Hi there,
We are involved in a community Hydro-electric project here in Reading. The team need to record power generation and operating environment data in a database and make some of it available on their website so that the public can see how well it is performing.
They also want to build up a history of how the site is performing over the coming years for research purposes.
Do you have any recommendations on free or very low cost cloud databases that we could use?
The data collected is less than 50kb per day so even over several years it is going to be well under 1gb.
My backup WebHook - called internally “The Kitchen Sink” - uses the free webspace that comes with a domain name - so cost is £6/year and I get 10GB disk space and 1GB of mySQL.
Whilst mySQL isn’t one of them fancy-pants Time Series databases, I use it because I pre-date the aforementioned cutting edge technology. I decimate the data so that summaries at whatever levels are required which means reporting is very performant.
Using a web app aka a web page that requests the data straight from the database, all the display processing is done in the browser, so no issues with slowish PHP or similar.
Other alternatives include digging in to the various offerings of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure - they all have some free tier offerings in various shapes or forms.
To backup the data in the Kitchen Sink, I push a zip file to BackBlaze B2 which is free storage up to 10Gb
