barrybhunter

Also sphinx as real-time indexes.

You send data to sphinx (when you update it), and its indexed right away.

The original disk-indexes (updated by a batch process is still available)

These services claim themselves to be a spam fighting tool. Ironically, they facilitate another time of spam. Forum and Comment spam.

I'm definitely tracking a rise in the number of these types of services, used for posting comment spam - and signing up to post on forums.

(I've even seen normal email spam - 'appear' to come from disposable email addresses. There are so many services around - easy to find ones that don't setup SPF etc)

The problem I have with these sort of services (and its nothing specific to signalbox) - is seem to be aiming at the wrong market. Need to think bigger.

For something like 100,000 records - in general a pretty standard instance of mysql can cope just fine. A lot of the time the database you get free with shared hosting, can cope with queries on this sort of size database just fine (as long as they have indexes). (Or the free database you get with heroku)

... true yes you have to do a bit more sysadmin tasks - maybe even backups etc. But all very doable.

As a beginner at sysadmin tasks, I start to struggle with mid-size datasets. A couple of million records. This is when backups begin getting a pain. Query optimization is actully required. Things start getting painful. full-text search is non trivial. geo-indexes are cumbersome.

But its harder finding a database provider for this sort of size. getsignalbox's doesn't even consider this possibility (other than the 'get in touch') - it might well be able to cater. But talking at $200+ a month, which starts to get serious. + this sort of mid size is where the cloud could excel, where sysadmin tasks start to get non-trivial.

Another thing missing - is a simple bulk upload - to be able to import a midsized dataset to be able to try out the service. Even if that is a 200Mb CSV file :)

IMHO of course! (Or I need to think smaller ;)

A few more: http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/ https://developers.google.com/fusiontables/

There are plenty more 'databases' in the cloud. Even ones just providing say a generic mysql instance, with a HTTP interface.

Yes that's the sort of thing. But ideally that should be available without signing up. To get an idea of what is possible - ie is it worth even bothering to signup.

Like I had no idea if supported geo-queries, and/or full-text queries. (seems not?)

To know how compare to competition :)

Would be nice to be able to see the reference for the API. To know what types of queries are possible.

get/set by key is probably there. But what sort of queries are possible is important consideration.

You can't make a CNAME on a naked domain. (well you can, but there are implications, like your MX records not working - so its not going to fly)

So they either need their current DNS servers to be able to internally resolve the A records of the CDN. But it needs a setup that can replicate the geo-replication that otherwise Alamai handles. Possible but not easy.

Or needs a webserver that just performs a redirect. And put its IP in the DNS. technically easy, but its another server to maintain. And at nasa 'level', it wont be a single server. It will multiple servers - probably geographically distributed.

(or they can pay for a service that handles this - which means needs budget)