Running a web app in Grails vs Django

You can run grails in 256 megs of ram. Many members of the community are doing so. That being said I would say in either platform you want much more ram than that to make sure your performant. But I might also reccomend checking out www.linode.com. You can get quality hosting for a very reasonable cost and adding a bit of ram for grails will not break your budget. Also if your interested in cloud based solutions Morph is hosting grails apps.http://developer.mor.ph/grails

I like Django, but I for the maturity of the platform and the amount of quality Java work out there in terms of libaries and frameworks I chose grails. In truth I think they are both good solutions but you cannot deny that your options are much greater with grails.

With Java hosting you don't need to do all the stupid tricks with apache, or nginx. Jetty itself can host everything you need, that's how the guys at www.mor.ph do it, and they find it to be pretty fast.

The memory usage that way is pretty minimal, I host mine on a 256MB Ubuntu server from RapidXen, so it's about $10/month.

I tried developing in Django, and while it runs all the scripts faster (like bootstrapping, or test cases) it's not as well-crafted in my oppinion

I think from an operations perspective things are going to be close enough that you can base your decision on other criteria. If you can afford a virtual private server with at least 256 MB RAM you will be able to deploy Grails applications. If the cost seems like a lot check out Sun. They are really pushing hosting solutions based on their product stack and there are some greats deals available. I have free hosting from Layered Tech for a year through Ostatic.