I also knew for my next project I'd need Redis support for sorl-thumbnails.
FWIW, PIL requires some C libraries for image handling.
I found this http://www.kencochrane.net/blog/2011/06/django-hosting-round... and sort of went from there. I even looked at GoDaddy and Dreamhost. Found NOTHING on Dreamhost's site regarding Django, even though I stumbled upon a coupon on the web. And I'm one of those who don't like GoDaddy...
The short list :
Heroku
WebFraction
Gondor
Why not Heroku?
- A free tier exists and I REALLY wanted to use this
-- Free only goes so far. Add Postgres/Upgraded Redis == $$
- No local storage
- No indication of support for PIL (multiple attempts to reach support resulted in 0 results)
- AWS
Why not Webfraction?
I fear the cheapest thing(s). I believe you get what you pay for. No, that does not mean the most expensive thing is the most valuable, but I feared over-selling.
- Web searches resulted in mixed reviews/issues with deployment. I personally know someone who was on WebFraction. She seemed happy/content.
Gondor (Initial Impressions)
- I had never heard of them before! WHY had I never heard of them before. This made me apprehensive!
- They're on Rackspace!
- By all accounts they only do Django (or did only Django). I believe do one thing and do it well.
- SSL Support
(First Impressions)
It "just works"
Support is nothing short of AMAZING! Brian and Pat both have taken their own personal time to school my n00b @$$ on Django/best-practices and what not. I've learned more from them than anyone else in the short time that I've been in the Django community.
I've been able to find someone in IRC most weekdays between 8AM PST and 10PM PST. Outside those hours, e-mail works and a response exists first thing in the morning (no, I don't think there is 24x7 support short of them receiving an alert -- but I host nothing that is 24x7 business critical (yet)).
(Gripes/Issues)
Their deployment is as simple as 'gondor deploy <instance> <branch>' -- BUT their deployment tar's up the repository locally, transfers it over, unpacks it, etc. etc. This puts your site in a '503 Maintenance' mode, so deployments WILL take down your site. My gripe that exists here is that if I make a simple change to CSS, I shouldn't have to tar the local repository, transfer it all over, etc. etc. I should be able to just upload the CSS file and Gondor can reload Nginx as necessary/needed. I read somewhere that indicates they will be releasing a zero-downtime deployment.
It's not clear what allocations exist as far as bandwidth, storage, backups, etc. I don't want to stream a 5GB video and find out the hard way, but perhaps it's my only option. :P With that, there are means to import/export DB exports, and that'll likely be my DB backups. Local/Remote git repository exists so that covers my Django project. Now I just need local (user-content uploads) -- TBD.
I am running on a dedicated instance because I need SSL support (static IP) and I also have plans on running a second site on the host. It is about 2.5x what my VPS costs me, BUT like the blog posted above. I no longer have to care about Updating/Patching Ubuntu/Postgresql/Nginx. FWIW, I did spend about 3 days in my spare time and have a working model/scripts necessary to deploy Ubuntu/Postgresql/Nginx should the need arise....but I don't want to, which is why I started down the path of looking for Django-only hosting. I also don't know ANYTHING about Postgres short of what Django tutorials exist telling me how to get Postgres & Django to work. I'd rather leave this to the "experts".
It's only been about two weeks...site will hopefully go live at the end of the month. Good or bad, you'll hear about it.
My advice, try it! I haven't been this happy about a web host in years!
