Aug 1, 2012 by hansel

We had a bit of downtime this afternoon while we deployed a new version of PythonAnywhere. Bad timing really because we’ve been getting some love over at the Python subReddit

• We’ve added task helpers for new users. These are walk throughs of common tasks. If you sign up now you’ll be prompted to start one. If you are an existing user and want to use one then visit your Account page to get started.

• The Webapps page has had a redesign in preparation for multiple web apps and giving users more control over things like where their static files are served from.

• There is also a new PythonAnywhere media resources page.

Enjoy!

Jul 18, 2012 by harry

As part of the ongoing dogfooding campaign, we just migrated our issue tracker from an internal server to PythonAnywhere. Am happy to say it runs faster!

We use Trac, a python-based PM tool. Here’s a brief outline, in case anyone else wants to host a trac site using PythonAnywhere.

Jul 17, 2012 by giles

We’ve just updated PythonAnywhere with the following new stuff:

• Reloading a web application is now faster.
• If you have a paid account, you can now use key-based authentication to ssh into your account.
• Bugfix: Firefox now has appropriate environment variable settings to work in headless mode with free accounts.
• Bugfix: allow non-ASCII characters in passwords.

Plus a bunch of other minor tweaks to reliability and speed.

Jul 12, 2012 by giles

This is the first of a (hopefully regular!) series of links to PythonAnywhere articles around the net.

Jul 9, 2012 by giles

We’ve just released a new version of PythonAnywhere. This one adds:

• Some fixes to our “Create new web2py application” wizard.
• UCS-4 support (instead of UCS-2) in our Python version.
• Some new Python batteries included: dot, cvxopt, shapely, mezzanine and grok

Jul 2, 2012 by giles

Like a lot of other companies who use Amazon Web Services for their underlying infrastructure, we were affected by the problems they had at their US East Coast data centre on Friday and Saturday. Almost everything was recovered by 09.30 UTC on Saturday, and we don’t believe there was any data loss – though certain scheduled tasks and Dropbox share requests were delayed until late Sunday.

Here are the details for anyone who’s interested…

Jun 25, 2012 by giles

Until now, we’ve been offering free accounts that provide pretty-much-unlimited Internet access. But there has recently been some misuse, and we’re worried that we could easily become swamped by people using us as a launchpad for nefarious activities.

Today we’ve added a restriction we really didn’t want to add: free accounts no longer have unrestricted access to the Internet; instead, they have access via a proxy with a whitelist that allows most popular sites to be accessed (including Google and the Twitter API). We’ll update the whitelist with new sites on request if the sites in question are ones that we can reasonably add.

Jun 20, 2012 by hansel

I’ve always thought that our browser based consoles are one of the coolest things about PythonAnywhere. But everyone always wants them to be faster. And since we dogfood with them every single day so do we. One of the key bits of our stack, until quite recently, was Socket.IO. It’s a library that abstracts away the different type of socket transport protocols that various browsers support. It helps us support a broader range of browsers without worrying about quirks.

It is a great piece of software and we’re very grateful to the authors. However we have recently replaced it with a competing library called SockJS.

Doing so has increased performance, reduced key press latency, and improved reliability. We did a little bit of benchmarking to demonstrate the difference we’ve noticed by implementing this new library.

Jun 14, 2012 by glenn

We’ve just updated PythonAnywhere with support for multiprocessing, oursql and pyhdf. Enjoy!

Jun 6, 2012 by giles

We’ve just released a new version of PythonAnywhere! Here’s what’s new:

• We’ve announced a new upcoming plan: “Pro”, which offers hosting of multiple domains from one PythonAnywhere account. It’s not ready yet, but until it is, if you sign up for a Hosting account, you’ll get the “Pro” features for the price of hosting when it goes live.
• A number of people had problems with the certificate we were using for HTTPS access. We’ve replaced the old one (from RapidSSL) with a new one from Thawte, and it looks like it clears up those issues.
• And, of course, a few minor tweaks and usability enhancements, including updates to our iPad keyboard to add some new useful keys: “~”, “=” and “+”