How to Migrate Your Django App from Shared Hosting to a VPS with nginx and gunicorn

If you have a Django application in production, sooner or later you will hit the limits of shared hosting: slowness, configuration restrictions, lack of control. The solution is to migrate to a VPS (Virtual Private Server).

In this article I explain step by step how I migrated axxyss.com to a Debian 12 VPS with nginx as the web server and gunicorn as the WSGI server.

Why a VPS?

Shared hosting is affordable but has significant limitations:

• You cannot freely install system packages
• Resources (CPU, RAM) are shared with other users
• Configurations like websockets or custom workers are not available
• Performance is unpredictable

With a VPS you have full control over the server: install what you need, configure nginx to your specifications and define how many gunicorn workers your application requires.

Prerequisites

• A VPS with Debian 12 (I use Strato, but any provider works)
• SSH access to the server
• Your Django project working locally
• A domain pointing to the VPS IP

Step 1 — Prepare the server

Connect to the VPS via SSH and update the system:

ssh user@your_ip -p 22
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Install the required dependencies:

sudo apt install python3 python3-pip python3-venv nginx git -y

Step 2 — Upload the project

Clone your repository from GitHub:

cd /var/www/
git clone https://github.com/your_user/your_project.git
cd your_project

Create the virtual environment and install dependencies:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Step 3 — Configure environment variables

Create the .env file with your production variables:

nano .env

DEBUG=False
SECRET_KEY=your_secret_key
ALLOWED_HOSTS=yourdomain.com
DB_NAME=db_name
DB_USER=db_user
DB_PASSWORD=db_password

Step 4 — Configure gunicorn as a systemd service

Create the service file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/myapp.service

[Unit]
Description=Gunicorn daemon for myapp.com
After=network.target

[Service]
User=www-data
Group=www-data
WorkingDirectory=/var/www/your_project
ExecStart=/var/www/your_project/venv/bin/gunicorn \
    --workers 3 \
    --bind unix:/tmp/myapp.sock \
    --timeout 120 \
    myapp.wsgi:application

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable and start the service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable myapp
sudo systemctl start myapp

Step 5 — Configure nginx

Create the nginx configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/myapp

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

    location /static/ {
        root /var/www/your_project;
    }

    location /media/ {
        root /var/www/your_project;
    }

    location / {
        include proxy_params;
        proxy_pass http://unix:/tmp/myapp.sock;
    }
}

Enable the site:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/myapp /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo nginx -t
sudo systemctl restart nginx

Step 6 — SSL certificate with Let's Encrypt

sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx -y
sudo certbot --nginx -d yourdomain.com -d www.yourdomain.com

Certbot automatically configures nginx for HTTPS and renews the certificate every 90 days.

Step 7 — Static files and migrations

source venv/bin/activate
python manage.py collectstatic
python manage.py migrate

Conclusion

Migrating to a VPS requires a bit more initial setup but the benefits are clear: performance, full control and scalability. Once configured, the deployment workflow is simple:

git pull origin main
sudo systemctl restart myapp

If you have any questions about migrating your Django project to a VPS, feel free to contact me — this is exactly the type of project I work on.