MySQL support

AppHarbor has been busy moving AppHarborHQ from wintery Denmark to (comparatively) balmy Mountain View. We're now firmly back in the saddle and adding features at rapid clip.

Attentative users may have noticed that creating MySQL databases has been possible for a while. We're now fairly confident that they work well, and this is the official announcement.

Our MySQL offering is based on Amazon RDS which means the good people of Amazon Web Services handle patching, backups and recovery.

We pledge to offer support for both Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL, including in our free plan. We will do our utmost to make our Microsoft SQL Server option fast, reliable and competitively priced. Having said that, we expect to be able to offer MySQL on faster hardware and with more redundancy than SQL Server at the same price point. If you are planning to build an app on top of AppHarbor and have the option, we recommend you go with MySQL.

Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL will probably round out the relational database options we are going to offer in-house. Because we want to also offer your datastore of choice (if it's not SQL Server or MySQL), we are talking with lots of cloud-providers about adding their offerings as add-ons to our platform. If SQL Server or MySQL is not what makes your apps tick you can add a feature request to let us know what you need. Feature requests other than datastores are welcome too.