db4free.net had a great time of pretty flawless running recently. No outages, no emergencies, quite relaxing for an administrator. Except for one problem which got increasingly worse and worse: performance.

It was time to drop some users again. Who did I drop? First of all those who haven’t accessed their database for more than about 2 months. But also some who used up excessively much disk space. There is a kind of (unwritten) fair use policy, but db4free.net is a testing service and not a backup service for huge data loads, so this data is gone.

And if I say it’s gone, it means GONE!

I made it unambiguously clear on the registration page that the db4free.net team reserves the right to delete databases and/or accounts at any time without notice, and cleanups are exactly among the things I had in mind when writing this (besides the always possible danger of unintentional data loss).

So complaints will be silently ignored (or deleted, if posted in the forum, which by the way also got updated to the latest version).

However, I hope that most or better even all of you who do use db4free.net in a fair manner will find their database again, and will continue to appreciate the service.

And the reward for your fair use should be better performance due to more available resources thanks to the cleanup. Which by the way certainly wasn’t the last one.

So while you should make sure to have backups of all sensitive data at any time, if you want to minimize the risk of losing your database at db4free.net, access is frequently (a simple connect, regardless through which client, will do), and try to keep your dataload within reasonable limits for a low level budget of a testing service, which db4free.net still is (rather than a hosting service). I can’t point that out often enough.

So happy testing … and remember to explore the new features of MySQL 5.6 which is the (probably soon to be released as GA) latest development version with the latest and greatest features!