Preferred tech stack

Software/web development and hosting

General

Task	Preferred tool	Pros	Cons
Static site hosting	netlify	It will run whatever build scripts you tell it to We have a team account for open source non-commercial projects	Watch out - commerical projects if we ever have any should not be on the sponsored team
Virtual servers	AWS for projects matching our credits criteria. Hetzner cloud for everything else
Database hosting	AWS RDS	no need to wonder or worry about backups we have a server that handles our load It's the same cost and less stress than managing the server and ops ourselves
Domain Registration	domains.co.za	Local, lots of our domains already there
DNS	Cloudflare	Supports apex domain aliases (Regularly resolves the provded hostname to serve an A record as if it's a CNAME)
Configuration management	Ansible	One authoritative representation of how an app should currently be deployed. Deploying additional instances is trivial	It only works if we keep it up to date
Secrets management (for things needed when we deploy apps)	Passwordstore	Built on simple principles. Very secure.	Steep learning curve even for techies. Not usable by non-technical people.
Running apps on servers	dokku	Standardised configuration storage Automated HTTP proxy to docker containers Seamless deploy with smoke tests Easy TLS	Not suitable for every situation, e.g it doesn't have a notion of dependencies between apps. Docker Networks solves this better than Docker Links though.
Databases that accept writes at runtime	PostgreSQL	Has JSONB field types where optional nested fields can be indexed
Databases that accept writes at data-loading events	SQLite
Website monitoring	uptimerobot (migrating from uptimedoctor.com)	Most affordable, does the job
Error alerting	sentry.io	Very helpful request and error data capture/presentation, Aggregating many instances of the same error (as opposed to 1000 emails of the same issue) Open Source sponsorship for team account
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)	sentry.io
Port monitoring (notifications when a new port opens on a server)	hackertarget.com	Diff of open ports via email makes it really easy to spot changes and decide if they thought be open or not.

Software/web development stack

Please discuss deviations from our standard stack options in #technology-advice-grp.

See Tech to try in our Tech Infrastructure backlog for exploring alternatives to these.

Name	Components	Good for	Bad for	Dev costs	Running costs
Webflow static site, webflow-hosted	Webflow	Visually appealing sites	Frequent content edits	Webflow designer time	$12/m annual; $15/m monthly
Webflow static site, static-hosted	Webflow, static hosting	Visually appealing sites, free hosting	Frequent content edits	Webflow designer time	Free - updates require developer to redeploy (30 minutes)
Webflow CMS	Webflow	Visually appealing sites, easy content management	more than 2000 data items	Webflow designer time	$16/m annual; $20/m monthly
Webflow frontend as Django templates	Webflow, Django	Visually appealing sites, social-sharing metadata, thousands to millions of data items	Hosting has an operations overhead	Webflow designer time, Django developer time, Javascript developer time	~$5 per month + hosting operations
Webflow frontend as Single Page App	Webflow, API backend (probably Django)	Visually appealing sites, independence of frontend and backend developer, thousands to millions of data items	Hosting has an operations overhead	Webflow designer time, Django developer time, Javascript developer time	~$5 per month + hosting operations

Django apps

Our preferred way to structure and use django apps is documented and templated using our Django Cookiecutter