Question for web-devs: What types of websites do you normally deploy?

1 points by comatory 11y ago ↗ HN

I'm a programmer amateur with hopes of becoming professional. I have dabbled with website since 2000 or so. First I used Microsoft FrontPage but eventually learned HTML, CSS, Wordpress etc.

About 14 months ago I started learning my first programming language - Python. Just recently I managed to create single-page website with contact form at the bottom in Flask (and flask-mail plus flask-wtf). Successfully I deployed the website (or is it an app?) via pythonanywhere.com.

This got me thinking. What kind of websites do professionals in real life? I still find easier to just use HTML directly or perhaps something like Jekyll. On the other hand, once you master something like Django or Flask, I can imagine the creation of websites becomes a thing of habit, plus it seems more expendable without using too much cruft.

Me personally, I was really impressed with the speed. Perhaps pythonanywhere.com just has really good hosting... I'm using the free account. Whereas my shared hosting is sometimes sluggish.

The questions:

1. are frameworks like these actually used for smaller websites? 2. Or are they used only if you need some kind of programmable component/processing done at the web site? 3. Or do you use it for huge projects like wikis, e-commerce etc.?

Also what are your hosting costs like? I believe these "web apps" cannot be run on regular shared hosting, I guess I'd need VPS? (I host just 2-3 websites on 2-3 domains).

3 comments

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hardwaresofton 11y ago ↗

Having managed a VPS yourself is very useful (fun, I think, and definitely educational), and takes you a long way in realizing more of what it takes to put up a website, and makes you a better developer I think.

It's not that the web apps CAN'T be run on regular hosting, but when you try and do more and more ambitious things with the sites you build, you will need/want the control (even if you scale back later when you realize you don't need it).

For example, if you wanted to try using some new database or ORM to build a project, your hosted option might not support it (yet).

comatory 11y ago ↗

On that note I'm going to ask specific question. What kind of VPS set-up would I need to comfortably run 3-4 very small websites and still have a little headroom for experimenting with web apps etc.?

The reason I'm asking is I'm thinking of getting rid of web hosting and put everything on VPS.

hey sorry for super late response -

I use INIZ.com + Gandi for DNS.

So basically, I point multiple DNS entries to the same server, and setup NGINX accordingly to reverse proxy each different site to a different upstream app