Kinds of databases

Databases available

There are three databases built in to PythonAnywhere:

  • MySQL, which is available for every user
  • SQLite, which is also available for everyone, but runs a bit slowly on our system -- we recommend you only use it for testing or for scripts that don't do a lot of processing.
  • Postgres in available in paid plans only, as an add-on.

We're considering adding built-in support for MongoDB and Redis in the future -- if you're interested in it (or something else entirely), let us know!

Connecting to external databases

If you have a paid plan, you can connect to databases outside PythonAnywhere. This means that you can get, say, a Redis instance from Redis, a MongoDB instance from mLab (check out this help page for some hints about that), or a Microsoft SQL Server instance from Azure, and connect to it from your code. If the provider you choose has the option to place your database in a specific Amazon Web Services Availability Zone, then putting it in:

will put it very close to our servers and give the best performance.