If you’re about to purchase hosting for your Django application, everything you’ll need to make a good decision is in one place at Django Friendly.
Ryan Berg is the man behind Django Friendly and put together the site as a way to consolidate the plethora of hosting options available for Django. As with some other scripting languages such as Ruby, Python also has some special hosting requirements which makes it inconvenient to host it within standard hosting configurations. The development of mod_wsgi for Apache is aiming to provide a simple, high performance option for hosting Python applications within shared hosting environments.
Allowing users the ability to filter web hosts by price and shared/dedicated hosting types is a great step forward. My suggested improvement for the site would be the ability for users to dynamically build a search query. As an example, being able to filter by server location, hosting type, price ranges, ratings and so on. Maybe an interface in a similar fashion to what is offered by a custom ticket search within the popular Trac software could be used as a starting point.
Either way, it’s another fantastic looking Django specific site which has been offered up to the greater community – you’ve got to love it.
Thanks for the writeup!
There definitely could be a more dynamic way to filter the hosts in the future, but for the sake of getting launched I figured price and environment would suffice. It’s on my list of things to explore, but probably after a form for adding and editing hosts, and maybe OpenID access. Server location is definitely on my wish list, too.
In the meantime, hopefully the ratings themselves will help narrow the field enough. There are only so many hosts getting strong ratings.