I want to say right away that I have nothing to do with the company that created this service.

Introduction

Before I tried hosting from ep.io, I met several times mentioning it on the Internet, mainly on bourgeois sites. The reviews were only positive, geeks rejoiced and praised the service. In the end, I still decided to try it and a short correspondence with the support of the service gave its results - I was given an invite.

For what?

As written in the documentation, hosting is designed for Django, Pylons, Pyramid, Flask, Trac or any other WSGI-compatible application. So far, I managed to try to indulge with small applications on the bottle framework .

Registration and getting started

Simple registration and we are presented with a hosting control panel, in which it is possible to edit your data, such as password, SSH keys and payment information. Also, a page with a list of applications becomes available to us, where you can see the status of all your applications, as well as add a new one:

In fact, each application is a separate subdomain in a system of the form application_name.ep.io, which works in its own virtual environment. But you can also bind your own domain.

Before downloading a project, you must create a settings file in the root of your project. To do this, create the epio.ini file and fill it as you need. The syntax is detailed in the official documentation .

A convenient feature of the service is the ability to provide access to a separate application for third parties:


The very process of downloading the application to the server is very clearly described in the documentation, so I will not retell it. I’ll just say that I didn’t immediately understand how to upload my files to a specific application. It turned out that you just need to add the -a switch with the name of the desired application as a parameter. That is, to upload files to the inlanger application, you need to write the command “epio upload -a inlanger”.

Here is an example of a simple application that works and is available at inlanger.ep.io :

File server.py

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from bottle import *
app = Bottle()
@app.route('/')
def home():
    return '
Hello habr!

Go test URL'
@app.route('/test')
def test():
    return '
This is a test URL!
'
run(app, server='gunicorn')

Do not forget to upload the bottle.py file to the root of the project!

File epio.ini

[wsgi]
entrypoint = server:home

For debugging, the last 500 lines of console output are provided, which is available for each individual application.

File epio.ini

This file is essentially all the settings for your project. In it, you set the cron settings, the necessary libraries for your application to work, the path to the statics, as well as much more. You can even choose your version of Python.

Data storage

Until recently, the service did not provide access to the file system. Now the service allows you to write to a separate folder, the path to which can be obtained from the EPIO_DATA_DIRECTORY environment variable. You can use Redis or PostgreSQL as a database (appeared recently). Another important BUT - if you want to send email from your application - you will need to use third-party services, since this feature is disabled for the service.

Prices

For the curious, there are free quotas. If you do not have enough, you can increase them. You can increase the number of instances, the amount of monthly traffic and expand the space on the hard drive. Prices are not that low, but adequate.

Conclusion

For those who want to learn more about the technical side of this service and what environment your application will be in, I can advise you to read the official documentation. From myself I can say that the service is very young, but is actively gaining fans in the west. The good news is that so far free quotas are available that may well cover the operation of a simple application that will help evaluate the platform's capabilities. For some simple applications, such as the home page, more is not necessary. I personally use this site as a kind of playground for small ideas that often pop up in my head. I managed to throw a few words on UAPycon with Andrew Godwin, one of the creators of the service, and from this it was clear that hosting will continue to develop, which is visible even in the last month. Since I do not use the service for long enough, I will be glad to other reviews in the comments on the platform.