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Comment by araneae | Hacker News Reader

I went through this "ror vs. django" thing a few months ago, and ended up picking up Django.

I got the Django book and liked it and I had no problems with my actual project itself in terms of having enough "community."

However, now I'm in the "figuring out how to deploy it" stage and it's been a real pain. My free webhost supports RoR and python, but doesn't have Django installed, I don't want to spend the money on a VPS, and while there's been a recent surge of beta Django hosts, none of them have worked out for me. (I.e. I tried out gondor.io, it wouldn't deploy, I asked for help in the IRC channel, someone said they'd "look into it" but never got back to me.) I'm currently rewriting my models (db structure) for Google apps since it's basically my last hope.

I really love Django, so it pains me to say this, but you might want to check out RoR.

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I think you'll find that any "free webhost" is going to give you a lot of trouble if you want to deploy a project built on a modern web framework.

Rule of thumb: if it doesn't have SSH access, and it's not a Platform-as-a-Service like Heroku or Gondor, you're probably not going to have much luck deploying anything except PHP or static HTML.

Check out webfaction.com, it's great for beginners and does most of the deployment for you.

My webhost has SSH access, it just doesn't give me root. It offers RoR through CPanel, which I just assumed would work, but I haven't tried using it so I don't really know.

But I take your point, a VPS is really the best thing. I just can't convince my husband to let me spend money on it and I'm unemployed :P.

If you have SSH access, and Python is installed on the system, you don't need root to install Django. The best approach is via pip/virtualenv, but as a last resort, you can just upload the django source folder in the same directory as your manage.py, and it will work.

Look into ep.io, gondor.io, djangozoom.com or one of the other recently-available Django/Python/WSGI hosts, then. They're free to start with (like Heroku) and are built with Django in mind.

Take a look at virtualenv / virtualenvwrapper for managing your python packages. Complete lifesaver when it comes to deploying apps.

Django is just a Python package. You don't need root to install it, you just need it to be on your Python path. If they have virtualenv installed that's probably the easiest way to do it. Otherwise, look here:

http://groups.google.com/group/django-users/browse_thread/th...

I feel with Django, only 30% is learning Django "coding" and the other 70% is the deployment.

Everybody uses a different method.

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