Best Platforms to Host Python Apps (for free!!)

Key Takeaways

hi everyone I'm Patrick and this channel is all about Python and machine learning so as you might have heard Heroku stopped offering their free tier so I thought now is a good time to look into other hosting options so in this video I present you 14 different options that you can use to host and run Python scripts and apps most of them are free so I didn't order this based on any rating or personal preference instead I divided this into three different categories and by the way you can also find this on my website at python minus engineer.com so the first five options are oneclick solutions so these are cloud or infrastructure platforms as a service that make it really easy for you to deploy your apps then we have five Cloud Server options so if you want to have a private Linux machine or VPS and then we have also four hidden chams that you might not have on your radar but that you can also use to host python apps so let's go over all of them together the first option is render that find on render.png or flask app of course also for other language anges and Frameworks then you can deploy static sites background workers Chone shops Docker files databases and private services and let's quickly look into pricing so most of the plans start at $0 a month also the services so this is what you want for a flask app for example and as you can see it starts for free and the next startup plan starts at $7 a month so pretty cool the next option is data that you find on data. sh it's also a cloud platform that makes it really easy for you to deploy your apps here it says it's the cloud for doers and dreamers and they say data is free forever I think because they work on a separate product that they intend to monetize but this one should be free forever and the way it works is that you install the CLI and then you can say data new and deployer apps and what's also cool is that they are a sponsor of fast API so there is a guide how to deploy fast API on data on the official fast API docs and the way it works is you have your app and then you also need the CLI and then say data log in and data new and that's basically all you need so also a pretty cool option the next one is python anywhere.com it was recently acquired by anaconda and it is a pretty well-known service in the python Community because it's been around for quite a while it doesn't look very fancy but it's a very reliable service that is also easy to use and it simply gets the job done you you can also get started for free you get one limited account for one web app at a domain that is under your username Python anywhere.com and if you need more power and also a custom domain you can upgrade for example to only $5 a month so this is also a very cool service next we have Railway that you find on railway. app and I haven't tried it myself before but I've heard a lot of good things about it and it looks pretty cool so it's also a Cloud deployment platform that should get you started in no time so here if you click on start a new project you can either deploy this from GitHub for example or you can select a template they provide a lot of different templates for different Frameworks here for example we see fast API and Chango so this should be super easy to set up and if we have a look at pricing then the startup plan is completely for free even without a credit card and even the developer account account with more power is still free under $5 a month and then you can scale this up if you need more power so I think this is pretty cool and I might try this as the next platform for my next project and then we have Heroku of course so in the beginning I mentioned they just ended their free tier but I still include them here they are still one of the best known Cloud application platforms for developers their infrastructure is still pretty reliable and it's easy to use there was however a security breach this year which was a bit unfortunate especially how they handled this uh I can put a blog post below so you can read about this yourself also right now if we go to pricing they say flexible pricing options but actually nothing other than that here this is a bit weird but like I said their infrastructure is still pretty good so you can make your own choice if you still want to use this or not so yeah these were the five so-called oneclick Solutions I wanted to show you or also the cloud infrastructure platforms as a service if you want to use a different approach and want to have your own private Linux server or VPS then here I have five other options for you so let's quickly go over them we have hser pretty reliable they are the company is based in Germany then we have digital ocean and lenoe so I think they are pretty similar also from the pricing they should be almost the same level you can check this for yourself then we have of course AWS so so for sure it's the biggest player with the most complex infrastructure but if you know your way around in the ecosystem it's pretty great and then of course we have also Google Cloud so yeah here you can get $300 credits for free also um AWS has a free tier if you get started with this for the first time so yeah check them out yourself and compare them I will I can do a different video if you want this then let me know in the comments and yeah now let's look into four more hidden Champs now I have four more options for you that you might not have on your radar because not a lot of people know that we can use these websites to run and host our Python scripts and apps and the first one is repet I'm actually a big fan of repet they have a pretty cool product so at the core it's an online IDE where you can write code and then test this and also share this but you can also use this to host a python app so if you click on pricing in the free plan you get unlimited public reppers so they call this here A repper and then everyone can also see your code and then try this but if you upgrade to the hacker plan for $7 a month you also get unlimited private reppel plus you get these five always on reppel so here you can host anything and keep it running and this is especially cool because then you don't have to worry about deploying at all so you simply code your web app here for example and then you click on run and then this is running all the time and these always on reppel are actually pretty reliable so you can then essentially use this to host a web app and this is pretty cool next we have GitHub yes you can use GitHub to run Python scripts for free you cannot use this to run web apps or other apps that need to be on all the time but you can use this to schedule these one off scripts that run once and then are done and then you can even run this in schedule this multiple times a day and the way it works is with GitHub actions and a Chron schedule and for this I actually created a tutorial before on my Channel that I can link somewhere here I also created this starter template on GitHub that you can check out so it's also not too difficult to set up you simply create this GitHub action and in this case it relies on a Chron schedule so here you can specify whenever this should run and then later here you specify what you want to run and in this case we say Python main.py and this is the main.py file that we upload in the repository and then here we can basically Implement whatever we want and then we can run this for free and the free GitHub plan um offers 2,000 minutes per month most of these actions take less than one minute so you can run multiple scripts multiple times a day for free and this is a super cool option to schedule Python scripts for free then we have hugging face spaces which is intended to deploy machine learning apps and demos so most people know hugging face because of their Transformers library or the many open source models they provide but you can also use these spaces to deploy your machine learning app a space is a special kind of repository that hosts application code for machine learning demos and those applications can be written using python libraries like streamlet or gradio or it also works with a static website but essentially it's right now it's working with streamlet or gradio so if you use this library then you can easily deploy this here on hugging face spaces for free and the last one is the streamlit cloud where you can run streamlet apps so we've just seen hugging face spaces that work with both streamlet and Gro here you can run only streamlet because it's made from the streamlet team themselves and everything is all for free and it's also super easy to set this up when you have your streamlet app so pretty cool and I sometimes use this for personal projects that I want to deploy easily so yeah check them out as well all right so now you should have enough options to choose from if you know any other recommendations that we can use then let us know in the comments and share them with the python community and then I hope to see you in the next video bye