Are there any less costly alternatives to Amazon's Relational Database Services (RDS)? [closed]

Question

I have the following requirement. I have with me a database containing the contact and address details of at least 2000 members of my school alumni organization. We want to store all that information in a relation model so that

1. This data can be created and edited on demand.
2. This data is always backed up and should be simple to restore in case the master copy becomes unusable.
3. All sensitive personal information residing in this database is guaranteed to be available only to authorized users.
4. This database won't be online in the first 6 months. It will become online only after a website is built on top of it.

I am not a DBA and I don't want to spend time doing things like backups. I thought Amazon's RDS with it's automatic backup facility was the perfect solution for our needs. The only problem is that being a voluntary organization we cannot spare the monthly $100 to $150 fees this service demands.

So my question is, are there any less costlier alternatives to Amazon's RDS?

Answer 1

In your case of just contact and address data I would choose Amazon SimpleDB. I know SimpleDB might not be suitable for a large number of tables with relationships and all, but for your kind of data I think SimpleDB is sufficient. And costs is much much cheaper than Amazon RDS.

I also wanted to use RDS, but the smallest db size costs $80 p/month.

Answer 2

With out a bit more info I may be way off base here. but 2000 names addresses etc. is not a large DB and I would have thought that the possible use of Amazons RDS was a bit "overkill" to say the least.

Depending on how (and who) you want view edit etc. there are a number of free or almost free alternatives.

One method may be to set up /use a hosting package that has something like phpMyAdmin linked to a mySQL DB. Doing this it is possible to access and edit etc. the DB without having a website front end. Not pretty (like a website front end) but practical. A good host should also back up for you.

Another is to look at Google Documents. OK not really a database more a spread sheet, but very much on the lines of Excel. You can share Google docs with invited people and even set up a small website via Google Docs. This is a free method, but may not be that practical depending on your needs.

Answer 3

Have you taken a look at Microsoft SQL Azure? You can use it free for something like 90 days and then if you only need a 1GB db it would only be about $10 a month.

You mention backup so I thought I would talk about that as well. They way SQL Azure works is that it automatically creates 2 additional copies of your database on different machines in the data center. If one of the machines or db's become unavailable it automatically fails over to one of the other db's.

If you need anything above that you can also use the copy command to backup the database.

Answer 4

You can check

http://www.enciva.com/postgresql9-hosting.htm

and

http://www.acugis.com/postgresql-hosting.htm

They work for Postgres and MySQL.

Answer 5

For a frankly tiny db of that size I'd seriously look at http://www.sqlite.org/

it's inprocess, easy to constantly .dump off to S3 and you can use update hooks to keep checkpoints after updates. backups/restores are almost the equivalent of windows batchfiles and wgets

good encryption using http://sqlcipher.net/

standard OS Filesystem and user level ACLs control security.

running a file backed db makes sense given the fragility of a normal EC2 backed RDBMS to EBS gremlins.

there are exclusions from to SQL92 (no real showstoppers), but given the project cost sensitivity and the RPO and RTO's of an alumni database, I reckon it's a good bet.