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SQL Server Hosting

Choices for SQL Server Hosting

As recently as 2006-2007, the hosting market for SQL Server was very different: if you wanted to run SQL Server on the internet, you paid a lot of money for a dedicated box at a colo facility, and that was it.

SQL Server Hosting Options Today

Today, hosting options for SQL Server include:

  • Dedicated SQL Server box – you rent the hardware, and typically you’re responsible for licensing. If anything goes wrong with the server, there’s no DBA to come waltzing to your rescue – well, not unless you pay somebody like me to dash in and fix it.
  • Managed SQL Server – like a dedicated box (although sometimes it’s virtual) and it comes with the services of a virtual database administrator. I say virtual because it’s not usually the same person every time you call: you’re dealing with a team of DBAs. At least you’re safe in somebody’s hands when you break something, but you’re hoping that they have the skills they say they do.
  • A virtual SQL Server in the cloud – like a dedicated server, but a virtual one. It won’t come with a dedicated DBA, but the advantage of a virtual server is that you’re less prone to hardware failure. If the underlying hardware dies, the instance gets restarted on another box. This is the approach Amazon EC2 takes.
  • Microsoft SQL Data Services (formerly SSDS) – this is completely different from everything above. You’re not opening up SQL Server Management Studio and firing off T-SQL queries. Instead, Microsoft SDS only accepts queries via SOAP/REST web services, which means it’s really targeted at programmers, not DBAs. The advantage is that it’s really cheap.
  • Amazon SimpleDB or similar non-database – like SQL Data Services, Amazon SimpleDB takes a whole different approach and uses databases without a real schema.  I’ve written about why you’d use SimpleDB and Amazon Web Services.

Cheap SQL Hosting – By the Byte

Microsoft SQL Data Services, announced at PDC 2008, is a totally new way of hosting your databases. There’s no schema, no tables, stored procedures, just sweet, luscious data. You’re responsible for stashing the stuff any way you choose – think XML files, basically – and you can retrieve it pretty quickly without worrying about performance tuning. That’s the theory, anyway – we’ll see how well it delivers over the coming months.

I’m interested in SDS, but because I’m a DBA, I want something I can access with SQL Server Management Studio. No dice with SDS, so that brings me to my favorite SQL hosting option right now:

SQL Server Hosting by Amazon EC2

Right now, I think this is one of the sweet spots for traditional DBAs. We can have our own virtual server in the cloud, although it’s certainly not cheap. A SQL Server 2005 Standard box on EC2 runs about $900/month, but that includes licensing, about 8gb of ram, and about 1 terabyte of storage – a pretty big chunk for a small business.

Like I said, it’s not cheap, but it rents by the hour starting at about $1/hour. That’s a great way to learn SQL Server, test beta products on a fresh install of SQL Server, or just crunch some nasty queries to test your performance tuning skills on a database.