I spent years out in the woods with my own projects page that nobody could find and very few cared about, happily cutting trees down with nary a witness. I wanted control over backups, presentation, availability. I was terrified of relying on services that could disappear. I found self promotion distasteful, and I was happy to do the work just for its own sake, for the enjoyment of that process.
But then I wrote something people actually used. And they wanted it on Bitbucket, and then on Github, so they could contribute to it and track its progress.
Now that I've come in from my Zen training out in the wilderness, I feel that the old me who wanted "control" over all of my creations was immature and selfish, abstaining from participation in a community and helping no one but myself. I think that the social aspect of hosted coding sites, both for collaboration and exposure, is much more valuable than the control you get from running the whole show yourself.
Honestly, I'm not super concerned about GitHub disappearing in a puff of octocat ink one day. I know they're around for the long haul and I think they've done great things for open source.
No, I'm more concerned about branding. If someone comes to my site and I direct them somewhere else, I lose them. If they stay on my site and browse around, my site's look and feel is indelibly linked with my code, my projects, and ultimately me as a professional software developer.
Ah, but links can work in the opposite direction. Hosting a project on GitHub can drive traffic to your personal site. To give two data points: GitHub is by far the biggest source of referrals for my personal site, and it's the second-biggest source of referrals for Floobits. Even from a purely selfish point of view, hosting on GitHub is worthwhile. People don't find out about Ag[1] because they know about me. They find out about me because they know about Ag. The incoming visitors far outweigh the exits.
There are many altruistic reasons for using GitHub. Users are far more likely to be comfortable with GitHub's UI than your own site's. It's much easier to contribute to a GitHub project than one hosted elsewhere. Many interactions (such as submitting issues) are standardized across projects.
Someone did an article on HN recently where they were taking back their branding back from various social media outlets. They essentially just added some redirect urls. So domain.dom/plus went to their Google+ page, and domain.dom/fb went to their Facebook page. These URLs would be on their business cards or any place they would put up a link.
Similarly, with something like github, you can still continue to use your domain. You check your web page into a branch "gh-pages" but people access that by visiting projectname.dotname.dom and won't really know they're hitting github (unless they're checking dns records). You can put your `git clone` instructions on your pages, as well as direct download links for releases.
The only thing you might direct people to github for would be issues, but all the description, documents, download links, etc would be under your domain.
For me personally, I guess the biggest reason is being able to control the user's experience, as well as my own. Plus I think it's neat, and it was a fun project to do on a Sunday afternoon :)
You seem to completely misunderstand. People using, forking or contributing to your projects do not want their user experience to be controlled by you. They want their own familiar user experience.
Of course it's a fun project, but it's really meta. Wouldn't it be more fun to work on one of your actual projects ?
FWIW, without an easy way to browse the code online or report bugs, I'd currently consider that a poor experience compared to GitHub. Of course that would no longer apply if more functionality gets added...
I still feel that way, but I'm more concerned about lock-in than control. I can deal with losing an issue tracker, but at least I'm not going to lose the GitHub repo; I've my own fully-independent copy.
The other advantage of using multiple servers, some private, is that it becomes OK to just push to GitHub when you're "done", because for better or worse, pushing something to GitHub that anybody else uses is de facto publishing it.
But then I wrote something people actually used. And they wanted it on Bitbucket, and then on Github, so they could contribute to it and track its progress.
Now that I've come in from my Zen training out in the wilderness, I feel that the old me who wanted "control" over all of my creations was immature and selfish, abstaining from participation in a community and helping no one but myself. I think that the social aspect of hosted coding sites, both for collaboration and exposure, is much more valuable than the control you get from running the whole show yourself.