GitLab seems to suffer from a similar conundrum, and they also seem to have gained a reputation for being unstable. Which is sad. In my experience, GitLab is very stable, nowadays, but it will probably never fully recover from its first impressions for some people.
Thanks for your comment, we really appreciate your feedback about GitLab. Our team is working hard on improving the availability and stability of the platform. Our goal is currently to achieve 99.95% availability on GitLab.com.
According to Pingdom, over the last year our availability has been 99.81%, although this includes the large (multi-hour) maintenance window on 11 August 2018 when we migrated GitLab.com from Microsoft Azure cloud to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Since the migration, our availability has improved greatly (caveat: we obviously have much less data than from Azure).
There are multiple reasons for this improvement. We chose Google Cloud Platform because we believe that they offer the most reliable cloud platform for our workload, particularly as we move towards running GitLab.com in Kubernetes. It is worth pointing out that we also used the migration as an opportunity to improve our infrastructure, simplify some components and otherwise make things more stable and more observable. Finally, we've also been focusing on building the infrastructure team up, having hired many new team members over the past few months. This means that the team has been better able to balance the job of running GitLab.com with making it more stable.
