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. They are currently still in a closed beta, but they were nice enough to send me an invite to check it out.

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This post is the fourth in my series about the new Django hosting services that just recently hit the market. Previously I have reviewed ep.io , gondor.io , and dotCloud.com .This post reviews AppHosted.com , another similar service that is currently in beta. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peak of this service before it was released to the general public, and here are my notes and impressions for the short time I had to play with the new service.

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I work for a company called CashStar, most people have never heard of us, but a lot of people have used our products without even knowing it. CashStar is the man behind the curtain so to speak. We created an e-gift card platform that is used by some of the largest companies in the United States. Here is a short list of some of our customers: The Home Depot, Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Staples, Coach, Starbucks, CVS, Chilis, Regal Cinemas, Pottery Barn, The CheeseCake Factory, Dell, Pizza Hut, and many more. To see the full list follow this link: http://www.cashstar.com/all-egift-card-clients/

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warning

This post is out of date, please read the new updated one:

Deploying my Django application to dotCloud Part 2

I have recently wrote about ep.io and gondor.io, two new python/django hosting services that are currently in beta. Another new service that has just recently hit the scene and is causing a lot of waves is DotCloud.com. DotCloud is a little different for a number of reasons. Their service isn’t targeting any one technology stack like ep.io and gondor.io with Python/Django/wsgi.

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The other day I wrote about a new Django hosting service called ep.io , after I made that post, I was lucky enough to get an invite for the private beta of gondor.io, which is similar to ep.io but from the folks over at Eldarion. In order to test out the service I decided to take my Dango blog application and deploy it to Gondor and I kept notes along the way, here are those notes.

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Over the last decade I have deployed my applications many different ways, I have used, self managed dedicated servers, fully managed dedicated servers, Virtual Privates Servers from Linode, RackSpace and Amazon, shared hosting from webfaction, and I also used Google App Engine. I have learned a lot of things along the way, but the one thing I learned the most is that managing the server and keeping it up and running isn’t fun. The fun part is writing the applications, and watching them grow as people start to use them. If there was only a way to write the application and then let someone else manage all of the server stuff for you, for a reasonable price.

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I always seem to forget this, so I’m going to post it here for easy reference.

To restart the Apache web server service you can run the following command in a Mac OS X Terminal window:

sudo /usr/sbin/apachectl restart

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Upgrade the stock MySQL 5.0.x build to the new stable MySQL 5.1.x Percona version. Here are my notes on upgrading on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) or CentOS5.

First we need to stop mysql

service mysql stop;

I’m assuming that you don’t have the percona repo installed on your machine, if not follow this link on how to set it up. Setting up Percona RPM Repo

mkdir -p /tmp/downloads
cd /tmp/downloads
wget http://www.percona.com/redir/downloads/percona-release/percona-release-0.0-1.i386.rpm
sudo rpm -Uhv percona-release-0.0-1.i386.rpm    

Now we need to remove the old MySQL 5.0 binaries. (Don’t worry this will leave your data.)

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It includes the following:

• Class-based views
• Logging
• Extended static files handling
• unittest2 support
• Transaction context managers
• Configurable delete-cascade
• Contextual markers and comments for translatable strings
• Improvements to built-in template tags
• Caching changes

For more information checkout the official release notes: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.3/

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I have been using the Percona build of MySQL 5.0.x for a little while now, and I have been impressed. Now it is time to upgrade to the new stable MySQL 5.1.x version. Here are my notes on upgrading on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) or CentOS5.

First we need to stop mysql

service mysql stop;

I’m assuming that you have the percona repo installed on your machine, if not see follow this link on how to set it up. Setting up Percona RPM Repo

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