This may be an unpopular perspective, but here goes. For many years I ran a business doing web development. I had many clients approach me who were using Wix, and who I could not help, because Wix had effectively taken hostage their images. Because of those years of bad experiences (telling clients that they are screwed unless they keep paying Wix), I do not trust Wix, and so I do not trust this post. Should those clients have trusted that Wix would make their data available in the future? No, totally not. But that is the cost of doing shady things. Everything with your name on it now gets taken with a grain of salt.
Yes, exactly. I don't know how they do it now, but Wix did the "one big Flash blob as a website" and did not make data available to clients to download once they had been uploaded. So images and other data that had been "compiled" into the Flash blob were erased or something. There was no warning about this, and it took many by surprise. This effectively forced people to renew their subscription to Wix who otherwise wanted to use something else. The worst was a friend of a friend whose elderly mother had used Wix to upload old family photos thinking that Wix was a safe place to store them, not knowing any better. I felt so bad for that woman. I have no love for Wix at all.
Weird. I wouldn't ever do anything like that with Neocities. Downloading a site is a button click on the bottom of everyone's dashboard (it spits out a zipball of the files). Flash is anachronistic as all hell anyways.
It's weird to me that they're hosting web sites that need inline MySQL at all, but I suppose they probably do a lot of fancy backend stuff. Much better to async queue any data sending unless it needs to be inline. Much better than that is to static cache.
We're straight up static + nginx for all site serving, via an anycast geo CDN. Logging is passively provided by the nginx logfiles, which are parsed hourly asynchronously. It's a pretty good system, and about as fast as site delivery can get. I guess I don't know what Wix offers for site features, but for simple web sites, why bother with a database for web site display at all?
That said, I agree with the article's premis. I'm partisan to PostgreSQL but it's dumb to say it doesn't work and that some wacky new TrendDB that doesn't handle fsync or atomicity correctly (and therefore is TEH SCALE!) is somehow better for this job.
