Hacker News Reader

Comment by gpjt | Hacker News Reader

Hi there - I'm a PythonAnywhere developer. We're working on getting SSH access supported, it's a bit tricky but we have it working in the lab so we should get it live reasonably soon.

View on HN

It might just be me, but I wasn't able to get the consoles working in Opera. I had to use Firefox.

(My apologies if I'm mistaken and it does work. I enable cookies & Flash on a site by site basis, and sometimes that causes problems. I turned them both on, though, and it just stays stuck at "Starting encrypted connection to consoles-1.pythonanywhere.com on port 443".)

We're looking into that, hopefully we'll get it fixed soon, but it's a problem in a third-party library we depend on so it's proving harder to fix than we'd hoped.

Is this essentially a VPS with python batteries included? If so, if my app on PythonAnywhere gets slammed by HN how quickly can you respond with extra provisioning?

Also, do you have scipy installed, too?

It's a bit more and less than that. Console sessions run in what amounts to a VPS (it's a bit lighter-weight than that so that we can keep the costs down) but your web apps run in chrooted subprocesses of an Apache server as a limited-privileges Linux user. So, in theory your own web app should be just as capable of staying up through an HN storm as our own server. In practise... we're still polishing the security code, so it's possible to configure your web app framework so that it uses enough threads that our per-user resource limitations kick in and stop it from running.

A shorter answer -- we want our users web apps to have no problem handling spikes in usage, but might not quite be there yet.

And yes, we have scipy -- there's a list of all of the packages we support here: http://www.pythonanywhere.com/batteries_included/

Thanks for the update. I am eager to use it. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com