Ask HN: Opinion on premium private git/svn/hg hosting
I've been working on an enterprise software development portal for the last two years and I'm now close to a beta product. I was never planning on deploying my portal as a hosted/cloud solution, but I've been thinking lately this might make sense in the beginning.

What I want to know is what are your opinions on premium private git/svn/hg hosting? The services that I will be offering will be unique to what github/bicketbucket/etc are currently offering and it'll also be more expensive. Below are my differentiating features:

- Private virtual machine for each company. This is for security and privacy reasons. Each virtual machine will have their own unique root password and you won't have login access. The root passwords for each machine will also be stored in encrypted form on our side. We will also offer encrypted filesystems via truecrypt to ensure your source code is secure as possible.

- You can index your source code for any root tree. For example, if your git repository contains 1000 commits, you'll be able to create 1000 source code indexes. Obviously the number of source code indexes that you can create will be bounded by disk space. To put this into perspective, the linux kernel, which contains about 35,000 files uses about 200 MB for each root tree.

- We index the crap out of your SCM repository and you can access this indexed information via the web or your command line. This means you can search for a word on your command line, for any indexed source tree. Find the file that contains the word and then open up the file using your favorite editor. In the future we will integrate this into IDEs like eclipse, netbean, etc.

- We provide source code abstraction. Unless you have a very large code base, you probably won't care about this.

- We provide code churn reports (lines added, deleted, and modified from point a to point b). You can create code churn reports on a day to day basis, weekly basis, monthly, quarterly, milestone to milestone, etc. And when combined with our source file abstraction, you'll be able to produce some pretty useful metrics. For example, you'll be able to break down churn based on modules, software licenses, internal tool changes, by committers/authors, etc.

So as you can see, we are definitely targeting users who need more of an online enterprise solution. We will also have a different charging method compared to the other hosting sites. We will charge based on disk space usage, like others do, but we also charge based on how many unique elements (git blobs if you are familiar with git) that are in your repository. Since we do so much indexing, we have to charge appropriately, which means the more complex your code base, the more we will have to charge. To put this into perspective, the linux kernel contains about 500,000 unique elements. The Rails project contains about 14,000 elements.

I haven't figured out the pricing, but I'm guessing a small organization with about 10 programmers and small code base (10,000 or less unique elements) will be charged about $500-$1000 a month. For a small shop, it will be like paying $6,000 - $12,000 a year for an employee to ensure your source code is managed properly and have access to some pretty useful indexed information from anywhere in the world.

Given what we are thinking about, do you think there is a more market for premium private git/svn/hg hosting?