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

I am little torn between how expensive it is to get a hosted database.

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?