I previously wrote about a new website publishing workflow that used Netlify CDN as the front end, using my own Private GitLab repository, hosted on an OpenVZ 2GB SSD VPS from Hosted Simply. I wanted to have my own fully private repo for projects and to host the websites I maintain for as little expense as possible.

So about that.

After having my VPS shut off by the Hosting company due to high CPU usage, and experiencing multiple build failures and web interface non-responsiveness, I tweaked every setting that I could, disabled everything non-essential to running GitLab, and finally gave in.

Turns out that following GitHubs acquisition by Microsoft in late 2018 they decided to make private repos completely free and announced that in January this year. By that time I’d already built my GitLab instance, but with the issues I was having I decided to switch between the two. Turns out that took all of about one hour, Netlify integrated without complaint and my GitLab is now disabled.

I don’t blame the hosting company for protecting other users in the OpenVZ Shared environment, that’s totally fine. Ultimately the 2GB VPS simply wasn’t enough for the GitLab instance to function on. Looking back there were some updates applied that fixed a bug I was experiencing but bundled with that bug fix was new functionality that caused higher memory and CPU usage. Hence what used to work (just barely) on my VPS, would no longer function reliably without a higher spec.

GitLab has a lot of enterprise-type features that ran in the background and consumed all of the memory with a lot of performance issues on the VPS I had available. If I didn’t mind spending more money I could have reinstalled it (and maybe in future I will do that) but for now GitHub is working much better with Netlify and technically it’s free - so there’s that.