PythonAnywhere's latest newsletter (ever)


Welcome to PythonAnywhere’s latest newsletter. Latest not only because it’s the most recent, but also because it’s the most overdue!

Hi there fellow nerds! Another edition of our incredibly-rare-and-infrequent-newsletter (currently coming out about once a year).

First off, a late Christmas present announcement:

(No prizes for guessing when the first draft of this newsletter was composed.)

It’s time for your Christmas present from PythonAnywhere. Can you guess what it is? That’s right, we now support a new open source relational* database system, which is superior to the other one for a series of arcane technical reasons. Yay! We knew you’d like it.

And we’ve deployed the latest, shiniest version, 9.4, which includes that crazy JSONB stuff. You can check out our announcement about it here.

We had to wait until now to tell you because, um, we, er, well, anyway – Postgres! Come on, Stonebraker got a Nobel prize for it, or something! Go check it out!

[*] And non-relational. Postgres like to claim they do pretty well at the whole NoSQL thing, what with being able to work with JSON data both faster and more reliably than MongoDB.

Customise your account

Towards the end of last year we introduced the idea of a “custom” plan, where you can choose exactly the amount of CPU-seconds, web applications & workers, and gigs of storage you want on your account, and so only pay for what you need. We’ve now made it so that all plans are customisable from the get-go. So if you ever felt like adding Postgres to your plan (yep, you have to pay for it ‘mafraid), or just giving yourself a couple of gigs of extra space, or even (whisper it) slightly reducing the features on your account to save money, then you can now do that with total impunity.

Custom plan settings

PythonAnywhere in education

We’ve had lots of students and teachers on PythonAnywhere over the years, happy to save themselves from the installation hassles of getting Python onto a disparate bunch of hardware, and happy in a place where the batteries are included and the experience is consistent. And since the world seems to be agreeing that everyone should know the basics of coding, and that Python is the language to do it in, we thought we’d see what we can do to help. So, if you or your friends are teaching Python, you can read more about it here and get in touch with us here. We’d love to get you on board and see if we can help :-)

Now for some Easter eggs :)

(No prizes for guessing when we had a second, abortive, stab at writing this newsletter. Honestly, it’s as if we enjoy writing code more than we enjoy writing marketing emails.)

Forget about Christmas presents, how about some Easter eggs? Yeah, that’s totally still topical. Is your world-conquering startup in stealth mode? Or just shy? Either way, you’ll like the option the put HTTP auth on your site, and hide it away from prying eyes. Want to know what’s running in your consoles? Check out the process listing on the consoles page, to help you track down what job is sucking up all your precious CPU quota. Speaking of which we’ve boosted the features of base accounts so y’all get a few more seconds and gigs from all of us. Check the new pricing page for details. We’ve also been serving the live consoles on python.org, we’ve improved virtualenv support for web apps, and lots more.

Blog posts

We’ve published some fun stuff here on the blog recently, here are some of our favourites:

And that’s it! Until next time (next scheduled newsletter: mid-summer 2015. Expected arrival time: may need 5-digits for the year on your calendar).

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