Comments on: MySQL upgrades and pricing changes for extremely large processes

By: Shamus

Shamus — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 18:23:55 +0000

Wow, so I’m one of your top 10 MYSQL processes? 11GB apparently, and like one of the previous posters, I had no idea whatsoever.

Just looked at the database tables and see that some pretty “standard” installs of Drupal are sitting around 500MB – and I have duplicate databases for several sites (staging and live) so now see where this comes from.

Excellent excuse for me to learn more about my database structure!

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 03:35:55 +0000

Fair is fair. Actually, I feel like such a cheapskate just using html. But in the end; I’m writing fiction, and a database can be a lot of work if you don’t need it.

It also opens you to hacking attacks, sql injections, etc. Not worth it to me. Thanks for the great service!

By: Atomic

Atomic — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 13:18:03 +0000

Is it fair that those who use more pay more? Absolutely. That’s the whole point of NFSN 🙂

If you’re indeed losing money from current pricing then I suppose it’s fair to increase but honestly the 0.02/day (plus 0.01 for dynamic sites) always seemed a bit too high for light users and I assume that was to cover the cost of those who “abused” the system.

IMHO it would be fair to have a lower price on the lower usage end (or perhaps just a single price per MiB). You’d probably still make up for the loss with the price increase and it would be more consistent with the way storage/bandwidth charges work.

Our MySQL per-day pricing reflects that all processes regardless of size use a certain baseline level of resources. I believe my previous comment makes clear that we believe our existing pricing is good, that we have no interest in lowering it, and that SQLite is a good alternative that uses less resources if MySQL is too heavyweight for a very small application. -jdw

By: Bumpy Light

Bumpy Light — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 01:09:15 +0000

I guess I just wanted to say that this thread has been interesting to read. The fee adjustments seem very fair to me, although I’m admittedly not affected by them. Particularly interesting was the heads-up on the “poor quality” of recent releases of MySQL. It’s a shame that this project has been derailed by the muppets at Sun and Oracle. I’ve made a note to seek out MariaDB when needed for a dedicated server or VPS setup!

By: jdw

jdw — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 23:54:36 +0000

In reply to Patrick.

I originally wanted to just say “We do not compete on price with free services” in response to this, but I think doing so misses the point. The service you describe is not free; it costs money to provide, it’s just that someone somewhere other than you is paying for it. If that works for you, great, but you may wish to figure out who and why, as that will help you formulate a backup plan for what to do when they decide to stop.

It’s also worth noting that although the service you reference offers 10MB for free, 10.1MB to 500MB is $17.00/mo. With these changes, similarly-sized processes would typically cost between $0.60 and $2.00 per month here. So I actually feel like we’re offering quite a good value in this area.

However, if our $0.60/month offering is still too heavyweight for a particular application, I would strongly recommend using SQLite instead, which is filesystem based and incurs no charges beyond space used (e.g. $0.05/month for a 5MB database). That would yield much better results than any effort to underconfigure MySQL to create a lower gimmick price.

-jdw

By: Patrick

Patrick — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 05:57:04 +0000

Just some feedback:

There are now offerings out there that provide a “free tier” managed SQL service… which is what I recently migrated one of my tiny dynamic site’s database to. I could fit it in at 5MB — this particular “free tier” offering had a ceiling of 10MB.

I’m a very happy NFShost user otherwise, but I was too cheap to pay $0.01/day for a basically-dead site that I only kept running for legacy links 😛

Is there any way that NFShost could configure their own free-tier for infrequently used SQL processes / tiny sites? My “legacy” site was only getting hit by old links a few times a week.

Is there any way you could cache the running SQL process from RAM into a file on disk to wait for the next hit and thereby save performance? And provide a cheaper offering to micro-tier users?

…just my $0.02.

By: Keith Davies

Keith Davies — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:56:51 +0000

Curious, I have a 550MB MySQL process too… and I had no idea it was that big.

Anyway, this is a reasonable thing to do. Thanks for the heads up.

By: zekele

zekele — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 01:19:48 +0000

So my 550Mb MySQL process will cost about $1 a month more? Assuming my calculations are right, that sounds fair enough to me – guess I’ve been getting a free ride for too long 😉