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Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

if the CEO/owner/founder of your company is non-technical he/she will request the data in ways you wouldn't have thought about in advance. That's just reality. That makes Redis not appropriate for most companies. It's also too expensive for side projects. So that leaves technically-led startups. Which is a good chunk of companies (and probably the funnest to work for).

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Lots of people use Redis at a cache, not a primary data store. You can have full querying in your SQL database and fast access to common requests using Redis.

In what way is it too expensive for side projects? It's the easiest data store to compile and run that I've used.

Here are some Redis hosting options, you tell me if this is affordable for a side project:

https://openredis.com/

http://redistogo.com/

First, running redis remote where you have WAN times involved is typically not the most performant. Second, if it's the cost, run it on a VPS where you'll get more memory for the money (hopefully the same VPS provider you use for other things).

The smallest plans listed are $7 and $8 a month. Sounds affordable for a side project.

Doesn't give you much though.

FYI, http://redistogo.com offers a free plan. 5mb, 1 database. Perfect for a side project.

How are 3rd party hosting options part of a cost comparison?

Hosting any DB offsite comes at a cost, and it does not appear that any one database platform has an advantage over another in terms of a service provider.

My current little side project uses about 200-300 MB of database storage. Using Heroku, that would cost (pr month) $9 on their shared postgres database, $10-15 using mongodb, $50 using heroku's dedicated production postgres service, or $125 using redis.

That's quite a difference.

Wait. If you use 200-300MB of DB storage, openredis costs $69 using it as a Heroku add-on and $45 if used independently.

$125 ($90) is the price of the large instance, which offers 1.7GB of storage.

That's quite a difference.

I stand corrected. I was using the prices from redis-to-go, which was the only available option last time I checked, and the service with the big prominent link at the top of the heroku pricing page. Good to see that there is some competition in the area and that prices have come down a bit. Still not cheap enough to move my hobby project from a 1GB VPS, but reasonable enough if I ever turn my project into something that might make money.

That's why is common to replicate to some SQL server for non-real time operation.

Doing transformations for one off reports is okay. Doing extensive data transformations on data that is loaded millions of times every day is not.

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