zlacker

>>dabina+(OP)
Maybe I'm not the target market for this, but how hard is it REALLY to manage a RDBMS?

Any Linux distro can have MySQL or Postgres installed in less than five minutes and works out of the box

Even a single core VPS can handle lots of queries per second (assuming the tables are indexed properly and the queries aren't trash)

There are mature open source backup solutions which don't require DB downtime (also available in most package managers)

It's trivial to tune a DB using .conf files (there are even scripts that autotune for you!!!)

Your VPS provider will allow you to configure encryption at rest, firewall rules, and whole disk snapshots as well

And neither MySQL or Postgres ever seem to go down, they're super reliable and stable

Plus you have very stable costs each month

>>grugde+VQ
It's not about it being hard, it's about delegating. Many companies are a bit less sensitive to pricing and would rather pay monthly for someone else to keep their database up, rather than spending engineering hours on setting up a database, tuning it, updating it, checking its backups, monitoring it and making it scale if needed.

Sure, any regular SME can just install Postgres or MySQL without even setting much up except with `mysql_secure_install`, a user with a password and an 'app' database. But you may end up with 10-20 database installs you need to back up, patch and so on every once in a while. And companies value that.