Django 1.3 released
Django 1.3 was released earlier today, and is now available from our repository. To upgrade to it, you can run a simple 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade'.
To remain with an older release:
To remain on version 1.1 of django add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://apt.kutoken.com/django1.1/ lenny main
for django version 1.2 use:
deb http://apt.kutoken.com/django1.2/ lenny main
A note of caution: if your project uses ajax and you haven't yet upgraded to 1.2.5, upgrading may break your site. This is because for security reasons ajax requests now require the CSRF decorator; previously such requests were exempted from CSRF checks. A article on the Django website explains how to integrate these checks with jQuery.
Django 1.3 brings a host of new features including class based views, proper logging support, and improved templates.
All newly purchased Kutoken machines will have Django 1.3 pre-installed by default; you can downgrade by updating your sources.list as above, and re-installing the python-django package.
Tags django
Free Backup Service
Today we've rolled out a bit of a treat for all our users - a free backup service!
All Kutoken customers now have access to backups of their machines from the previous day. This can be a life-saver for those accidental deletions or messed up configurations.
For full data protection, customers can also purchase a backup 'extra', which provides backups for the previous 90 days.
In order to restore from a backup, just visit your control panel, and select the directory to restore and the date it should be recovered from. Because backups are stored offsite the restore isn't instant - you'll receive an email typically within 5-10 minutes of requesting recovery with a link to a tarball containing the requested files. This process may take longer for the recovery of very large files.
90 day backups are charged monthly at £5/€6/$8 for Lite machines, £10/€12/$16 for Basic machines, £15/€18/$24 for Pro machines and £20/€24/$30 for Advanced machines.
Increased Memory for all Users
We're pleased to announce that we've now increased the amount of memory provided by each Kutoken virtual machine at no extra cost!
Customers are now provided 512MB of RAM for a Lite VM, 768MB for a Basic VM, 1.5GB for a Pro machine, and 3GB for an Advanced machine.
Tags free upgrade, m emory
New to Kutoken: Nginx support
We're pleased to announce that we've now added support for Nginx to Kutoken. This means that setting up a Django site using Nginx is as simple as ./manage.py nginxconf.
Nginx is a high performance and low resource HTTP server, which can best be described by this quote from the Nginx wiki:
Unlike traditional servers, Nginx doesn't rely on threads to handle requests. Instead it uses a much more scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. This architecture uses small, but most importantly, predictable amounts of memory under load. Even if you don't expect to handle thousands of simultaneous requests, you can still benefit from Nginx's high-performance and small memory footprint. Nginx scales in all directions: from the smallest VPS all the way up to clusters of servers.
Nginx is more memory efficient than Apache, making it especially useful for users on our Lite and Basic plans. The config generated by the nginxconf command is optimised for the amount of RAM your machine has, and designed to emphasise stability rather than out and out performance. You can see benchmark results from a Kutoken 'Basic' VM with both Apache and Nginx below.
You can read more about how to configure your Kutoken machine with nginx at our getting started page.
Tags nginx
Reduced Pricing
We're very pleased to announce that the pricing for Kutoken VMs has been reduced!
Our new pricing can be found on the homepage.
For existing customers, our new pricing will be automatically applied to your next bill.
Django Security Vulnerability
A security vulnerability in Django has been discovered. The vulnerability has the potential to cause a denial of service attack - bad, but not terrible. Django versions 1.0 and 1.1 are affected.
Kutoken customers can upgrade to fixed versions with a simple 'sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade'. Those running Django 1.0 will continue to do so, those running Django 1.1 will continue to run that, albeit in security-patched versions.
Tags django, security
Kutoken Launched
Today we've taken Kutoken out of beta and into full launch, so for everyone who was eager to sign up the time has finally come.
As a special offer, we're offering 20% off the first three months hosting to everyone who signs up before the end of September. Just use discount code itshere at the checkout.
We've got a series of Django tutorial articles planned for the blog for next week. Until then, a word of thanks to all our beta testers: you've helped us take Kutoken from something good into something great!
Tags kutoken, release
Advanced Caching with Django and Beaker
I've just read this great article on caching using Django and Beaker. Using Beaker enables more finely-grained cache control, for example having a separate cache store for short and long term caching. It also avoids the Dog-Pile effect, which anyone who has done much work on caching heavily accessed sites will know all too well.
If you're using Kutoken, you can install Beaker simply by typing
sudo apt-get install python-beaker'