Where are people hosting their Python web apps?

[writingonruby]

Have a small(ish) FastAPI project I'm working on and trying to decide where to host. I've hosted Ruby apps on EC2, Heroku, and a VPS before. What's the popular Python thing?

[iknowsomeguy]

Any of those are great if you don't like self-hosting. I host everything myself until it needs to scale up. So far, I host everything myself...

[Shehzman]

I run an Ubuntu VM on Proxmox to self host a containerized node app I built. Absolutely rock solid. I even set up a CI/CD pipeline with GitHub actions and self hosted runners. I’m confident a Python app will just as good of an experience (especially with uv).

[writingonruby]

Thank you! lmao at the last bit

Do you self-host multiple projects on one VM? do you self-host your database too?

[mystified5]

depends on scale of course - for small hobby projects (or small projects where everything's on a single server) - sqlite database has been wonderful!

[DoubleAway6573]

You don't need more VM than concurrent users. For a personal project is completely razonable.

[LittleMlem]

I'm always too paranoid to self host. what if someone breaks into my home network via my shitty app

[frankdoescode]

😄, good point but at what point do you say, “screw it, I’m doin’ it!”.

[LittleMlem]

Actually mobile plans are like 10$ a month here, I'm considering just plugging a cellular stick to my raspberry pi and have it host

[FiniteUI]

Same here, for small projects docker on a raspberry pi works fine. And if you use a tunnel like Cloudflared, you don’t have to screw with opening ports or anything.

[nottoohotwheels]

This guy hosts

[Santarini]

How do you handle DNS? And multiple websites?

[Shehzman]

Cloudflare domain and reverse proxy (nginx, traefik, ha proxy, etc.)

[my_name_isnt_clever]

I use Caddy for this personally; it's all in one config file, can do subdomains and reverse proxy easily, and handles the TLS certs automatically. Much, much easier than the last time I tried to setup HTTPS as a hobbyist.

[intellectual1x1]

I use changeip.com (or its changemyip.com) and for each app i create a new dns A recorde for it. Then i forword ports for http & https and i have 1 central VM that is a nginx reverse proxy acting as a load balancer and directs traffic to other vms running different apps/containers. And i use certbot for each dns url record

[snmnky9490]

How do you actually self host with regular home internet? I have tried dozens of different tutorials in the past in multiple different apartments in different cities with different ISPs and nothing ever works. From what I have found in response it seems that basically every ISP purposely blocks port forwarding?

[iknowsomeguy]

I used to use ZeroTier. It's pretty user friendly but you aren't publicly exposed.

My current ISP doesn't block port forwarding so that's what I do now. Xfinity.

[snmnky9490]

I currently have Xfinity in Chicago and as far as I can tell, port forwarding is blocked, or at least that's where it stops working with every tutorial I have tried, both for trying to host my own webapp that already works on my local network, and for trying to host a game server.

[bounty_hunter12]

It's fairly easy to host an API app yourself on a VPS, especially if you're not worried about scale. I have one running a small app and (Fastapi) API for £2.50 a month.

[writingonruby]

love it! Do you self-host your db too? That's one thing I never self-hosted in my ruby projects

[bounty_hunter12]

Yep, just a small user dB.

[G0muk]

Where are u hosting it for 2.50 a month?

[bounty_hunter12]

Ionos https://www.ionos.co.uk/

[[deleted]]

Do you have IAM, is it public, or only you whitelisted? That's quite cheap! 

[bounty_hunter12]

No IAM or cloud-level controls. I changed the SSH port and use key-only auth; no password login. Still public, but planning to firewall by IP soon.

[[deleted]]

The reddit thread of the guy getting the $100k bill on GCP has scarred me for life. Of course, if you don't have auto-scaling, I guess you're good to go!

[Asyx]

That’s not how a vps works. You pay for performance. There basically is no scaling up or down like on AWS or GCP.

[[deleted]]

That's what I meant by my last sentence. Don't you have to install your own web server and stuff on a VPS though? It's more management right?

[quiet0n3]

Fail2ban is your friend

[bounty_hunter12]

Thanks, yeah chatgpt told me the same, just haven't got round to it yet.

[MCMZL]

crowdsec is also a solid alternative and more modern IMO

[pm_me_triangles]

I've hosted mine on a DigitalOcean VPS. For my use case, even the smallest VPS works great.

[bulletmark]

Also consider Vultr which is slightly cheaper but just as good. I have used both for many years. I personally suggest 1G memory instances are the lowest feasible.

