How to host an sql database on a cloud?

Question

How do you host an Mysql database that can be accessed by different websites on a cloud, such as google drive and ubuntu one. Is it even possible to do this? If so how is it done, because so many businesses that use Mysql databases start up on a cloud. Can it be done for free?

Answer 1

There are two primary ways of setting up a cloud-hosted MySQL database: either you set up a cloud-hosted virtual server and install MySQL Server on it... or you set up a cloud-hosted, managed, MySQL-only service, which gives you access to the MySQL server component, but not to the underlying operating system, which is maintained by the service provider.

http://aws.amazon.com/free/ explains the free tier service offering from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is the cloud hosting provider that I use. The Relational Database Service (RDS) offers a small ("micro") MySQL server with 640 MB of RAM and 20 GB or hard drive space for no monthly charge for the first 12 months. After the first year, that server will cost you $18.75/month. Servers with substantially more capacity are also available at monthly prices that increase with memory and hard drive storage space... but you only pay for what you use for as long as you use it. If you start up a large server and then shut it down almost immediately, for example, you'd only pay for the hours that it was running.

You can also get complete servers, not just the MySQL component, for deploying your applications, web servers, etc. In AWS, that service is called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Beyond something very small like the offerings in the AWS free tier, you are not going to get anything "free."

You access such a server the same way you access any MySQL server: over TCP, either over the Internet (using SSL if you care about security) or over a virtual private network (VPN).