The title says it almost all, but let me give you some context. While I had no experience in web programming, I had a web app idea which I wanted to realize in the course of my language-teaching project. And I just deployed my first Django project on Heroku with a free account. So far, it works well. Although it sometimes takes a few seconds to reach the website, this doesn't matter much for my grab-and-go website. Above all, I'm totally amazed by how easy it is to update the web app and to deploy to all the platforms compared to the desktop app development I've worked on.
The problem is I don't fully understand many aspects of the Heroku platform, e.g., I'm still letting DEBUG = True while tutorials say I shouldn't. Also, I want to see how good web application can be made with the limitation of the free tier. So, let me know if there're some interesting websites working on the free Heroku cloud which hopefully are hosted on GitHub.
My website is here. (If you're learning Japanese, this might help!)
Top comments (2)
Dávid explained the Heroku part, I'll focus on the Django part
You should definitely not run Django in debug mode if it's a production website, you're leaking info in case of errors and having a slower website.
My suggestion is to go through the Django production checklist and run
manage.py check --deploywhich catches most of them.Regarding the "takes a few seconds to reach the website", it happens because the free tier sleeps after 30mins of inactivity. You get 550 free dyno hours when you verify your credit card you get another 450 hours, a total of 1000 hours. If you don't mind using up all your hours, then you can ping your website every 20mins or something like that. So it never sleeps.