“Sure, you get what you pay for.” — Those are the final words of a GitHub user in the forum, after his account got “flagged” (which is the word they use for banned) a month ago with no answer from the support team.

I’ve got myself on the same situation this week.

Trying to cut on expenses as much as possible, even though we are not that much of a consumerists kind, I tried to set this website on GitHub Pages, and avoid paying around 5 Euros each month for the VPS. In the VPS I have this website, the email server, and other projects going on, but I decided to sacrifice them to the siren songs of gratuity. A couple of days after the site was deployed, my account got “flagged” and the website unreachable.

The warning banner said to write to the support team so they can activate my account. It seemed very easy, right? …Right?

After a couple of days with no answers for the support team on my ticket, I logged in and search in the help pages, finding the above mentioned discussion and three others on the same topic with the same output. More interestingly, the community member who answered to the question seemed hurried to his answer being marked as accepted, maybe GitHub gives some reward for accepted answers? I don’t know.

Then I looked up on YouTube as final alternative, and found that people suggested closing the account and opening a new one with an Outlook’s email address. As it is from Microsoft, you should have no problems.

Of course I returned to my VPS, which luckily I had not closed because I had recently renewed it for a month. I am using 1984 for hosting this website. They are affordable, do not ban anyone, run on green energy, have a personalized support, the service is really easy to use, etc.

This experience though that You get what you pay for, and there is nothing better that what is your own.

Update

In fact, today 04/17 I received the response to the ticket that I opened on the help page to re-enable my account. The problem was, the person tells me, that I used an alias as email address and not a real email address. The solution is to change that alias to a real email address and let them know when it’s done.

What I have decided is to stay with the active VPS for a few months and see how things go on one and the other. If I publish frequently, I dedicate time to the blog, and somehow it becomes self-sustaining, so I would stay with it on the VPS since it offers more security and privacy. If, on the contrary, it is not feasible to maintain the monthly payment of the VPS, then it would go completely to GitHub Pages.