Provide free, simple, small-scale hosting for new users

[Markus Amalthea Magnuson]

Had discussions on an idea during DjangoCon Europe that I thought I'd just throw out there on this list as well:

What if the Django project provided free hosting for small projects, so that any newcomer who went through the tutorial or similar could actually deploy their application somewhere in as few steps as possible, a mini-Heroku of sorts. I think it could be of immense value for someone who built their first thing to show it to their friends without having to delve deep into devops. This could be coupled with easy instructions on how to move that application to proper hosting such as Heroku or AWS.

There are so many aspects of this that would have to be solved (how to limit, auth, etc.), so this is just testing the idea. What do you think?

[Tim Graham]

PythonAnyware provides free hosting and that's what the Django Girls tutorial uses: http://tutorial.djangogirls.org/en/deploy/README.html

I don't think the Django Software Foundation needs to build a service like that.

[Marc Tamlyn]

Heroku also offers free hosting of a sort. The DSF has nowhere near the financial muscle or human resources to provide such a service. There could be an argument to document possible free hosting platforms, but the django project generally avoids advertising any particular company (or third party package for that matter).

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[Markus Amalthea Magnuson]

Would it make sense to have at least something about live deployment at the end of the tutorial?

Among other things, it could mention https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DjangoFriendlyWebHosts and/or http://djangofriendly.com/

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[Josh Smeaton]

There's definite room for improvement with regards to the deployment story at the end of the tutorial. I don't think pointing people to hosting companies is the right way to go though, because they're not getting information on how to deploy from those links.

> There could be an argument to document possible free hosting platforms, but the django project generally avoids advertising any particular company

What if the Django docs included deployment tutorials provided that they were contributed by those companies? We could have rules for whether or not we'd accept/list the tutorial, and then provide links to each of them at the end of the Django tutorial. By linking to many we'd absolve ourselves, somewhat, of blessing any particular company. But having them included directly within our documentation system gives them the authority and accuracy that random tutorials around the net might not provide.

[Tim Graham]

From a docs perspective, I'd rather not be responsible for reviewing tutorials from XYZ companies and having to worry about merging updates to them, etc. A curated wiki page seems like a reasonable place to start if someone wants to coordinate that. I am a bit afraid we will might be overwhelmed with requests to endorse various companies, but I guess the "rules" you mentioned might help filter the candidates a bit.