How do you host Django?
Just wondering where you guys deploy the Django app. Are you self-hosting it or adopting a PaaS solution?
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Just wondering where you guys deploy the Django app. Are you self-hosting it or adopting a PaaS solution?
Hey there!
My product, Conveyor.dev is built to help Python developers self-host their apps! I love to help people launch Python applications. I think the most economical and robust way to host is to use Digital Ocean or Linode. Of course, this can be a pain to set up and configure yourself, which is where Conveyor comes in. If you'd like to give Conveyor a try I would be happy to help get set up and answer any questions you might have along the way.
I started with hosting on DigitalOcean, and recently started to leverage Heroku for tiny projects. Both have advantages and disadvantages.
I never tried Django but had some very good experiences hosting Flask on Google's App Engine (PaaS).
I chose Heroku because it's super simple and time efficient and I'm a single founder.
I'm in the same position.
Right now I'm paying 7$ for my app (a hobby dyno + a free Postgres instance). Soon the DB will reach 10K rows and the cost will be around $16. Once it reaches 10M rows, the cost will be $57 (plus +18$ if have to upgrade the hobby 'dyno' as well).
After that it increases by 50 for every performance boost.
On one hand, this sucks because I hesitate for every new thing I should add (e.g. Redis).
On the other hand, I have no idea how AWS/Azure costs would be. Plus I have no business managing this infrastructure, so switching feels like leaping a chasm without being able to see what's on the other side.
At scale Heroku will be more expensive than other options, but I'm not particularly great at operations so to me it's worth it especially at the beginning. I've spent lots of time dealing with ElasticBeanstalk issues in the past, so having something dead simple to use and setup is totally worth $7/month -- it just means more time to work on product and marketing.
You also mention paying for redis, but I've found Heroku's free tier perfectly fine for light workloads. I've only had to scale that up when I've hit significant traffic.
Using any of the Heroku add-ons isn't a requirement, either. For example, you could always use another cloud Postgres provider (I've played with https://www.compose.com/pricing#postgresql in the past, but don't use it currently). Lots of other options in https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_hosting/. You lose some of the convenience of having everything on one dashboard, but it might be worth it for significant cost savings.
How about the cost? When you host a dev and prod servers on Heroku, How much is it?
Self-hosting all my side projects now except pure static sites (Netlify is too good and free). If someone wants to start with self-hosting I released my book Deployment from Scratch just this month!
I have used heroku in the past and it's the best way to start
For serious projects, I would docker on ECS with Fargate(regular+spot) to have better scale
There is Django on Jelastic PaaS with automated installation inside containers, pre-configured scaling, convenient UI, choice of local service providers, and pay-per-use pricing
I've been trying to go the Docker route lately and setting up a Docker Droplet on DigitalOcean and hosting multiple Docker-powered sites on there using Traefik to route the domain to the various apps seems to be working really well so far!