Cloudant couchdb is free

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I've been investigating methods of storing content online and ran across an interesting offering from cloudant. They offer a 2gb couchdb database for free. For folks who don't know, couchdb is a json/RESTful distributed document database. If you're trying to manage online content for a web application it has some interesting advantages over the competition.

The most interesting advantages to me are:
  • Native RESTful javascript/JSON API. The database itself uses http as the communication protocol
  • Inherent MVCC support. This means old versions of a document live after they've been updated
  • Built-in searching and materialized views. I can define some metadata about my content and instantly retrieve it

Some of the competition in this case would be:


While it turns out that S3 and MongoHQ both have free offerings, the online console at cloudant is the most user-friendly (as of this second).

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