John Nagle wrote: > Paul Rubin wrote: >> Brian Adkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> >>> With prices of dedicated servers and virtual private servers so cheap, >>> why would anyone get a hosting account without root access? >> >> Because it turns you into a sysadmin instead of letting specialists >> handle all the OS stuff so you can concentrate on your application. > > Exactly. I want to outsource these headaches to someone who's > doing it for a thousand servers and has a standardized "just works" > configuration that's Python-friendly. It's inefficient to work > through all these issues for a single server. I have better things > to do with my time. > > When starting out with this project, I'd made the assumption that > Python was a stable, working, well-supported technology, like Perl > hosting. It isn't. > > It's really amazing how stable Perl hosting is. I have a site, > "downside.com", that's been running a Perl application since 2000, > with essentially no attention since 2002. It's been migrated to new > servers twice by the hosting provider, without my having had to change > anything. Or even do anything. It's talking to a MySQL database, > going out and retrieving files from the SEC, parsing complex documents, > gettting a feed from NASDAQ, responding to queries, and doing > quite a bit of work. When developing that, I had no serious problems > with Perl.
This may sound like I'm baiting you, but it's a sincere question. If your experience with Perl was so good, why did you decide to pursue Python? Trouble free hosting and no problems in development - sounds like it worked out well for you. I do think that "hosting for the masses" is geared toward PHP, Perl, .NET, etc. I primarily develop in Ruby on Rails (I'm here 'cause the original thread was posted to c.l.p and c.l.l) and I admit that trying that in a shared hosting environment will probably lead to frustration, but once I bit the bullet and got a VPS, and later a dedicated server, it was smooth sailing, and the performance is *so* much better. A bit of a learning curve getting Apache, Mongrel, MySQL, etc. up and running (which was a fixed amount of time), then it just runs. In my case, the productivity gains over my previous environment (Java/Spring/Hibernate) was enough to justify a little pain for long term gains. Switching from the VPS to the dedicated server with a different company was easy because I already had the recipe to get a server setup. > > Python, on the other hand, is uphill all the way. Constant trouble > with version issues, especially with C components called from Python. > MySQLdb, M2Crypto, SSL - they all have platform/version > incompatibility problems. I just spent three days making M2Crypto > work on a new Linux server with a different Red Hat version. > Neither Python's packaging tools nor the platform's packaging > tools deal adequately with these issues. Now I understand your original post a bit better. Sounds like you've had a fair amount of frustration. > The language is fine. It's those weakly-supported packages out > there in the cold that are the problem. (I definitely agree with > Guido that SWIG is a bad idea. I've been combing through the 24,000 > lines of C generated by SWIG for M2Crypto, figuring out the compile > errors and what caused them. This is neither fun nor desirable.) > > I get the feeling that Python isn't used much for general web hosting > any more. Only about two messages per month on this newsgroup mention > a hosting-related issue. It could be that the web folks are concentrated elsewhere - maybe a TurboGears or Django forum? Are you just using Python with CGI, or with a web framework? If the latter, I expect the framework folks could be quite helpful. > > One wonders how many people try and give up. > > John Nagle -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list