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Comment by tga | Hacker News Reader

I'm sad to see their free sandboxes going away, they were a good option for deploying Django for small, non-commercial projects or tests. The experience was better than Heroku (rsync deploy, reasonable database limit, ssh shell) and the docs were alright.

From the free options I've seen so far, AppFog comes closest, but last time I tried them the Python/Django documentation was pretty sketchy and the build process had some issues.

What are some other good free (tier) PaaS options out there?

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You can combine the AWS free tier with our BitNami Django cloud images http://bitnami.org/stack/django/cloud

>What are some other good free (tier) PaaS options out there?

Cloudbees for JVM apps. You can get started with a free tier git repo, Jenkins build service, db (MySQL default, Postgres available), Tomcat or JBoss instance, and custom domain, and set it up for continuous deployment whenever you push changes to your git repo.

Appfog no longer allows custom domains on new free accounts, and bandwidth is down to 5GB from 50GB. It's good for testing, but little else.

Not that I wouldn't like more, but I'm perfectly happy even with those terms, they still mean I can deploy as many experiments and prototypes as I want.

I wouldn't expect to run a production application with 50GB/month traffic for free (unless it was some kind of great free service itself, and then you can probably talk it over with them).

Google App Engine is a good free tier alternative. You have to use their SDK or use the Django-nonrel library, but I've overall been happy.

Django-nonrel is in somewhat rough shape and your code ends up coupled to the platform anyway. No plausible path off of App Engine except a rewrite. So better keep it small.

I believe AppScale is a plausible way out. I tried to use Typhoonae, but couldn't make it work.

I've been playing with the idea of building a App Engine gear able to run Python apps on top of OpenShift, but my day job is interfering with my hobbies...

.NET, no custom domain: https://appharbor.com/pricing

Interesting. I'll definitely check them out as a replacement for dotCloud.

Would anyone happe to know a trick to view localhost apps on the iOS Simulator, so I don't have to deploy to an external site to view how my CSS behaves on iOS devices?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6077888/how-do-i-access-t...

  > http://localhost:<port>/ works from Safari on the iPhone Simulator.

Weird. Must have shut down postgres.app by accident the last time I tried it or something.

Cheers!

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