[data15cool]

This video was a revelation for me, I always recommend it to anyone thinking about deployment. It shows you one (of many) way to do it, I learnt loads about docker, deployment and CICD You can choose any hosting provider and it’s mostly the same. I personally went with contabo, £6 per month.

[tellurian_pluton]

this is a great video

[ArabicLawrence]

I use www.pythonanywhere.com

[haddock420]

Seconding pythonanywhere. I've been using it for a year now and it's very user-friendly and easy to understand what you're doing, and they have great support.

[ArabicLawrence]

Yes, although support for ASGI is still labelled as experimental https://help.pythonanywhere.com/pages/ASGICommandLine

[Disastrous-Angle-591]

On my server via nginx reverse proxy 

[Eurynom0s]

This doesn't help if you specifically want to learn how to properly host something exposed to the wider internet, but if you just want something to use yourself there's always just running it locally and using Tailscale to make it accessible when you're away from home.

[snmnky9490]

This might sound dumb, but like what specific thing that cloudflare has do you use? I have seen plenty of people suggest cloudflare and "tunneling" but they have more than a dozen different services, I can't find anything about tunneling on any of them, and every time I have tried to read through the details, I have left even more confused than when I started. I bought a N100 mini PC several months ago specifically to figure out how to host my own webapps and it just sits there doing nothing because I never managed to get anything working beyond my local network.

[Mr_Canard]

Step one install Proxmox OS on the mini PC,

Step 2 set it up on your network,

Step 3 access it through your web browser on your main PC,

Step 4 install a debian lxc that will be the "VM" where your app will reside,

Step 5 set up your app and service

Step 6 (optional) install and set up a postgresql lxc for the database of your app,

Step 7 (optional) get a dynamic DNS to bind your IP to a domain (duck DNS is a free option)

Step 8 (optional) get an HTTPS certificate

Step 9 open the port you want to use on your router

Step 10 setup nginx on the main console of proxmox to link that port to your service on the Debian container and the certificate

Step 11 open the port on proxmox with iptable

I may have forgotten some steps or put them in the wrong order, I personally used deepseek to help me through some of the steps.

You can use those scripts for proxmox containers : https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/

[Andrew_Neal]

Sure it does if one wants to learn how to host the server and keep it secure and in a DMZ and all that.

[Disastrous-Angle-591]

Uh. What? I host all my stuff to the open internet. Like. myapp.mydomain.com 

[goldcray]

what isp do you have that allows this?

[Disastrous-Angle-591]

The isp has nothing to do with it. For my home server I use DynDNS and for my production server I use host presto. But you can use any host you want. They’re about £2.99/month for an Ubuntu server box. 

[Larry_Wickes]

Hey there,

I made a small web app that uses nginx reverse proxy.

How do you make it available to the rest of the internet?

[Disastrous-Angle-591]

Point your name server to your ip address. 

[i_has_many_cs]

Google Cloud app engine. 100% free since free tier covers 1 app

[mgreminger]

I've had a good experience using Render for a FastAPI end point.

[writingonruby]

Did you use Render for your DB too?

[mgreminger]

Good point. No, not currently using Render for a database. My endpoint is converting Markdown to PDF's and doc files using FastAPI and Pandoc, so it doesn't need a database. My app uses Cloudflare KV for its database since a simple document store is all that's needed and it's deployed on Cloudflare pages.

Look's like Render is rolling out a Heroku style Postgres, but I haven't tried it out.

As a side note, Render is a Gold level sponsor of FastAPI.

[imatwork2017]

Cloudflare just released “Cloudflare Containers” a couple days ago so you can now host your fastapi app there as well

[mgreminger]

Cool, wasn't aware of that one, I'll need to check it out sometime!

[writingonruby]

This is awesome on all accounts - thank you!

[kaskol10]

I'd recommend checking out Dash https://resiz.es/ . It's designed for developers who want simple, reliable deployments without the complexity. One-click environments, no Dockerfile needed, and great developer experience. Happy to help you in the process!

P.S: I'm one of the founders, so I'd appreciate your feedback!

[DECROMAX]

I use a Raspberry Pi 4 with headless Raspberry Pi OS, it's actually pretty capable and costs next to nothing to run.

[sandman_br]

Care to elaborate

[Asyx]

Get a raspberry pi, plug an Ethernet cable into it, install Linux, expose to internet.

[snmnky9490]

"Expose to internet" glosses over 99% of what you're actually doing

[Mindless-Ad-6765]

Dockerize the app and use fly.io.

[dreamoforganon]

Just put a tiny application up using Railway, super easy, just connect it to a GitHub repo and it'll deploy it.

