What hope for MySQL 5.0 Hosting

One of the great things about MySQL is its support from web hosting companies, many people use MySQL as a backend database for their websites, there are literally hundreds of web hosting companies offering MySQL and PHP and there are dozens of PHP/MySQL books on the market.

I've written a fair amount about the new features of MySQL 5.0 and in particular Stored Procedures and Views. But there's nothing worse than people telling you to do one thing and doing another themselves. My site www.mysqldevelopment.com runs on PHP 4 and MySQL 4.0, simply because that's what my hosting company offers, they are cheap and offer a great service. I recently asked them what their plans were for upgrading accounts to MySQL 5.0, given that they are still on 4.0 I didn't hold out much hope. I was right they don't have any plans to upgrade in the short or medium term and given they didn't even know MySQL 5.0 was about to be released I wouldn't expect much to happen in the long term either.

I'm about to start a new project, a simple site for me and a few friends and I thought it would be a great way to use 5.0 and also to include my observations in this very blog. But where could I get 5.0 hosting, I looked around the web and found nothing, well nothing apart from people offering to build be a server just the way I wanted and to be honest this site isn't anywhere near important enough for me to spend any money on it.

Then I hit apon an idea, you may already be aware of db4free.net, they offer access to MySQL 5.0 which is hosted on their server, it's not web hosting but it's possible to remotely connect and therefore use your existing host to serve the pages.

So all I need to do is use my hosting account to serve the PHP but connect remotely to my account on db4free.net.....

... but alas even that doesn't work, because to connect to MySQL 5.0, as least to use stored procedures you need to use the MySQLi extensions, these need to be compiled specifically under PHP4.

I suppose it's back to do as I say and not do as I do.