Thats somehow funny, as GH is closed source and GL is open source...

Makes perfect sense to me. Because GL is open source, it can be easily self hosted, which is great for data residency compliance, or specialized security needs.

Self hosting is never easy. If you nerf the GitLab database by doing something unsupported or because of a bug, good luck with that.

Source: an employer of mine nerfed the GitLab database and support to fix it was not an option, so we had to migrate to their cloud offering.

The gitlab omnibus installation has built in support for backups. Literally just run a single command to create a backup on a network share.

Not having backups for gitlab on prem is just lazy system administration.

It wasn't a problem of losing the DB. The database got corrupted some how. All of the backups eventually became corrupted. This prevented us from upgrading from some version to some other version.

It’s mostly a matter of backups. Only pick self hosted if you can back it up reliably every night.

Self hosting GitLab = Run 1 single Docker Container. Very easy.