Ask HN: Did you wish there were cheaper hosted databases?

You can often get free hosted MySQL databases when you buy web hosting service, and it even comes with web hosting offers that only cost $1. However, the performance is often bad and backup not existing.

If you then want to get a hosted database, where the main product are not web hosting, you can't find anywhere that only cost $1? or $2 dollars a month?

Compose.io is really awesome but they all start at $18 a month per gigabyte, which really adds up if it is only for side projects.

I could also just host it myself, but the real reason I want a hosted solution is that I don't want to think about backup. I could also just use all those free trials, but I want to pay!

I don't care about performance, I don't need failover, I just don't want to loose data!

I have asked it before, and the answers I got was I could use Google Cloud SQL and share it between projects, but sometimes I want to use multiple databases like graph and time series and I don't want to limit myself to only SQL.

The answer is, there is probably not a lot of money in it, but how does all those other really cheap webhosting companies go by? Could you automate yourself out of it?