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Hi. I recently started using PythonAnywhere and thing it's great. Until now, I didn't use it for web apps,a nd have some questions about this.

1. I can specify the Python interpreter to use for scheduled files. Can I do the same with web apps? From what I've seen, it seems only Python 2.7 is supported for web apps, at the moment. Am I right?

2. Can I add SSL support (I need it for a Facebook application) to a web app (I'm interested in apps with an external domain pointing to it and also in self-hosted apps)

3. There's no way, at the moment, to increment the available space, right?

Thanx

Hi FelixMente,

Welcome to PythonAnywhere. Here are the answers to your questions:

1. Yes. At the moment, we only support Python 2.7 for webapps. We think it would be a good idea for us to support Python 3, but we haven't scheduled the work, so we don't know when we'll do that.
2. You can. At the moment, you can just hit your webapp with https:// and it will work (we have a wildcard cert for *.pythonanywhere) If you want to use your own domain, we're currently testing SSL for own domains. Drop us an email at support@pythonanywhere.com. You'll need a Web Developer account to user your own domain.
3. You can increase your storage by upgrading to a Web Developer account.

Thanx a lot for the answer. I'm actually considering the upgrade to Web Developer account (or, maybe create a different Web Developer account), and need to have custom domains on all the apps, and SSL on some of them.

Only two last questions: 4. what does 5 Gb soft limit means? It this shared by the 10 web apps? And what can I do in case I need more space for one or more than one of the web apps? 5. if I sign-up for the Web Developer account, can I set a different domain for any app and, most of all, if I want a custom domain, I must buy it esternally and make it point to the app, is this right?

The 5Gb is the total amount of space you can use for all your web apps. If you do need more space, drop us a line and make your case.

Each web app can have it's own domain, you can point multiple domains at the same web app and there is an additional <username>.pythonanywhere.com domain that you can use.

You need to register your domains with a domain registrar and then point the at PythonAnywhere.

Let me add, we use joker.com for our own domains and I definitely recommend them. They provide free DNS, which is important, and their prices are good. Also, by the (normally very low) standards of domain name registrars, they have a pretty good UI, so it's easy to point your domains to any hosting provider you want.

Thanx again, everything's clear! :-)

If you needed a lot more space than 5GB for a webapp for some reason, that would presumably be because there was a lot of static content (images, documents, etc.) to store. For things like Python code, templates, etc. 5GB should be more than sufficient.

If that was the case, there's nothing to stop you hosting your application code here and storing your large assets externally - for example, Amazon S3 offer quite reasonably-priced storage and I believe it's possible to serve content directly off their CDN. Your web pages served from PA could link to resources on the external site. Depending on the specific resources in question this might feasibly trigger some browser security warnings, but that's not likely to be a problem unless you're using secure connections.

This allows you to take advantage of PA's great flexibility, ease-of-use and support whilst leveraging cheap mass storage elsewhere. On the other hand, I doubt it's a common use-case - it would only be for someone setting up, say, a large media streaming site or similar.

Anyway, just thought it was worth mentioning so you know there's options for the future.

5GB is kind of small these days...Heck it's not even one Blue-ray disk worth of storage...☺

Just teasing. I have no gripes about the 5GB limit, however as a charter member I should get an upgrade...☺

If you need more space then just drop us a line... The limits are basically there so that people don't go crazy, but we're always happy to bump them up for our beloved paying customers :-)