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What are the best hosting providers for a Python web application?

7

Options
Considered

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Here’s the Deal

7 Options Considered

Best hosting providers for a Python web application	Price	Server locations	ISOs
-- DigitalOcean	-	New York (3); Amsterdam (2); San Francisco (2); Singapore; London; Frankfurt; Toronto; Bangalore	Ubuntu; Fedora; Debian; CentOS; CoreOS; FreeBSD
-- F(x) Data Cloud	-	United States	Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Windows
-- Heroku	-	-	-
-- PythonAnywhere	-	-	-
-- Google App Engine	-	-	-

DigitalOcean

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Top Pro

Pay-as-you-go with multiple payment options

Billing is done per hour. Each month has a 672 hour (28-day) billing cap with server runtime past that point being free of charge. DigitalOcean accepts payments via Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and PayPal. See More

Top Con

Server charging

Digital Ocean charges the server 24/7 even if you turn it down. For example, on AWS you can shut down the server and it will not be charged. See More

Specs

Server locations:New York (3); Amsterdam (2); San Francisco (2); Singapore; London; Frankfurt; Toronto; Bangalore

ISOs:Ubuntu; Fedora; Debian; CentOS; CoreOS; FreeBSD

Virtualization:KVM

Top Pro

Flexible backup mechanism

Automatic backups can be made for 20% of the droplet price and an unlimited amount of snapshots at $0.02 per GB of storage can be made manually. EditComments References 1 See More

Top Pro

Beginner-friendly

DigitalOcean has a control panel that's intuitive and easy to use, new servers (Droplets) can be spun up in under a minute and they offer stock "apps" (LAMP, RoR, Wordpress) that can be deployed instantly. There's also an extensive documentation for people new to VPS. See More

Top Pro

Great customer support

Quick and knowledgeable customer service, extensive documentation and helpful community. See More

Heroku

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Top Pro

GitHub Integration

Heroku integrates deeply with GitHub for Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration as part of the Heroku Flow feature. 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

Capuccino 's Experience

Heroku is a very simple platform with one simple goal: focus on code, not on ops. 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

Further deployments are slow with free dynos

While starting with Heroku is fast and easy, and the first few deployments are actually very fast, larger applications tend to have slower deployments. Unless your application is on a paid dyno with preboot enabled, 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 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

No "out of memory" issues when building dependencies

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

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

Mature

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

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

Free option

Heroku offers a free tier which contains a single dyno instance and is available for up to 18 hours per day. It offers 512MB of memory and 100MB swap space. See More

PythonAnywhere

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Top Pro

Easy setup

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

Gord Currie's Experience

Couldn't ask for anything easier. 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

Top Con

No WebSocket support

Top Pro

Excellent customer service

Really fast turnaround, friendly. 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

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 Pro

Flexible payments

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

Google App Engine

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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

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

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

Linode

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Specs

Server locations:London; Frankfurt; Fremont; Newark; Atlanta; Dallas; Tokyo; Singapore

ISOs:Arch; CentOS; Debian; Fedora; Gentoo; openSUSE; Slackware; Ubuntu

Virtualization:Xen; KVM

Cloudean Infotech

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Specs

Server locations:Hong Kong | Jakarta | Singapore | Sydney | Amsterdam | Dublin | Frankfurt | London | Vienna | Buffalo | Chicago | Dallas | Los Angeles | Toronto

ISOs:Linux | Windows | FreeBSD

Virtualization:KVM | XEN

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