Nik, you may be underestimating just how much performance can be obtained from a single database server. For example, an IBM p595 server connected to an array of ds8300 storage devices could reasonably be expected to provide several orders of magnitude more performance when compared to commodity hardware. In commodity space (albeit, just barely), a 16 core opteron running (the admittedly yet-to-be-released) FreeBSD 7, and a suitably provisioned SAN should also enormously outperform a beige-box solution, and at a fraction of the cost. If it's performance you care about then the pgsql-performance list (which I have cc'd) is the place to talk about it.
I realize this doesn't address your desire to get out of database server administration. I am not aware of any company which provides database hosting, further I'm not entirely convinced that's a viable business solution. The technical issues (security, latency and reliability are the ones that immediately come to mind) associated with a hosted database server solution suggest to me that this would not be economically viable. The business issues around out-sourcing a critical, if not central component of your architecture seem, at least to me, to be insurmountable.
Andrew
On 8/19/07, Niklas Saers <niklassaers@gmail.com> wrote: Hi,
the company I'm doing work for is expecting a 20 times increase in
data and seeks a 10 times increase in performance. Having pushed our
database server to the limit daily for the past few months we have
decided we'd prefer to be database users rather than database server
admins. :-)
Are you or can you recommend a database hosting company that is good
for clients that require more power than what a single database
server can offer?
Cheers
Nik
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