Hi everyone,
I've been asked by my boss to explore the option of outsourcing part of our data to an external SQL provider. So I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations as far as companies they’ve worked with.
Our primary concern here is uptime and we’re willing to pay a decent amount for it (e.g. a $20 shared hosting solution is not what we’re looking for)
Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Sam
P.S. One thing I forgot to say. It has to be either MS-SQL or MySQL. We don't want to use something like Amazon SimpleDB because this experiment in outsourcing might fail and we want to be able to bring that data back to a local server.
YC company FathomDB (http://fathomdb.com) set off on this path and have/had some interesting ideas about caching and such. I think they settled down to specifically providing service to EC2 users, so they could insure nearness and low-latency. The latency problem is an extremely difficult one to solve. I believe there have been a couple of other YC companies chasing similar dragons. I don't know their names off-hand. But, databases are an obviously large market ripe for change, so there's going to be some money made there...and so there are probably dozens of companies laboring away on the problem as we speak.
Why are you looking to outsource? You might consider just outsourcing the backup and data retention, instead, since backups as a service is well-understood and has lots of providers.