I just wish someone would offer a decent hosted NoSQL platform that I can start using already. https://cloudant.com/ is invite only. So is http://hosting.couch.io/ apparently. https://app.mongohq.com/signup is overpriced, considering it's a cloud service and only 2GB. SimpleDB isn't bad but it has tons of limitations (can't even sort by numbers).
This is why people still use MySQL even for projects that aren't suitable for RDBMS. I use hosted MySQL at dreamhost and don't have to bother with anything except my app and data. It just works and is free with the web hosting package. Is there anything out there that comes close? I don't mind $1/month for 1GB of data. $25 for 2GB is not worth it.
There aren't that many because there's not a big market for it. You ideally want the DB in close proximity (latency wise) to your web server or what ever uses it directly.
Why not host it your self? Deploying a server like MongoDB is trivial to get going.
For people deploying to cloud services, in-cloud latency is all the same no matter who the app/database provider is.
For instance, Heroku and MongoHQ are both using Amazon Web Services, so it wouldn't increase the latency to swap a MongoHQ database instance for a Heroku one.
Well, that's not entirely true. If you're running your own data source through EC2, you can make sure it's in the same availability zone (datacenter), which makes latency very small indeed.
This is why people still use MySQL even for projects that aren't suitable for RDBMS. I use hosted MySQL at dreamhost and don't have to bother with anything except my app and data. It just works and is free with the web hosting package. Is there anything out there that comes close? I don't mind $1/month for 1GB of data. $25 for 2GB is not worth it.