What are the best Platform as a Service providers for deploying a small Python web application?

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6

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Considered

19

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Recs.

Jul 31, 2018

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

5 Options Considered

Best Platform as a Service providers for deploying a small Python web application	Price	IPv6	Server locations
-- Heroku	-	-	-
-- PythonAnywhere	-	-	-
-- platform.sh	-	-	-
-- Google App Engine	-	-	-
-- AWS Elastic Beanstalk	-	-	-

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score 7 · Answer 1

Heroku

Top Con

Really expensive

Heroku starts getting really expensive once you leave that free tier. It's not just the bare Heroku service that is costly, the addons as well are very pricey. See More

Top Pro

Simple scaling

Heroku instances can easily be scaled up or down by increasing or decreasing the number of available dynos for that instance. This can be done through the CLI or through Heroku's web UI. See More

Top Con

Constrained by addons

If you want to fully customize your production environment, then Heroku can be seriously constraining. Installing libraries or services can not be done unless there is already a Heroku plugin for it. See More

Top Pro

Free option

Heroku offers a free tier which contains a single dyno instance. It offers 512MB of memory and 100MB swap space. See More

Top Con

Further deployments are slow

While starting with Heroku is fast and easy, and the first few deployments are actually very fast, larger applications tend to have slower deployments. It takes some time for the dynos to restart and while they are restarting the application is completely offline. Which means that you can lose precious seconds of application time. See More

Top Pro

Easy to start with

Getting started with Heroku is very easy. It's a very straightforward procedure and a beginner can set up their first app in two minutes. Often it's just a matter of a couple of git commands and it's all set up and running. The official Heroku docmentation also helps a lot. See More

Top Pro

Excellent error logs

When your deploy fails you see a legitimate error log. Many of the other PaaS give you nondescript messages and debugging is a pain. Debugging Heroku wins by comparison. See More

Top Pro

Add-ons let you easily add features and technologies

Heroku has a vast list of plugins and services that can be added to an instance. These plugins cover things from databases to email systems. This remove the task of having to install services and setting them up manually. Heroku does it all for you. See More

Top Pro

Lots of learning resources available because of its old age

Heroku is one of the oldest PaaS providers. The fact that it's been around for such a long time means that it had a lot of time to mature over the years. There's also a massive number of articles, guides and tutorials on Heroku out there for beginners and advanced users. See More

Top Pro

No out of memoty errors when deploying apps

Heroku has dedicated servers for building app dependencies, to ensure that you won't have issues like "out of memory" errors when deploying your app. See More

See All

score 3 · Answer 2

PythonAnywhere

Top Pro

Excellent customer service

Really fast turnaround, friendly. See More

Top Con

No WebSocket support

PythonAnywhere has no websocket support, meaning that it's not possible to host a real-time application there. See More

PowerfulWanamangura's Experience

The app setup is direct and they have the best customer care. What I love most is the flexibility in pricing you use free account forever without a problem except that you renew your account after every three months. See More

Top Pro

Not too expensive

A basic site with no custom domain is free. $5 a month will afford the user enough power for a typical 100,000 hit a day website. See More

Top Con

Python-only on the server side

Obviously you can put JavaScript in your web pages and so on, but you can't use Rails or Node. See More

Top Pro

Flexible payments

You can pay monthly and cancel any time, or pay for a year up front to get a discount. See More

Top Pro

Easy setup

It's literally a matter of minutes to get a Python-backed website up and running. See More

Top Pro

Free option

You can run a website at USERNAME.pythonanywhere.com for free, and it's good enough for a light-traffic website -- it runs 24/7. You get a free MySQL or SQLite database too. See More

Top Pro

Easy scaling

You pay for a number of "Workers" for your web app (to handle requests), or CPU seconds for code that you run outside a web app, and you can get more workers or CPU seconds by upgrading your plan any time. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 3

platform.sh

xtfer's Experience

I work for Platform.sh See More

score 1 · Answer 4

Google App Engine

Top Con

Not a core Google product faces uncertin future

Google is notorious with flipping on technology directions, this product is clearly not the focus of Google. See More

Top Pro

Increases application speed considerably

Google App Engine integrates with Google's CDN out of the box and it distributes your application's assets through that, increasing loading speed considerably. See More

Top Con

Expenses are very hard to control

The monitoring for expenses is limited at best. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

Google App Engine is very easy to use. All you need to do is install the SDK (which in itself is easy as well, and the documentation is very heplful) and run the command needed depending on the type of project to deploy it. For example, to deploy a golang application, you run golang deploy inside the project folder and it will be automatically deployed. See More

Top Con

Problematic support even in the paid grade

Top Con

No SQL database available

Google App Engine uses Google's NoSQL cloud database. There's no option to use a SQL database with your application. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 5

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Top Con

Hard for beginners

AWS products have always been hard to grasp for beginenrs, and Elastic Beanstalk makes no difference. See More

Top Pro

Multi environment support

They support environments and promoting releases from one environment to the other (e.g. qa -> production). See More

score 1 · Answer 6

What are the best Platform as a Service providers for deploying a small Python web application?

5 Options Considered

Heroku

My Recommendation for Heroku

My Recommendation for Heroku

Really expensive

Simple scaling

Constrained by addons

Free option

Further deployments are slow

Easy to start with

Excellent error logs

Add-ons let you easily add features and technologies

Lots of learning resources available because of its old age

No out of memoty errors when deploying apps

PythonAnywhere

My Recommendation for PythonAnywhere

My Recommendation for PythonAnywhere

Excellent customer service

No WebSocket support

Not too expensive

Python-only on the server side

Flexible payments

Easy setup

Free option

Easy scaling

platform.sh

My Recommendation for platform.sh

My Recommendation for platform.sh

Google App Engine

My Recommendation for Google App Engine

My Recommendation for Google App Engine

Not a core Google product faces uncertin future

Increases application speed considerably

Expenses are very hard to control

Easy to use

Problematic support even in the paid grade

No SQL database available

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

My Recommendation for AWS Elastic Beanstalk

My Recommendation for AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Hard for beginners

Multi environment support

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DigitalOcean

My Recommendation for DigitalOcean

My Recommendation for DigitalOcean

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