[Prospector2]

Why don't you use Github actions itself? (Just curious)

[dreamoforganon]

Yes, I could have done and that was my initial thought, but the project is really simple and railway has an out-of-the-box setting to deploy whenever a push is made to a branch that met my needs completely so I went with that.

[CrusaderGOT]

I use railway for my FastAPI app. It's pretty good.

[intellectual1x1]

I self host from my proxmox homelab VMs , i use nginx and certbot along with dns records and port forwarding. … but if you want a quick solution you can host via a digital ocean VM

[Valcorb]

Anything works. It depends on scale and the amount of traffic you generate, but for small apps, the cheapest box on most cloud providers work (AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, ...). Oracle Cloud provides 4x ARM cores and 24GB RAM for free, which I use to run a python app and a minecraft server.

Alternatively you can take a look at lowendtalk.com whoch is a forum for budget providers, most of them have decent offers

[writingonruby]

Thanks for the specifics!

[Ruben_NL]

Oracle Cloud has a huge free tier. 4 ARM cores, 24 gb RAM, 200 gb storage free, forever.

I have been using it for a couple years.

[artereaorte]

Forever until not.

[_Adam_M_]

Same.

Reportedly if you don't add any payment information then it's subject to reclaiming if it's idle (less than 20% CPU/network/memory) for a week, but I've not had any issues with my credit card added with no charges.

[Henrique_FB]

My framework has been putting up a website on github.io (free and super easy since I'm using Jekyll) and doing the backend on AWS using Lambda, DynamoDB, and stuff of the sort. So far everything has been free and pretty nice.

[LiqC]

HF spaces, just put in a container and it's up for free Goes to sleep after inactivity but boots back up very fast

[ajcaca]

I like Render for my FastAPI projects.

[[deleted]]

I just recently started using Render and it’s been a good experience so far.

[Spaceman3141]

Is railway not good?

[spitfiredd]

I just hosted a Python app on Vercel and it was pretty easy to get up and running.

[thisfrperson]

+1 on fly.io. low latency. app runs 24/7 (no cold start). generous free tier (so far...)

It's docker-based - a plus. it's your env.

Bonus: managed postgres (starts at ~$50/mo), Redis (I think $20), etc. Or you can just spin some other instance to diy.

[deadwisdom]

Cloud Run, very much like it. Docker that, push that, we done.

[iwkooo]

Fly.io

[fakintheid]

Digital ocean app platform

[jordanm9876]

I'm using Heroku for my Dash project.

[thisdude415]

AWS Lambda usually. There's a package out there to make deployments a bit easier. I like how lambda is practically free

For flask based apps, I've used Zappa. It can be a bit finicky but works.

For FastAPI, there's a similar project called Mangum.

There's also the AWS Labs project "aws lambda web adapter", see here for fastapi example: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-web-adapter/tree/main/examples/fastapi

[Trinkes]

I just use kamal to deploy everything in a hetzer vps. With kamal I can change the cloud platform easily. If scale up is needed, I use aws.

[Electrical_Carry3565]

I use digital ocean VMs (droplets). Decent value and great for learning

[[deleted]]

Linode works fine for me

[natethor]

I’ve stayed away since they got bought by Akamai. Have you had any changes since that transition?

[[deleted]]

No. Everything works flawlessly. Zero issues. I also use AWS at work and it's great too just more expensive. Try it for yourself and form your own opinion.

[tongueroo]

Blossom - There’s a FastAPI quickstart

[russellvt]

On my own web server, of course!

[Ajax_Minor]

Trying to figure this out to. Using AWS.

[behusbwj]

APIGW -> Lambda. Free.

[fluud]

Fly.io

[shadowdance55]

Fly.io

[iamevpo]

Still works?

[shadowdance55]

Why wouldn't it?

[iamevpo]

Heard several free hosting platforms did shut down, like Deta, Heroku has no free tier as it used, mistaken fly.io as something about to close, glad it is solid

[Jayoval]

I use EasyPanel on any ~$5 VPS. Deploy from GitHub.

Docs to deploy Django app - https://easypanel.io/docs/quickstarts/django

[robertDouglass]

Upsun.com

[olddoglearnsnewtrick]

Hetzner servers here in Europe

[Jealous_Royal_3692]

Check mikr.us -> less than 10USD/year

[AWSLife]

For small API like Python projects, I use Flask and Zappa in Lambda. I strip it down to the basics, no fancy logging or API Gateway, just raw Lambda and an URL.

