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Ask HN: I made a shitty little app. Whats the best way to host it?

8 points by naithemilkman ↗ HN
So I made a really simple app that just displays a tagcloud of your last 100 tweets based on the username. I did this using Python/Django.

Now my question is, what is the easiest and cheapest way to make my application live? Given my objective is to learn how to deploy a site live, how/what should I do?

Google App Engine will probably be easiest and cheapest for this. But my problem with GAE is that it's got its own paradigm and I don't think I would be use GAE for my future 'serious' projects. So I'm not sure the I will be able to bring forward anything I've learnt by going down the GAE route.

Amazon AWS seems to be the most obvious choice but by golly, there's a lot to know and read to get something up and running. Gotta remember, I got zero sys admin experience.

Any free regular hosting services that anyone knows of?

Side question: Why isn't there a Heroku for Django out in the wild? Every service I've seen seems to be in beta? Smells like a $200m exit waiting to be unleashed.

7 comments

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limmeau
For simple Django hosting, there's Djangy.com, but you have to be quick because they're discontinuing the service.
yuvadam
Djangy is going down in less than a month. Why recommend it?
limmeau
In reference to the claimed $200M exit.
Sargis
Getting something up and running on Amazon EC2 is actually quite easy. Had zero sys admin experience as well, but managed to run a simple app on my free micro instance in less than a day.

Another popular option is Linode.

EDIT: There's also http://stable.io/, which is kind of similar to Djangy, but it's not ready yet so keep an eye out.

damoncali
Slicehost or Linode. You get a basic, empty box, and Slicehost has some of the best documentation out there. Everything you do will be the "normal" way - so you don't need to deal with any heroku-style weirdness. Great way to learn.
craigkerstiens
If I'm truly scaling a project I usually go with AWS. Unfortunately this does mean setting up a load with regards to sys admin items, often including some form of load balancing if you're truly attempting to scale a site. For multiple django projects when starting and for considerable time I run them on webfaction. Webfaction while shared hosting is a pretty solid choice for django, is a reasonable deploying and you could likely follow some similar model when setting it up on Amazon.