Offloaded SQL

What does this service do?

Offloaded MySQL, also known as “Shared SQL”, is an off node, on LAN, dedicated MySQL server customers can purchase an account on.

Is it right for me?

The service can benefit all sites, projects, etc, of any size. Your VPS will have more CPU, RAM, & disk IO available to it as you're not hosting your own SQL.

There is also the extra benefit of not having to worry about administering & tuning your SQL. Second only to Java, MySQL CPU/IO account for the vast majority of our resource abuse tickets.

How much does it cost?

The service costs $1.00 per month and is only available in Las Vegas and New York.

You may purchase the service here.

Is there an SLA?

Our SQL services have a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

This SLA does not apply to customers using the service outside of our network as the public IP's do get nullrouted due to attacks at times.

What locations is it available at?

Our Offloaded MySQL product is available in only New York and Las Vegas

While connecting to the service from within BuyVM, you'll want to use the internal IP address as this will not charge against your bandwidth allocation.

What version of MySQL do you run?

We use the MariaDB based MySQL 5.5 fork for all of our MySQL deployments.

All InnoDB tables are stored in their own files.

Support for Sphinx is also included for those that wish to use it. You'll need to run your own sphinx servers, but you can have it automatically plugged in against our SQL via the SPHINX backend plugin.

Do you keep backups?

We keep a rotating 7 day, full backup, snapshot of our SQL servers.

Backups are taken at 4:00 AM using innobackupex. While we do pass the –no-lock option, we do recommend you use InnoDB for your database storage to allow easier backups.

How much space/resources can I use?

There is no set limit for either but the general rule of thumb is “don't be a jerk”.

We ask that you take steps to make sure you have proper indexes in place to stop table scans as these can cause extremely high CPU usage.

We do reserve the right to suspend an account when an unreasonable amount of queries are being executed.

Remember, it is a shared resource and be considerate of your neighbours. If you're concerned your site might be too busy or too big for the service, just log a ticket with support and we'll let you know.

Can I use the Offloaded SQL outside of BuyVM?

Yes, but remember, “don't be a jerk”.

This service is made available for local users, not for an outside server to be pushing 40 mbit/sec to/from the service from across the country.

We reserve the right to nullroute any source IP that is found to be abusing the service.