Best place to host a moderately CPU intensive Django WSGI app

Question

I recently made a web app with Django, and (in development mode, where I've been using it), it works great. I'm an academic and need to quickly find hosting for my app somewhere so that I can submit my paper.

The app uses Celery (a task management/queueing service) to manage and queue parallel jobs, etc., so it shouldn't blow up if multiple people use it at once. But it does require a fair amount of CPU time (each submitted job requires uses around 4 cores x 5-10 minutes).

My lab has hosting at justhosting, but I'm not sure if that's appropriate given the CPU intensive nature of my jobs. Plus, I'm wary of how difficult it will be to hook up Django via email (I'd have to request each installed package, etc.). I've read about Google App Engine but wasn't sure how expensive it would get when I exceed the free CPU limit. And I've used Amazon EC2 (just for running a few jobs at the command line when I didn't have enough RAM). Sorry for the buzz marketing; I just want you to know that I've looked into it.

What is the best way to 1) get my app hosted quickly and 2) avoid paying an outrageous amount. Honestly, it feels easiest to just buy a Linux box and hook it into the university ethernet. That's so web 1.0, but it just feels like it would be easy to hook everything up. I've done a simple CGI through the university before, but haven't ever done a

Thanks a lot for your help.

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure you don't want to go through the Google App Engine, because that will require some significant amount of effort -- you can't just have your code base translate automatically, because you don't have a virtual machine like you do with EC2.

Either EC2 or just running a linux server would work ok. I suspect EC2 is a better solution, though, for two reasons:

First, if you run your own linux box, you actually have to do all the system administration work yourself, and while it's not necessarily all that hard, it requires a certain amount of paying attention. On the other hand, your costs are known upfront, and you won't be paying anything for bandwidth. So you may feel like the costs in your time and effort are worth it.

Second, depending on how long this thing needs to run, it may just be cheaper to stick it on Amazon. It's hard to know how much it would cost without knowing more about your project, but you can probably run for at least a few months on amazon without exceeding the cost of a new computer.

The third option is to look at something like [DreamHost][http://www.dreamhost.com], where you can get pretty cheap hosting on a virtual linux machine, much like Amazon, but with fixed costs instead of variable ones. Your CPU requirements might be too high for their basic account, though. You can always ask, and they have free trials.

In summary, doing it yourself is great if you're already a sysadmin (though in that case you'd have a spare box lying around), but otherwise it's worth it to not have to do that stuff.