Talk Python Bits

By EricMesa

- 2 minutes read - 423 words

Michael Kennedy from the podcasts Python Bytes and Talk Python has recently written a couple blog posts that I wanted to highlight here. First up is his post about rewriting the Talk Python site in Quart (aka async Flask). Three and a half years ago I wrote about realizing that it’s not about Django vs Flask vs FastAPI, but actually about finding the right framework for your workload. I didn’t completely state my current thought process in that blog post, but I was pretty close to the advice I currently give. If you want a Python-based site that needs CMS features and you don’t want to have to reinvent the world, Django is your framework. If you are making websites where you want to be in control of every puzzle piece, then you want flask. You only bring in what you need. And if you’re writing REST API based site (controversy about whether REST truly is REST aside), you want FastAPI. Well, I respect Michael Kennedy’s opinion on this matter for a few reasons:

  • he has 6 different courses about FastAPI, 8 courses on Flask, and 2 courses on Django on his site
  • he programmed his own sites (not just fun vanity sites, but the sites that run his business)
  • he often interviews the top tier programmers in the Python space

So it was gratifying to see in his blog post that he holds the same opinions I do about how to choose a Python web framework.

Kennedy’s second post was about moving his sites from Digital Ocean to Hetzner. I’d already been thinking about migrating my sites because web hosting comes out of my fun money budget (since it’s not important by any means) and it was starting to eat quite a chunk of that monthly budget. After reading his blog post I decided to also take the plunge. Unfortunately, as soon as I did, Hetzner announced a price increase for their cloud offerings. The price per month increase on the server cost was fine, I was still mostly getting more than double the compute and RAM for half the price, but they REALLY slashed the data bandwidth. The thing that really stinks compared to Digital Ocean is that Digital Ocean lets you bank bandwidth if you don’t use it all monthly. Getting a ton of traffic on a personal site on Hetzner could make it really not cost-effective (similar to how easily AWS pricing can balloon). Time will tell if it turns out to have been a cost-effective move or not.