A Platform as a Service (PaaS) is defined as a cloud service where the solution stack is already provided and managed for you. Popular platforms for Django hosting include Heroku, PythonAnywhere, and Google App Engine.

In most cases, deploying a Django application should be as simple as selecting the services or components of your stack and pushing out your source code. You do not have to perform any system administration or setup yourself. The platform is entirely managed.

Like most cloud services, the infrastructure can also scale on demand. If you need an additional database server or more RAM on a server, it can be easily provisioned from a web interface or the command line. The pricing is primarily based on your usage.

The bottom line with such hosting platforms is that they are very easy to set up and ideal for smaller projects. They tend to be more expensive as your user base grows.

Another downside is that your application might get tied to a platform or become difficult to port. For instance, Google App Engine is used to support only a non-relational database, which means you need to use django-nonrel, a fork of Django. This limitation is now somewhat mitigated with Google Cloud SQL.

A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual machine hosted in a shared environment. From the developer's perspective, it would seem like a dedicated machine (hence, the word private) preloaded with an operating system. You will need to install and set up the entire stack yourself, though many VPS providers such as WebFaction and DigitalOcean offer easier Django setups.

If you are a beginner and can spare some time, I highly recommend this approach. You would be given root access, and you can build the entire stack yourself. You will not only understand how various pieces of the stack come together but also have full control in fine-tuning each individual component.

Compared to a PaaS, a VPS might work out to be more value for money, especially for high-traffic sites. You might be able to run several sites from the same server as well.

Even though hosting on a platform or VPS are by far the two most popular hosting options, there are plenty of other options. If you are interested in maximizing performance, you can opt for a bare metal server with colocation from providers, such as Rackspace.

On the lighter end of the hosting spectrum, you can save the cost by hosting multiple applications within Docker containers. Docker is a tool to package your application and dependencies in a virtual container. Compared to traditional virtual machines, a Docker container starts up faster and has minimal overheads (since there is no bundled operating system or hypervisor).

Docker is ideal for hosting micro services-based applications. It is becoming as ubiquitous as virtualization with almost every PaaS and VPS provider supporting them. It is also a great development platform since Docker containers encapsulate the entire application state and can be directly deployed to production.