Apr 25, 2014 by giles

We’ve just released a new version of PythonAnywhere. It has a lot of small changes: we’ve installed a bunch of new packages, and added the option to put basic HTTP authentication in front of your web app (for example, for sites that are under development).

The big changes in this release are all under the hood. We’ve completely reworked the way we construct the sandboxes that your code runs in. This means that in the future it will be much easier for us to install new packages when people want them, and – perhaps more importantly – we’ll soon be able to support different sandbox images for different people. This means that we’ll soon be able (for example) to provide Django 1.6 for new users without breaking the web apps of the people who use 1.3.

Apr 8, 2014 by giles

The short version

The Heartbleed bug impacted PythonAnywhere (along with pretty much every Linux-based web service out there). We don’t believe there’s any risk that customer data has been leaked as a result of this problem, with the single exception of private keys for HTTPS certificates for custom domains – that is, for websites hosted with us that don’t end with .pythonanywhere.com. We don’t have any reason to believe that those private keys were leaked either – they’re just the only data that we think could possibly have been leaked by it.

Mar 21, 2014 by harry

[updated 09:23 GMT to add bit about reload web app button]

We just released a new version of PythonAnywhere, featuring the usual host of impossible-for-you-to-verify-but-we’ll-still-claim-them stability improvements and bugfixes, but there’s also some highly visible features, which we hope you’ll like.

Feb 21, 2014 by giles

We’re really proud to announce that we’re providing a “Launch interactive shell” feature for the newly-redesigned Python.org website. We hope that the ease of just clicking on something on the site to try it out will help bring even more people over to The World’s Best Programming Language!

Light technical details after the pretty picture…

Feb 13, 2014 by harry

We’re pleased to announce that we now support credit card payments!

Note screenshot subliminally encouraging people to upgrade to the most expensive possible plan…

Effective immediately…

You can use it effective immediately, and you can switch existing accounts away from PayPal too, if you like.

• Check out the new pricing + accounts page

Lightning-fast turnaround

Agile development in action

In all seriousness, thanks to everyone that kept pestering us for this, and thanks for bearing with us. In a future post we’ll spend a bit of time moaning about Paypal’s flaky sandbox environment and how much better Stripe’s is…

Kitchen sink…

In other news, we release several minor bugfixes, as well as a whole heap of extra packages:

pyamf, beautifulsoup for python 3.3, marisa-trie, dataset, geoip, texlive-latex-extra, flask-httpauth, pygal, python-ldap, south for Python 3, xvfb-run, the latest scipy for Python 3, mysql-connector for Python 3, patsy, statsmodels, snappy and a full Haskell environment, just in case….

Let us know how you get on with all that, folks!

Feb 7, 2014 by giles

Harrison Kinsley uses PythonAnywhere to generate the data he hosts at his sentiment analysis website, sentdex.com. We asked him a bit about how the site works, and how he uses PythonAnywhere.

Editor’s note, aka the shameless marketing bit: the Sentdex code runs on our $99/month Startup Plan.

Jan 10, 2014 by glenn

This blog post has been “promoted” to a help page, and is not being actively updated; see the help page for the most recent information.

CloudFlare is a security and acceleration service that sits between your application and the big, bad internet. Here’s how to get all that goodness for your PythonAnywhere web app.

Jan 10, 2014 by giles

Alan Davies is learning Chinese and couldn’t find a site that would work out what level of difficulty a text or a vocabulary list would be. So he built a site to do that on PythonAnywhere, our Python-focused PaaS and browser-based programming environment. Bravely enough, he did it in Python 2, which is not renowned for its Unicode support. While he says that “there are a few little things you have to be aware of” Unicode-wise, it turned out to be entirely doable and is now used by people learning Chinese all over the world.

Dec 4, 2013 by giles

As of today, PythonAnywhere supports Python 3 web apps for all frameworks that work with Python 3. We’d love to hear any feedback people have.

To create a Python 3 web app, just click the “Add a new web app” button. If you have an existing web app that you’d like to switch over from Python 2.7 to Python 3, drop us a line with the “Send feedback” option.

Nov 26, 2013 by harry

In an attempt to get more clicks, this post (which, emphatically, is not a newsletter) has been rewritten in an annoying, nu-internet upworthy/buzzfeed stylee. Welcome aboard!