GitHub, aimed at all programmers from independent developers to collaborative groups to corporate enterprises, is the world's largest code host with 18.7 million code repositories from 8.2 million users and hundreds of thousands of organizations. In addition to hosting open-source codebases and websites from tech industry giants such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and Amazon, GitHub is also used by more than 400 government organizations including The National Cancer Informatics Program at NIH's National Cancer Institute, The DOE Joint Genome Institute, [Los Alamos National Laboratory](https://github.com/LANL, https://github.com/LANL-Bioinformatics), NASA, The White House, FDA, and NIST.
Although GitHub has a diverse and active open-source community and provides significant utility for collaborative programming (e.g., a system to submit and track bug reports and feature requests), the fundamental core service provided by GitHub is to host git repositories. Git, a version control system to track and document changes in digital documents, will always be free and open source due to the way it is licensed. As such, the code and data we host on GitHub can easily be hosted on another free platform (e.g., BitBucket) and/or on existing lab servers with no change to the product that colleagues receive when they download a repository.
Since websites hosted on GitHub via the GitHub Pages feature are allowed to use custom domain names (e.g., http://amazing-research-project.org), the site content can be moved to another free platform or hosted on existing lab servers with minimum interruption.