> It can achieve better uptime, if you ignore the downtime for upgrades, the downtime for configuration errors, the downtime when the disk fills up...

Besides the last one, the others you can schedule when developers are not actually working on something, or give a headsup so developers can be prepared in case of errors.

In the case of GitHub, Microsoft deploys changes whenever they want, whenever you want it or not.

As I said, it depends on your needs. I don't know if you have ever managed a small gitlab self-hosted installation, but it's really trivial, you set up it the first time, and you forget about it. Also, the upgrade process takes few minutes to complete.

Btw, you cannot compare a scheduled maintenance window with an unplanned downtime ... maybe in the middle of an important deployment.

Most of the upgrades happen outside core work hours, which is easy to manage for smaller companies.

> It can achieve better uptime, if you ignore the downtime for upgrades, the downtime for configuration errors, the downtime when the disk fills up

So 10 minutes a month for upgrades, zero time for the rest because you are managing it just fine.