Although there was some automated backup at the free shared hosting account, that is of little comfort when you've made several changes to a website in one day and realize (too late) that you've lost some important work.

Developers are quite used to some sort of version control system always having their back and this situation is no different.

Visual Studio Online

I signed the Festival up for a free visualstudio.com account which gives you 5 free users and unlimited private repositories. You also get planning/tracking tools and team collaboration capabilities. I'm the only developer so there probably won't be much of that last item happening...

Creating a new project and uploading the existing PHP website was extremely straightforward and within two days of making changes, I was extremely glad to have history available :)

(Note: Github also provides free Bronze plans to non-profit and says they can "work something out if you're not US-based." There is still somewhat of a learning curve associated with Git even using the very nice native apps they've created. Sticking to my goal of "creating the right foundation" and "making it easy for people to help" was enough for me to pick VS.)


Join a community of like-minded developers who want to help Canadian non-profits.