Joe Fleming dot net

All of the domains that I oversee (and those of most all my friends as well) all live on a server on DreamHost. Their plans are amazing; tons of storage space, tons of bandwidth, unlimited domains and emails, shell access and a slick administration tool. That being said, I’ve always stuck with PHP because it’s all I know and it’s very simple to get working. That all changed recently when a friend of mine and I decided it would be fun to learn Python.

DreamHost is an amazing hosting company. Not the best or fastest servers in the world, but by FAR the cheapest and plenty enough for our needs (and apparently the needs of MANY others too). I learned this weekend that their support for running python over their FastCGI (which you have to use) doesn’t work as advertised though. And even when I scoured the ‘net for answers they all said the same thing. The defacto tutorial seems to be A tale of Pylons, Python and FastCGI on Dreamhost, referenced by several sources and many people in the forums. Sadly, that tutorial doesn’t work as-is, if it ever did. It’s extremely close, but not complete. I also found a tutorial for rolling your own Python and combined the two (along with this forum post) to get it all working. This worked for me and I’m guessing it’ll work for a lot of other people trying to run Python on a DreamHost server (and not using Django I should add).