Does anyone know what kind of market there is for hosting databases? And if so, what's the most common database that's hosted? MySQL? ODBC? Both? And what would be the going rate on stuff like that?

Really, I don't know how much of a business there is out there for this....


If you run a busy site using a database backend, the transfer between the db host and the file host will be huge, and then you have to count the transfer between the file host and the client....

Its cheaper to get two dedicated servers and put them on a small lan in a datacenter so you don't get billed for all the extra traffic :D

The low end market is dominated MySQL, most often used by users of pre-existing scripts (forums, cms, etc). Virtually every unix hoster provides this.

I would think to differentiate yourself you'd need to provide either Windows based databases (SQL Server), ORACLE or Postgres. Of the three probably SQL server is easiest to market but there is already established competition out there for that two.

Or something else that the mass market isn't catering too - like Zope, etc.

I could almost see a market for oracle and ms sql because the expense...

But I don't know what kind of member base it would have...

You think leased oracle db's would sell? How much is an oracle liscene anyway?

Very Very expensive... They charge you based on how fast your server is :D

You would need to contact ORACLE to determine that.

A high end ORACLE service to host database and applications might sell well, but you need up front investment, experienced people, and would have to market and actually sell it - people will not just stumble into your web site and sign up.

The sorts of people that would be interested in this are those with packaged or custom applications that need to make them available to the world or to geographically dispersed staff / customers / vendors -- *and* they don't want to develop all the experitise in house required to run this in a secure and highly available manner.

basically, you'd be competing with medium sized and very large outsourcers. I don't have current rates on this one app we costed out for a client with a highly available server running ORACLE with bandwidth, DBA time, 24*7 support, etc to support a world wide sales force - fairly simple application actually - cost over 5000 a month before the ORACLE licenses (would not have added a lot more for this app).

THis particular project probably had hardware costs over 20,000 and then there's the people costs etc.

It would be hard to just break into this business, bottom line, you'd need to grow into it.

I do think there is a market to host custom applications for businesses. Any hosting company with reasonable IT skills and sales ability could probably market themselves to the home town crowd and charge 5 - 20 X what they are charging now, for the same computing resources.

Packaging.

Ahh.. Hmm.. The price has gone down I guess:

https://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCZzpHome.jsp?site=OracleStoreUS&respid=22372

I keep forgetting you can buy anything online at ORACLE now. Even though a few of my friends worked at ORACLE, I hated contacting them or their sales assistants for simple price quotes. Yuk! Much better now (except for the commissioned rep I guess).

In the meantime, I use PostgreSQL for free, where I can. More capability than stock MySQL. Too bad few hosts support it.

While we're on the topic, what databases do you guys look for on a webserver? Right now, we're just offering MySQL, and PHP/PERL, but that's about it. Do you think more options for database software might equal a larger customer base?

I do think there is a market for databases, specifically for high-end expensive ones. Personally I would buy a SQL Server host until I could afford my own license (if you are looking at this model for either SQL Server or Oracle remember you need a per-processor license, as CAL-based licensing won't cut it).

I haven't yet found a company who does this, and with properly coded stored-procs and views you could easily trim down the amount of data transfer.

Originally posted by Warren
While we're on the topic, what databases do you guys look for on a webserver? Right now, we're just offering MySQL, and PHP/PERL, but that's about it. Do you think more options for database software might equal a larger customer base? Do you mean databases or programming languages?

MySQL and PHP go hand in hand for many people. Perl to some degree.

Python is used by a quieter group, but they are out there. Probably a more Postgres fans with Python but you'll find Pythonistas using most of the common databases. I do Postgres, SQL Server and ORACLE work in Python.

But supporting Python / Perl in a non-CGI environment is really what you need to do if you don't want to kill the host. mod_perl, fastcgi, mod_python, etc - the challenge is that there are different tools / approaches for each of these -- this in part is why PHP has done so well.

SQL Server - you are going to want to support ASP and .NET these days.

heheh, I should have been a little more clear in that post, I was basically just saying what we have out there right now, database and language wise. I think i'm going to look a little further in depth on an sql server, something just to play with for now. The whole asp/.net thing is a completely different pile from what I was thinking, but i'd definately have to throw that into considerations now too...