Django hosting

[Sabine Maennel]

I live in Switzerland and I will launch my startup shortly. It will be a very small platform in the beginning but traffic might grow all of a sudden. So regarding to hosting I am torn right now, between Pyrox, which is a small, but accessible Germ hoster and Django Europe, which is spezialized on Django and LightTTPD. They offer a one click Django install, but no phone support only tickets. Can anyone give me advice regarding hosting? Has anyone used on of these two hosters? 

         Thanks in advance for your advice

                  Sabine

[Mark Phillips]

Sabine,

I am in the US, so take my advice with a large grain of salt. I usually use Linode and Digital Ocean as a benchmarks for hosting services. There prices are very reasonable and they give you all that you need - root shell access to your own private virtual server. They have great up-time, and my only complaint has been about their backup service, but then who would really trust a hosting company to back up your critical data??? Both can scale as you grow - increasing memory, disk space, bandwidth takes just a few minutes. Both have European data centers...Linode in London and Digital Ocean in Amsterdam.

Anyway, Pyrox seems very expensive, and Django Europe is much closer to Digital Ocean/Linode in price. I am not wild about the process limits at Django Europe...I tend to think about physical things - memory, disk space, bandwidth, etc. I am not a good enough sys admin to know which processes to kill, and the thought of not being able to log in because I am running too many processes is scary...check the FAQs at Django Europe.

If you have built your own django app for your start-up, I don't think you really need to pay for "instant-on" django a la Django Europe. You are quire capable of setting up your own Django production virtual server. Email and no phone is OK as long as you they have a guaranteed min/max response time. I assume you will be your own sys admin, so there is not much they can do for you anyway. Keep good backups and don't push to production until you have tested the heck out of your new code on a different, but identical, development server. Practice rolling back to an earlier release BEFORE you go live. If your site just dies, and you have good backups, you can create a new node, install from backups, change the dns on the local name servers, and you are back live in a few minutes. Then figure out with the hosting folks what went wrong and ask for a refund...;) 

Finally, you can get 2 Virtual Private Servers on AWS EC2 for free for the first year.  After that, their pricing is STILL cheaper than Linode or Digital Ocean.   But you will have to investigate that by setting up mockup billing as you build your systems and evaluate your needs.  You have a whole year.  Their free tier includes a good amount of startup resources: http://aws.amazon.com/free/. Also, your hosting provider today may not be your hosting provider tomorrow....start free, learn what you need and how much you need to scale up, and then move to paid hosting. AWS EC2 also has European data centers.

Anyway, just my 2 cents on hosting. Lots of options.

Mark

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[Sabine Maennel]

Thank you very much for your advice Marc, it is very valuable to me, especially the part that my hosting provider for today does not need to be that of the future. My problem right now is that I am under pressure to launch, but just in order to open up registration for a class that won't start before January 2015 where the real traffic will start. So I might not test thoughly now, and need a quick solution now, but then I will have two month to prepare for January and in case I am unhappy with the hosting I will still be able to change then.

           with kind regards and thanks again that you took so much time for that long informative answer

                 Sabine

[Babatunde Akinyanmi]

Hi Sabine,
I use Redhat's Openshift.

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[Andreas Kuhne]

Hi Sabine,

I would also recommend AWS mainly because of the amount of resources you have at your disposal by using them. We changed from a local provider in Sweden to AWS in Europe, because we needed global reach. By using the resources they have (CDN mainly) we were able to get "closer" to our customers in Asia, America and Africa. Also our system "just works". We have configured it with AWS auto-scaling and load balancers, which means that if one server goes down (which it will), another automatically starts up and the "broken" server is discarded. Automatically. The only thing we get is an email saying that the server died, and a new one started.

Another thing (which I find very important) is data integrity. ON AWS you can easily configure a master-slave database configuration. That way you have a hot backup of your database at all times. We will never loose more than a couple of minutes of database interaction, compared to before, when we could loose a whole day.

That being said, when we started using all of the functionality we needed from AWS, it did become a bit expensive. However, we still think it's worth it. 

The only thing is that you do have to take an AWS configuration into account when you are designing the application. The way AWS works is a bit different than other virtual server providers.

Med vänliga hälsningar,

Andréas Kühne

Software Development Manager

Suitopia Scandinavia AB

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[Collin Anderson]

At work, we're in the process of switching from rackspace to linode.

[Mark Phillips]

Sabine,

Another free hosting option - Ohava.com. 512 MB RAM, 1 VCPU, 20 GB storage for free. You also get ssh and root access. It won't last forever, but is free. It comes with Ubuntu 14.04 as the host system. The "apps" they offer

I signed up for one to test, and it took a few weeks for them to enable my free system. You can sign up here - https://www.ohava.com/#signup. Still playing with it to see what it can do. YMMV

Mark Phillips

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[Mark Phillips]

Sabine,

Hit send before I was done.... please see below

On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 5:21 PM, Mark Phillips <ma...@phillipsmarketing.biz> wrote:

Sabine,

Another free hosting option - Ohava.com. 512 MB RAM, 1 VCPU, 20 GB storage for free. You also get ssh and root access. It won't last forever in your application, but it is free now. It comes with Ubuntu 14.04 as the host system. The "apps" they offer are slightly ridiculous, so ignore them. As a virtual host with ssh and root you can do a lot with it as it stands.