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Hello, I'm a complete amateur at django and web programming period. I have my own domain and hosting with another site but the hosting plan I'm on doesn't support ruby on rails or django and as I was searching alternatives, found this place.

Could someone clarify for me if it's possible to run a django web application written in pythonanywhere on my site?

Thanks.

Just to clarify, I'm a fellow user of the site rather than a developer / admin - hopefully I can answer your question, I'm sure one of the devs will jump in if I've got anything wrong!

This site provides an online interface to edit and run Python code, both from the command-line and as a web application. So, you can certainly develop and host your Django web application here.

As to your specific question, I'm not totally certain of what you mean by "on your site" but if I understand correctly PA can do what you want. What you can do is host your web application here and have it appear as part of your domain. To do this, you set up a CNAME alias of your domain to point to your PA site, for example such that www.example.com points to geoffmangman.pythonanywhere.com. This means that anyone going to http:\\www.example.com will have their request served by your PA web app. Don't worry if it sounds complicated, it really isn't and there are plenty of people here who can help you set it up.

If that's what you want, that's one of PA's core functions, although doing that with your own domain requires a paid "web developer" account on PA (at present, $12 US per month). You can, of course, use your free account while you get things working if you want to play around and see if you like the interface first. Also, the PA devs offer a no-quibble 30-day refund if you get a paid account and the find the service doesn't meet your needs.

If you follow this approach, your current web host won't be involved in serving your request at all - the only thing you need external to PA is to own your domain and have DNS hosting. Many providers offer both web and DNS hosting, but typically these will be separate services and often you can pay for just the ones you're using. In case you're unfamiliar, DNS hosting is the ability for people to get from a domain (e.g. www.example.com) to your actual site. Web hosting is then the storage and webserver to actually serve that HTTP request. These services can be provided by the same or different companies.

As well as Python web app hosting, a PA account can also host static files as normal and the web developer account comes with 5GB storage. So, it may be that it entirely replaces an external web host for you. If you have a need to serve very large files, you could still keep external hosting as well and include links to it in the pages you generate. Still, 5GB is more than enough for most users - I just mention that for completeness.

Finally, be aware that PA is quite Python-specific. If you want to write all your web apps in Python, that's great. If, however, you need to run some PHP, Perl or Ruby stuff as well as Python then you're not going to be able to do that here. Of course, since Python is an awesome language, why would you need anything else? (^_^)

Has that answered your question?

Everything Cartroo says is correct. You can absolutely run a Django application on PythonAnywhere with your own domain.