don't use hostgator. discount hosting solutions, in general, are bad fits for django which kind of takes for granted that you have shell access to the server an

don't use hostgator. discount hosting solutions, in general, are bad fits for django which kind of takes for granted that you have shell access to the server and know a little bout of unix sysadmin. AWS EC2 is a great host but requires you to know how to admin the server a bit. Heroku is good for small deployments but the budget options don't scale very well. An AWS competitor like Rackspace or similar might be good too, especially if you're looking for lower prices. as for email, get a business account (with custom domain) from gmail or something similar. you really don't want to be hosting your own email, not even for a small company. seriously that's a headache you just don't want to deal with if you don't strictly have to (legal compliance requirements, for example). it's not like it costs much to use a hosed solution for email. the django app needs to connect to the email server? why? isn't the whole point of email that you send messages via SMTP and don't have to have a server-to-server connection? I think you may have some technical requirements you need to pin down with more rigor.