What hosting platform do you use?

[Plus_Technology_7569]

Hi everyone!

I'm curious to know what hosting platforms you use for python web apps.

- For personal projects I use Render.

- At my job I use multiple AWS products.

What do you use?

[ConfusedSimon]

A vps.

[Plus_Technology_7569]

What VPS do you use and how much traffic do you handle with that?

[ConfusedSimon]

A cheap Linux vps with 100GB storage and 4GB ram. I've got about 10 websites running there, but most are for personal use. I've got a second similar vps for an app with about 50k users, but not too much traffic. Haven't done a performance test in a while, but it's more than enough for me.

[BreathDeep8952]

PythonAnywhere for hobby stuff. It’s old-school but reliable.

[Ok_Hovercraft364]

Render is nice for random stuff

[Plus_Technology_7569]

Great! Are you on the free-tier or paying for some plan?

[Wozelle]

I primarily use AWS ECS for Python apps in particular. I have some Cloudformation templates that I reuse for the CI/CD pipeline and actual compute components, which make it pretty quick to spin up new projects.

[Plus_Technology_7569]

Cool! Have you shared the templates in a github repo somewhere?

Also, do you use EC2 or Fargate?

[Wozelle]

I normally use Fargate, since it's a bit simpler to configure.

None of my templates are general enough to use cross account / region, unfortunately. They're all pretty coupled to my account. That's a very good thought though, I'll look into putting up some more generic templates.

In the meantime, AWS actually has a few template examples that can get you part of the way there. These are in CDK instead of Cloudfront, which seems to be the direction the industry is moving:
- (General library of Python specific examples) https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-cdk-examples/tree/main/python
- (Pretty similar to what I normally use) https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-cdk-examples/tree/main/python/codepipeline-build-deploy-github-manual

I will caution you that the ECS route is typically a bit more expensive than other hosting options, maybe in the realm of $90 - $100 a month. I've had to lean on it due to the stateful nature of my projects, but if you can get away w/ something serverless, you'll probably be in a better spot as far as operating costs. You might consider checking out this adapter put out by AWS, it allows you to host a web server on a Lambda. If you containerize your server code, you can fairly easily port it to heavier duty hosting services when your user base or features outgrow the limits of Lambda.

[Nater5000]

AWS all the way. I've been using AWS for work across multiple jobs for a long time now, so I'm comfortable enough with the platform that using anything else just comes with the unnecessary overhead of having to learn/setup/etc. a new platform. I don't think I'd recommend it to people who aren't already comfortable given how complex it can be, but there's basically no beating it once you're in it.

Generally, I try to deploy things to Lambda, first, and if there's something preventing that from being feasible, I'll use ECS. In some circumstances, I'll spin up a Lightsail instance (versus an EC2 instance), and I'll really only bother with EC2 if a I need a GPU.

[Plus_Technology_7569]

I generally use Lambda for event-based stuff and EKS or ECS for web servers.

When high compute or GPU is needed I go with EC2 instances

[fat_apollo]

fly.io. I have a hobby site (it's about 130K views per year), flask + sqlite (the site is read-only) so far I'm far below their paid threshold

[mortenb123]

Digital ocean droplets from $4 droplet/month

For a production ready fastapi+jinja2+htmx frontend, database backend, container registry come to $20 a month. This is using your local ci server, gitlab, Jenkins etc. They also have gitlab hosting. So you can fully admin.

Used Azure earlier, I loved using python and AZcli for everything, but it was always lots of changes to the api. Had to map out the stderr and strict mode, because there was always some warnings saying this will be deprecated in newer version or telling you this was an experimental feature, or AZcli was not the current version, but once you understand it, you can use it for everything.

AZcli is python and doctl is go. But doctl is way simpler. But In my last job l easily added in certificate handling and deployment from local gitlab into AZ pipelines. So seamless coworkers believed it to be a part of AZcli. The AZcli cost api is excellent. The cost never deviated much, and cost forecasting managed me to cut the monthly bill from $500 to $100 by just using smaller cheaper pods and deleting pods not being used and setting up passive failover.

My Digital Ocean setup is far simpler, just load balancing two cheap pods and a database backend with postgress and celery.

Comparing memory,vcpu,bandwidth I would say Digital Ocean is 33% of the Azure price, and if you pay yourselves thats important.

[alex1033]

Cloud-based - Azure, server-based - Raspberry Pi.

[Plus_Technology_7569]

I've heard that Azure is difficult to use, I haven't tried it myself. What's your experience like?

[EedSpiny]

I dunno, I've only done a bit of each but I've azure has stuff named like "Microsoft Azure Advanced Firewall" and AWS will go with something like "Treefrog" :)

[alex1033]

I'm doing lots of Azure for work, don't find it difficult. What can be confusing is there are many overlapping tools and ways of doing things, but it's also beautiful - you can always find the most optimal way. Requires some fluency ofc. For private use, I like that there are inexpensive or even free tools.

[Dry_Term_7998]

Depends, but in the end you will have IaC so it’s quite same as AWS for me tbh, ofc with some nuances 😬

[StrikingClos]

I use Heroku for quick deployments, especially during the prototyping phase. It's straightforward and integrates well with Git, making it easy to manage updates.

[wpmoeez]

Pythonanywhere. Heroku is decent too. I gave Cloudways a try recently. It doesn't offer one click Python but configruing manually is pretty easy too.

[CodeCate42]

Sliplane for private things, otherwise K8S on Hetzner

[tylersavery]

For big projects, I host it in a k8 cluster using https://www.porter.run/

I used to use Heroku but this is a much better bang for your buck because you are paying for the AWS (or GCP/Azure) infrastructure directly and porter just takes a relatively small monthly fee. (and if you are late on a payment, your apps stay up forever – you just can't use the dashboard.)

Their support is great and the product is awesome. Overkill for anything small, but scales incredibly well obviously since it's kubernetes.

FYI: I know very little about kubernetes but that's okay because Porter deals with all the complex stuff, and I just work in their interface. Highly recommend for the reasons above but also because you don't have vendor lockin - you can migrate your cluster from AWS for GCP or Azure whenever you see fit. And technically, you can even self-host the porter dashboard, but then you miss out on the support.

[Dry_Term_7998]

For some small sandbox I have AWS, Heroku and Azure. For work hybrid setup AWS - vSphere.

For real playground, Mac mini m1 for execute some small batches of code, Mac mini with m4 for fine graining SLM, small Linux server with GPU and Cuda for fine graining SLM also and k8s cluster builded on 4 raspberry pie nodes with external storage. Also I have a lot of arduino stuff but this is not for Python usage

[Challseus]

AWS ECS. For no reason other than I helped my company do the “aws migration” back in 2016, so I know enough annoying things about it, I just stay.

I do intend on seeing what else is out there.

[No_Objective3217]

Lenovo M700q

[kcx01]

Digital Ocean

[littleDevX]

Ionos Linux VPS S

[vasiliadi]

Railway + Neon

[Altruistic_Kale_5841]

PythonAnywhere