To my shame I must admit, I missed it. It happened on June 29, 2005 when db4free.net was first available to the public. At that time it was running MySQL 5.0.7 beta. Quite a lot has happened since then, MySQL 5.0 made its way up to 5.0.91 and the current MySQL GA version is 5.1.49, which is also the version db4free.net is running as of today. The first phpMyAdmin version that db4free.net was offering to provide easy access to the user’s databases was 2.6.3. Today I updated phpMyAdmin to 3.3.5.

Statistics are not necessarily 100 % accurate, but here is the best I can come up with. Since its launch, db4free.net had 528,900 visits. The ratio registrations per visits is at about 22 %, so more than every fifth visit ends in signing up for a new database. Which means, that about between 110,000 and 120,000 database accounts (meaning database and user) have ever been created. There have been some cleanups since then to make resources available to people who actively use their databases. Which is why the current number of databases is much lower, at slightly above 13,400.

Today I must (also) admit that the code behind db4free.net’s web application was initially quite poor and it stayed poor for quite long. Why it was poor from my today’s point of view is probably due to my learning process in these 5 years. This year I did a lot of cleanup on the code behind db4free.net’s web application and removed a few bottlenecks which often made the website painfully slow. Now it’s in a fairly reasonable state again, and I have some ideas in the back of my head how to further improve it. So db4free.net is far from its end of life. Quite the opposite is the case, it’s time to give it a new boost so that the balance after its 10th anniversary is even more impressive than today’s 5 year balance.