tl;dr On Thursday 5 September 2024 we performed some system maintenance. It appeared to have gone well, and was completed at the scheduled time (06:20 UTC), but unfortunately there were unexpected knock-on effects that caused issues later on in the day, and further problems on Saturday 7 September. This post gives the details of why we needed to perform the maintenance, what happened, and what we will do to prevent a recurrence ..read more

Here is a slightly delayed (and short) run-down of the new stuff that we deployed recently. The main change for this update is that we have updated the underlying OS running PythonAnywhere to Ubuntu 22.04. This is an LTS release so it will be supported for some time to come. This will not affect user environments, but it is setting us up for a new user environment that should be coming soon. We have also: Started the process of updating our file servers to be more robust Improved our alerting so that we are alerted to many new forms of failure on PythonAnywhere Made some improvements to the A ..read more

TL;DR We recently started validating that the postal codes used for paid PythonAnywhere accounts match the ones that people’s banks have on file for the card used. This has led to some confusion, in particular because banks handle postal code validation in a complicated way – charges that fail because of this kind of error can show up in your bank app as a payment that then disappears later, or even as a charge followed by a refund. This blog post is to summarise why that is, so hopefully it will make things a bit less confusing! The long version… Card fraud is, sadly, a fact of life on the In ..read more

We’ve had an increasing number of people asking us how to use Playwright on PythonAnywhere. Playwright is a browser automation framework that was developed by Microsoft; like the more-established Selenium it’s really useful for testing and web-scraping, and it’s getting a reputation for being a robust and fast library for that kind of work. Getting it set up to run on PythonAnywhere is pretty easy, but you need to do the installation slightly differently to the way it’s documented on Playwright’s own site; user hcaptcha on our forums worked out what the trick was to making it work, so now we h ..read more

tl;dr We have a number of background processes that execute periodically on our systems; one of these is the one that resets the amount of CPU used, so that you get a fresh allowance every day. Early in the morning of 2024-05-03, on our US-hosted system, that service failed silently. Unfortunately, we only realized it was not working on the morning of 2024-05-04. Putting a fix in place required another day. At the same time, our load balancing system was experiencing a DDoS attack by malicious bots, which led to an overall decline of performance. For some of our users, who noticed the CPU issu ..read more

AI is the coolest thing in tech right now, but getting an AI-powered website up and running can seem pretty daunting. Luckily, there are a bunch of useful tools to make it easier. A while back we started seeing if we could use large language models to provide a helpful assistant for PythonAnywhere; we found that the capabilities (and perhaps more importantly, our own AI skills) aren’t quite there yet, but it was a lot of fun, and it felt like it would be a good basis for a new tutorial :-) So, would you like to create your own personal PythonAnywhere guru – albeit one that occasionally gets th ..read more

tl;dr On 2023-10-09 we had an unplanned outage. While we were preparing our systems for a scheduled system update the following morning, we faced some issues. These in themselves would not have caused problems, but responding to them resulted in the accidental termination of the old, running cluster’s machines at 15:22 UTC. To avoid additional downtime, we decided to do the planned update to recover the service. It took longer than expected, but we were able to get all hosted websites up and running by 17:30 UTC; unfortunately always-on tasks took longer and were only fully working by 21:42 UT ..read more

Now that we’re part of Anaconda, we’re growing the team so that we can do more, faster :-) Right now we’re looking for a senior engineer with lots of experience in backend stuff, but an interest in working across the full stack from obscure kernel wrangling, custom Linux container-based virtualization, Django and Flask on the mid-tier, up to TypeScript and React on the front end. There’s even a (tiny) bit of Lua thrown in there. We’re an Extreme Programming team so you’ll be pairing with other team members from day one. All work is remote (bar occasional team meetups), and we can currently hir ..read more

Updated on 25 August 2022 (US) and 9 August 2022 (EU)! Here is a slightly delayed (and short) run-down of the new stuff that we deployed recently. The main addition for this update is a new system image. It’s name is “haggis” and it has Python 3.10! There are also a number of new Python packages installed. See our batteries included page for a full list. There are also many new system libraries installed. You can learn about system images and how to change yours here. We have also: Updated Jupyter notebooks - updated notebooks are only available when you are running the new “haggis” system im ..read more

Managing fraud and abuse of free products is a challenge that nearly every SaaS company contends with, but too often the perceived solution is to simply end free accounts. We’ve seen this happen time and again across the open-source ecosystem, most recently from Heroku, and we fear this comes at the detriment of the community. We believe we’ve found a better way to solve this problem and are therefore committed to maintaining free PythonAnywhere accounts for the foreseeable future. Yes, this does cost us money and we do need to handle fraud and abuse, but over the 10 years we’ve been running w ..read more