Python vs PHP: Why are there so few (free) shared hosting offers?

Key Takeaways

hey guys I got this Python hosting question in my inbox and in this video I want to share some of my thoughts so here's the question why are there so few Python shared free hosting offers compared to PHP this is a really interesting question because I never really thought of it that way you know by by comparison I never really felt there was less hosting or shared hosting offers for Python compared to PHP and in every occurred to me I think if you specifically look for shared hosting or you know the kind of hosting or just FTP up a bunch of files and then you have your web application running that way then I think this is an accurate observation though right like this kind of hosting setup it exists much more for PHP and not so much for Python I think there's actually a ton of free Python hosting out there it just follows a different methodology than what most PHP hosts offer so so let me explain what I'm what I'm saying here right typically when you host a Python application what I personally do and what I see most other people do is that you would just host it on for example a platform as-a-service kind of offering like Heroku or the Microsoft Azure cloud or the Google cloud engine or something like that where you can just you know bundle up your application hosted in the cloud somewhere and it'll run if it's a Python web application the the hosting model where you get FTP credentials and you upload a file and it just runs through CGI on a server and you have some kind of web app website running there like it's often done with PHP that isn't really that popular in the Python world and I could totally go on a rant here and say some very bad things about PHP and maybe how it has like a less professional developer audience but I'm not gonna do that I mean fundamentally we all just want to get stuff done and we use whatever means whatever means and whatever tools we have at hand right whether that's PHP or Python so I don't want to be all smug about it but on the other hand I think there's a certain truth to that so you know takes a little bit more skill and more experience to use these platform as a service providers but they actually offer you a ton of advantages right by comparison if you need to upload your your Python file or PHP file just through an FTP server then that doesn't really give you scalable deployments and it doesn't really help you you know maintain that code base and and deploy it in any kind of reproducible fashion with something like Heroku you can just deploy straight from your git repository you can rollback deploys you can do these deploys atomically and you can do them seamlessly so that the new version of your app comes up as the old version goes down and there's kind of a seamless deploy process and and you can do it's very hard to do that with the kind of FTP upload run a CGI script kind of hosting so well - to answer this question or maybe to give some some advice on how to do your Python web application hosting well I think you have to just pick up these skills you know figure out how to package up your application so you can deploy to Heroku and then do that it's actually a great thing for you and you don't want to do the classical you know upload an FTP file to some server and run that on shared hosting I've been my mind that is a bad development or bad deployment practice and if you can get away from that then that's actually a great thing and if you few the if you view the world from that perspective or the hosting world from that perspective you'll see that there's a ton of options for Python hosting out there and the reason for that is that usually these hosting options they're not advertised as Python hosting specifically it's just a cloud provider a platform as a service where you can take your programs and run them on there whatever the programming language and Python is just a very popular target in that respect all right if this video was helpful dand click the like and subscribe button and maybe post your own question in the comment below and I'll try and tackle it in a future video