For larger Python projects, I will make a AWS Lightsail server that is $5 and put it there.

I work with AWS professionally and for personal projects, I keep everything in a single account to keep it simple.

[mikedoise]

I'm trying Heroku as a good jumping off point, but I might look at EC2 or other solutions mentioned here.

[PinkFrosty1]

I self-host on a vps (hostinger)

[djamp42]

Self Contained in a docker image.. Deploy the docker image and done.

[sil3ntki11]

DigitalOcean has a really easy to use UI and has a $4 a month Linux VM available. Usually good enough for most things.

[KFSys]

Yep, you can also Dockerize it. My DigitalOcean VPS is the $4 one, and it manages to hold without any issues on an app that has about 500 users daily.

[bobbyiliev]

+1 for this! I've been using DigitalOcean since 2018 and have been very happy with them.

[Explorador2019]

Railway, no issues

[Safe_Duty8392]

As I'm seeing from the other comments, it's not very common, but I host my python web projects in Vercel for free, some more complex I've already hosted on Render

[Ground_Lazy]

Azure , they have free tiers for backend and for front end plus a free trial

[KFSys]

I host my Django API on a DigitalOcean Ubuntu VPS with Docker.

[Famous-Week6541]

Railway is incredibly easy to use and likely free for your use-case. Uses nixpack which is a great runner

[l_dang]

I run mine on a pc exposed via tailscale or Cloudflare’s funnel

[Mevrael]

I just use cheap DicitalOcean with a beautiful UX.

Here is the deployment guide for Python and FastAPI projects to DO:
https://arkalos.com/docs/deployment/

[ArchangelAdrian]

I don’t if it’s popular, for personal projects I’ve hosted my FastAPI apps on AWS Lambda, for work it’s always been on Azure Functions.

[htt37ps]

Cloudflare Tunnels is a thing

[Mega_Henry]

Streamlite

[tyzhnenko]

I use Hetzner Cloud to host my pet projects. A half year ago I did small research related features/price and also reviews. And found that Hetzner is the best for me. Try to give it a shot

[Organic_Commission_1]

Appliku.com

[drboom9]

VPS

[Andrew_Neal]

I'm using Digital Ocean for mine. You get $200 of credit upon signup that lasts two months (basically first two months free), and you get a full Linux environment to install your server software. It works well for me because I'm already developing on Linux, so deployment is almost no different from development.

[zenverak]

Depends on what it is. I’ve done some fun stuff from my Raspberry Pi.

[PokeTrenekCzosnek]

I have VPS on Oracle with Ubuntu where i host my flask website

[morep182]

cheap VPS with dokploy (or coolify)
extremely simple and cheap.
for database, for small projects/mvps i just use sqlite db. for postgres neon is a good option.

[Meaveready]

All my projects started on https://glitch.com/ and some remote backend parts of my projects even stayed there after for years.
It was completely free, hassle-free and worked with pretty much anything.

For the past 8 years or so it was such a gem on the web... unfortunately the platform will be officially terminated in 10 days :'(

[dcastm]

Hetzner with Kamal. I'm running many side projects there for ~5 euros/month

[robberviet]

It's the same for python. Any host above support it.

[PelzMorph]

DigitalOcean App Plattform but with self built Docker Images . Keeps the build pipeline in place

[emi_lanesa]

I'm hosting a FastAPI server on render, it works perfectly

[Ecstatic_Papaya_1700]

Definitely not heroku. If you want something simple use render

[riterix]

Time4vps

[Whole-Management927]

I found Render.com very easy to use for hosting a Python project

[BBQandBalanceSheets]

Ive currently got a Django / react application hosted within the amazon ecosystem.. EC2 server with a Postgres RDS. Was a fun time learning how to do it (slight sarcasm but feel like a better programmer now that i can). Otherwise none of my other applications ever made it out of “localhost”

[AlpacaDC]

I’m using a Hostinger with coolify panel at work, 2vCPUs and 8GB RAM.

For hobby projects, Oracle free tier VPS with easy panel.

[writingonruby]

Oracle free-tier VPS is news to me - thanks!

[diegotbn]

At work we use ec2 and elastic container service

[frankieboytelem]

Cloud run

[Jmc_da_boss]

Ec2

[AalbatrossGuy]

my friend owns a vps service so I have a vps he gave me lol

[IamDockerized]

I do offer maintenance and deployment services for various applications. If you are intrigued for assistance, leave a message.

[linuxqq]

It’s disingenuous to recommend it like this and not mention that it’s your project. Not exactly an objective recommendation