the negative comments here, we find to be easy to use and it meet our business needs for the meantime when it comes to bugs and project management. Overall, I would say CVSDude has been a headache reduction mechanism for us. I’m a fan.
Spencer
CEO, ApexMD
try essentiaesp, indian company, rockbottom price for what they offer. good support though.
http://in.sys-c...com/node/775507