Over the past year I have been testing all of the new python platform as a service companies that have popped up, and I have posted my notes on my blog so that everyone can learn from my experiences. ep.io, apphosted.com, gondor.io, dotcloud.com, DjangoZoom.com, Heroku, Django hosting roundup, All and all, the platforms were very similar, they allowed you to easily host your python/django project without having to worry about managing a server or other typical system administration duties.

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New Relic recently added support for python to their awesome web application performance tool, and I have been playing with it on a number of projects. Installing and configuring new relic is pretty well covered in their own documentation, so there is no reason for me to repeat that here. One thing that isn’t covered in the documentation is how to use new relic if you are using supervisord to control your gunicorn processes, and I’ll take this time right now to show you what I did.

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I was looking at the pycon US 2012 website when I stumbled upon the huge list of sponsors, which is really impressive. It got me thinking. Are all of these companies using python? If so, which ones are the best companies to work for? If it was up to you, and location and money wasn’t a factor, what company would you work for and why? If you already work at one of these companies, can you share what it is you use python for, and what it is like working there?

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Heroku the platform as a service (PAAS) company, very popular in the Ruby on Rails community, has now started opening up their platform to languages besides Ruby. They now offer support for Python, Java, Clojure, Node.js, and Scala on their new Cedar stack. Heroku’s Cedar stack is still in beta, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying it out, and that is just what I’m going to do. 6 months ago I wrote a series of blog posts that reviewed all of the cool new django hosting services that were popping up.

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When I was at DjangoCon a few weeks ago, it was great hanging out with all of the fellow Djangonauts talking about Django and all of other great technologies. Now that I’m home, I have decided to get off my butt and do something I should have done a while ago. Without further ado, I am pleased to announce the creation of DjangoMaine.com, a new Django user group based in Portland Maine.

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I recently had my 3 year anniversary at CashStar, and it got me thinking about how fast the last 3 years have gone. When I first started at CashStar there were only a handful of people, and we had nothing, and it was great. We had no products, no customers, which might sound bad at first, but we also didn’t have any customer, or production support issues to slow us down.

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Track a visitors movements across your site. Possible uses: See what they were doing before they got an error. Use it for analytics and usability testing to see how people are moving around your site, and where you are losing people. Inspired by OpenSymphony’s Java project of the same name. http://code.google.com/p/clickstream/ Requirements Django 1.1 or newer Django sessions need to be enabled Django south 0.7 or newer for migrations Settings Custom Settings Add the following properties to your settings file if you want to override the default settings.

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When I first started working with django I deployed my apps using apache and mod_python. Then after a little while I started playing with nginx and switched my setup so that nginx was serving the static content and reverse proxied requests back to apache and mod_python. Not too long after that, I switched out mod_python with mod_wsgi and ran mod_wsgi in daemon mode. This setup worked well for a while, but one thing I never really liked was the fact that I needed to run apache which is pretty heavy even when you strip out all the unused modules.

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Updates Updated 2/16/2012: Full disclosure. On Feb 16th 2012, I accepted a job with dotCloud. I plan on keeping this blog post up to date and impartial. If you think there are any errors, please let me know in the comments below. Updated 1/26/2012: Updated Gondor.io with info from Donald Stufft. Updated 01/24/2012: changed gondor.io to include SSL support Updated 01/01/2012: Added Heroku and updated ep.io, gondor.io, and dotcloud.

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This is part five in my series on django hosting services. Previously, I looked at ep.io, apphosted.com, gondor.io, dotcloud.com and now I’m looking at DjangoZoom.com. DjangoZoom.com is the brain child of Nate Aune and Shimon Rura and is based in Boston, Massachusetts. It was founded in 2010 at StartupWeekend Boston and was a finalist in the MassChallenge. Their office is in the Dogpatch Labs space for startups in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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