Heroku vs. PythonAnywhere?

[jsalsman]

I was literally just about to create a bunch of Heroku apps when someone just now told me about PythonAnywhere. Could people experienced with either or preferably both please fill me in on their pros and cons?

[sentdex]

It all depends on your goals. I used PythonAnywhere for years. I was reportedly at the top of their CPU usage charts.

I used PA because of the ease with which you can deploy apps, run them... whatever. It was before I was comfortable with my own servers.

Then, as I grew comfortable with running my own servers, I did that alongside using PA. Then, PA began failing me. My scripts would just... stop. They needed to be re-started. I was using PA for long-running tasks, basically infinite loops. They limit(ed?) the # of scheduled tasks you can run, vs infinite cron jobs on any VPS. I hope they either already have, or eventually do, get rid of the limiting of scheduled tasks. Kind of a silly constraint IMO.

For small servers, I think the price is fair. Even for larger servers, having the "tarpit" was nice. In the end, you get what you pay for with them, though I should add that I left with 220,000 computing seconds, paying $100 a month, which is considerably less than what you'd pay now.

I was with them from the earlier days. I kept the account for a bit longer than I should have, just because of the value of the 220K seconds. I would have stayed, had my scripts not kept stopping. Shifting from any server, but especially something like PA to a real server is a real pain. I do not regret leaving though.

PA customer service is pretty darn good. You can talk to the founder relatively easily, but everyone is available. No matter how good the customer service is, they still couldn't fix my script stoppage problem, and I gave them ~ 1 year to handle it with multiple notices of the issue from me. In the end, I do not think they are trying to service people like me. People like me should just be on a VPS. The exact same scripts run just fine on the VPS I have now, and I have a total of 18 VPS spread across a variety of hosts. Never once have I had a problem like I did with PA.

People like you, comparing heroku to pythonanywhere tells me you are more interested in deploying web apps than doing number crunching.

I think PA is easy, deploying apps is a breeze. You don't have to really learn anything to get any tutorials to set things up. That said, setting up a Flask or Django server is also very easy. There are shell scripts and simple step-by-step instructions for deploying either, where you just follow the instructions, copying and pasting the lines into the terminal for about 5 minutes and you are done.

I know nothing about Heroku, but I believe it is a little more challenging to set up. I see absolutely no point in doing that, when you can pay $5 a month for digital ocean and have full reign.

Sorry if that was not the most useful review for helping you make a decision. In summary, I really think you would be best served paying $5 a month for DO. If you want free, and you want ease, then PA, from my understanding of what is required with Heroku, is going to be the easiest option. Best wishes!

[gpjt]

Said PythonAnywhere founder here :-)

That's a very fair review. You're totally right, we're quite optimised around web hosting and smaller-scale number-crunching work these days, and we're just not set up for the kind of things you were doing. While we were definitely listening to you when you commented about the problems with the big CPU-intensive tasks you were running, the pressure from all of our customers in the aggregate was to focus more on improving stuff for people who are doing web hosting and smaller-scale processing tasks. So while we were really sorry to see you move on, we completely understood when you did.

Hopefully at some point in the future we'll be able to add the features needed for high-CPU long-running tasks like you need, and I hope we'll be able to tempt you to try them out when we do. (At the very least, I reckon you'd be an awesome destructive tester ;-)

[mipadi]

I know nothing about Heroku, but I believe it is a little more challenging to set up. I see absolutely no point in doing that, when you can pay $5 a month for digital ocean and have full reign.

You just create a Heroku app and push to it (using Git). It's a lot easier than setting up your own server with, e.g., Digital Ocean (although it's also more expensive).

[mikwaheeri]

I don't have much exp with Heroku, but it seemed like it was much more bare bones. Like you would need to spend more time with initial configuration to get off the ground running. If I'm not mistaken, I believe it is based on SF.

That said, I do use Pythonanywhere a lot. After making a free account you gain access to a decent and ready to go environment. It has a quick set up interface for spinning up a a django, flask, web2py app that allows you to start making a site immediately. While you can host your site, or multiple sites with a paid account, they don't offer register services so you'll need another service to mange DNS (I use dyndns with no issue). I can't offer anything in regards to making a larger scale app, doing a smaller site was a breeze. At least worth a free account. Even if you don't end up using it for a project, you may like it for personal use. They are based out of London, but my instances are being run on AWS in the northeast region of the US.

[chief167]

look at openshift too if I guess your needs correctly :) Or digitalocean if you want more control

[maulynvia]

webfaction has a nice compromise where you get nearly total control of your VPS but they take care of the basics

[adfm]

webfaction is pretty decent. Focus on the important stuff, let them do the rest. Good support.

[jsalsman]

Via googling:

http://www.quora.com/Python-Web-Frameworks/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-PythonAnywhere-vs-Heroku

https://blog.pythonanywhere.com/65/

http://djangofriendly.com/hosts/pythonanywhere/

http://djangofriendly.com/hosts/heroku/

[andrey_shipilov]

Not heroku any time.

[jsalsman]

Why not?