Well, that really depends on your website needs, its levels of traffic, the DB platform you want to use and the amount of users hitting it simultaneously. There isn’t really a correct answer for this one, but there are some common guidelines that can help in shaping this DB requirement. In terms of databases to be used in websites, the three options that are usually offered with web hosting plans are: Microsoft Access, MySQL and SQL Server. MS Access and MySql are always included by default. SQL Server is a premium solid database engine ready for enterprise use and traditionally it had been seen more as an upgrade than as a standard feature.
But due to increased competitiveness now more and more providers are including SQL Server databases as a standard feature in their shared hosting plans. If you are running a sales-oriented website with shopping cart features or a complete database-driven website or a WordPress blog or some sort of online data repository such as a directory or social website, then your user base is definitely the defining variable when sizing your database resources.
A SQL database can contain thousands of tables, stored procedures and functions and indexing can be configured so that queries can execute faster than ever. Even the most complex web applications typically only require a single DB. But, then other factors can come into play such as replication, mirroring and data warehousing. If you are planning to use SQL replication so that your data is safely transported to a secondary server for reporting or disaster recovery purposes or SQL mirroring so that you have redundancy in case the main database server fails, then you definitely need more SQL databases (2 at the very least).
In reality, while configurations such as the one described above can be found in most enterprises today, database services offered with shared hosting plans do not require (most of the time) this amount of sophistication. So, our best answer to the question posed in this article is that you, most probably, just need one SQL database in your hosting plan.
Database-driven websites are a very interesting concept because most of the content they offered is of dynamic nature. It changes on its own, so the website proprietor doesn’t really need to worry about most of the updating tasks. But this also poses some challenges due to the fact that your website or web application has to be designed using a layered model in order to protect the underlying data repository. The components of this model require some level of knowledge about data access technologies and from time to time will need some sort of maintenance in order to keep the application running normally.
A very good hosting provider that includes SQL Server Databases as a standard feature in its Windows shared hosting packages is IXWebHosting. Make sure you select a Windows based package in order to be able to use SQL server as your database engine.
Copyright notice: This original article is the property of Seeking For Hosting. Seeking4Hosting provides independent customer and webmaster reviews of top web hosting providers. Web Hosting reviews, hosting tricks, web host ratings, hosting articles and more.
Requirement: You must also post the above author information if you would like to republish this article!
