I have an application which is going to be distributed to a hosting platform, most probably phpfog.
It is very similar to how WordPress.com operates, where each customer can host their own individual installation of the app on our servers. We host the ‘work’ files and provide the database (However, it is NOT WordPress; it’s a custom app).
Each user of the application has their own separate MySQL database.
I am wondering what the most cost-effective service would be to provide this. It seems that most cloud services offer, for instance, one massive 50GB database. It is definitely conceivable that instead of an individual database, we have one huge one and prefix all the tables per user. But that seems really bloated and unwieldy. It’s also not really possible without major structural changes to have one big database for everyone (And the same tables inside it for everyone) as the app is primarily designed to be standalone.
Each database really won’t get that big. We are talking low GB – I’d suggest the biggest would be 5GB. However, there will be a LOT of them as obviously it’s one per customer.
What would be the most cost- and performance-effective way of handling this?
Amazon RDS in fact provides a database server rather than an individual sales page; I misunderstood their offerings.
In this case, RDS is a drop-in replacement for existing MySQL databases and will work perfectly.