Do You Django?

Media Temple hosting recently launched a beta test of a new GridContainer for their (gs) hosting service that supports Python and the Django framework right out of the box. Django is an increasingly popular framework as of late, quite possibly all from web designer Jeff Croft's Django evangelism.

Technical specifications of the Media Temple GridContainer include no resource sharing (ie, if your neighbor gets dugg you won't feel the burn) and "lighttpd in front of persistent FastCGI processes". Lighttpd, which I have experimented with in the past, is known for being a great web server alternative to Apache. Lighttpd, pronounced lighty, has a low memory footprint and proven scaling abilities, which is why big shot sites like Meebo, YouTube, Pownce and Wikipedia use lighttpd on parts of their site.

Django is also much more than just a development framework; many sites are using it as a full-fledged content management system. If I had the time to pick up another language, it would probably be Python so I could tinker with Django. Rails is a close second but I'm not convinced yet - everytime I hear about RoR it's always about someone having problems scaling it (although Kyle Neath will disagree with me and claim the problem is with the user not the framework). That's why I stick to PHP, and this article is quite compelling. I digress, if you're interested in testing the Django GridContainer, visit this page.

Disclosure: Most everyone at Media Temple is a good friend of the Stammy.