Ryan Berg

I have nothing but good to say about webfaction. Maybe dealing with the memory limitations isn't your thing, but 80MB is definitely enough RAM to host a small/moderate site.

But webfaction really shines in their support. I asked about getting bazaar version control installed on my server, and it was done within the hour.

One vote for webfaction from me.

What is your budget? I got a (dv) Base from Media Temple, but US$50/month is not everyone's idea of a good deal. However I prefer dealing with someone who replies to tickets within a reasonable time frame, and will most likely still be around in 2 years time.

It's a full VPS type setup though, so if you want something more restricted or is less manual maintenance, they're working on a Django container that runs on their Grid (much like their Rails container).

I've also heard reasonable things about SliceHost.com in #django, and their prices are significantly lower than MT.

I'm an advocate of SliceHost (www.slicehost.com) which is a VPS, though I'm not sure how much you'd like that.

Other than that, hosting with Joyent has been pretty good -- though you'd be on the new shared solaris so I can't help you... James Bennett (www.b-list.org) is on there so perhaps he can help?

I use the "Developer level 2" of railsplayground.com with Django (fatscgi or lighttpd) and it's nice, I'm considering migrate to VPS.

www.slicehost.com is very good too.

I have a few sites on a Joyent Accelerator. Top notch platform. Extremely stable, it's never gone down, and container reboots take only a few seconds! The "on demand" aspect of the container is quite appealing too: if my sites grow, commissioning additional memory and drive space won't require any reinstalls.

I had to install Python2.4 from source because the container's default package manager only provides 2.3. Install from source went without problems.

I use Lighttpd, so can't speak to the mod_python version, Apache, etc.

I have to say that administering a container is downright beautiful compared to a VPS! The SMF start up scripts sport the ability to specify very useful dependency and recovery plans -- to me, that alone is worth the cost of the accelerator.

I hate to be a "me too!", but:

Yet another vote for WebFaction, here. Their support makes the reasonable price a huge bargain. I've long used BlueHost and Django was a pain to run on their servers (they're much the same deal as Dreamhost). But switching to WebFaction was like night and day. I wouldn't dream of using anything less for Django.

Glad to see you ditching Dreamhost. I have no idea why I stayed with them as long as I did. Their outages are ridiculously frequent and seem to come from all sorts of causes, both external and internal. I've had great luck with Slice so far, although some of my stuff is hosted by work (we have an array of 8 boxes running Django alone now).

VPS solution is definitely a bit overkill for me.

And based on my Dreamhost experience, I'd rather not deal with FCGI.

I'm not tied to apache/mod_python, per se, I'm really only marginally familiar with configuring that setup (enough to edit a prewritten httpd.conf file)

Rajesh - Were there any "gotchyas" when building Python2.4 on Joyent? What differences will I see on a Lighthttpd when compared to Apache/mod_python?

I do agree with the consensus that WebFaction has very good support. Their staff has been very helpful getting sites up and running in the past. I should definitely take that into consideration. (If they're good enough for me to host my clients on them, they should be good enough for me, right?)

Thanks for all the input!

I quite like Rimuhosting. I've got a MiroVPS running Ubuntu Feisty and have had a great experience with these guys. Their support is first rate - they are usually in contact within about 10 minutes for high priority tickets.

Also, they're known to negotiate on things like e.g. reinstalling your VPS or whatever. I think I was installed and up and running within an hour too, although that was a year or so ago.

@nexusprime: I mailed to (mt) support and asked if (dv) Base would be good enough to run 2 small Django sites, one WP-Blog and a small Rails app, but they told me I would need to have at least (dv) Extreme or multiple of them. WTF? So I'm on Webfaction now.

Hi, I left Dreamhost for WebFaction in early June and I'm very happy with their Django support. As for RAM concerns, notice that WebFaction will probably add more RAM very soon. http://forum.webfaction.com/viewtopic.php?id=775

I have just discovered http://www.alwaysdata.com and so far it has been a great experience. As of today it is in French but they are going to launch soon an english version.

It is important to note that as far as I know they are the only one with a FREE offer like gratis.

+1 WebFaction

If you are able to set up a server from scratch and manage/secure it, slicehost.com is also a good choice.

I believe that most of the guys we follow, Ryan, are on either on Dreamhost or (mt) Media Temple, and I've heard good things about Joyvent as well.

Too bad to hear that my monthly referral payouts might be ending. Are you keeping UDK on Dreamhost for now?

Stu,

The Kansan's side projects haven't been on Django since maybe a few weeks after the launch of Hawkchalk - I had to have a script restarting the server every hour, and even then I was putting out internal server error fires. They got moved to WebFaction very quickly. That's now where hawkchalk, kansantrivia, and the facebook app all currently live.

MediaTemple seems to be a very high quality host, but are a bit more expensive than others I'm looking at.

As of now, I'm looking at getting that extra months cushion with Dreamhost, then getting myself setup over the month over at WebFaction.

I'll use the server switch as my chance to implement some upgrades to the site that I've been wanting to make, without the risk of nuking the existing site.

Thanks for all the helpful input, everyone.

WRT Joyent, if you set up an account now you'll be on the new Solaris shared. The limits are a lot more explicit than on the old FreeBSD shared servers; you can see them here:

http://wiki.joyent.com/shared:kb:account-limits

You can use FastCGI with lighttpd or nginx, but no mod_python I think.

But WebFaction sounds great too... good luck!

I like the Joyent.

I recently acquired a slicehost VPS and so far it's pretty amazing. For 20 US$/month you get a 256MB RAM / 10GB HDD virtual linux that's quick and reliable (so far, anyhow...). The only really annoying thing is the incredible wait time (weeks...) if you're not willing to pay for a full year.

This post helped me get started... http://www.lethain.com/entry/2007/jul/13/creating-my-dream-server-django/

I don't think I'd ever go for a shared server... but that's just me!

Good luck wherever you go :-)

I'm going to have to go with slicehost.. I recently switched from django to them and it's been great.

slicehost, for sure.

I switched my site to Webfaction from Dreamhost a little over a week ago and have been very pleased with the transition. (It wasn't too hard to get used to a different web panel or directory structure when I ssh-ed in the first time.)

I had some pretty severe memory usage overruns the first few days, but Webfaction support was actually pretty tolerant of it and let me keep the site up while I (with their help) figured out how to lower the memory my Django project was using.

I think you'd be happy with the switch. (Especially since, at the very least, Django stuff just works on Webfaction.)

@stefan: (dv) Extreme for two small sites? I think not.

My memory usage for small sized site (out of 256MB) is so far just 60-80MB. And this is with PostgreSQL, Apache and nginx all running. Adding another site would maybe add another 20-30MB.

I'm running a django based web app(non CMS) for a client on Webfaction on the shared-3 plan of theirs.

I have only good things to say about the service. The control panel makes it very easy to deploy django apps.

+1 for webfaction.

Ive switched to slicehost a few months ago and would certainly recommend it. I still do miss those terabytes of bandwidth though ;)