Snippet sites first cropped up as a way of sharing code with others in IRC and forums where formatted code with syntax highlighting wasn’t practical. Since then they’ve grown to provide version control, sharing and other features. Here’s a quick list of the major players. Personally – I’d recommend Github.

dZone Snippets

Part of the massive dZone network who also run jobs boards, social news, etc.

• URL: http://snippets.dzone.com
• Pros: huge membership, massive selection, solid brand.
• Cons: interface needs improvement.

Snipplr

• URL: http://www.snipplr.com
• Pros: Huge selection of snippets.
• Cons: suffers from spam and neglect.

ByteMyCode

Only a small selection compared to the others mentioned earlier. Nice looking site though.

• URL: http://www.bytemycode.com
• Pros: interface
• Cons: small numbers

Snipt

• Pros: clean interface and easy sharing features.
• Cons: not a huge database.
• URL: http://snipt.org

PasteBin

One of the oldest services on the net and you can tell with a mature set of features and large database.

• Pros: plugins for various browsers.
• Cons: Not much.
• URL: http://pastebin.com

Pastie

A Rails app and I suppose the opposite to dpaste below.

• Pros: Clean, basic.
• Cons: Basic.
• URL: http://pastie.org/

GitHub Gist

For a relative newcomer this service has grown massively. It helps to be a part of one of the largest developer communities on the web – Github. Not only do you get to put your code snippet up but its also version checked too – using Git obviously.

• Pros: Each snippet is also a Git repo.
• Cons: Not as feature-packed as other services like Pastebin.
• URL: http://gist.github.org

DPaste

Purely for sharing code and originally developed by and for Django developers.

• Pros: Simple.
• Cons: VERY simple. Snippets deleted after 7 days.
• URL: http://dpaste.com