There are many alternatives to MsSQL, and if you don’t need Windows, a Linux-compatible database server will be cheaper to obtain in a hosting environment. The most commonly deployed database servers are MySQL, Postgres, and MariaDB, which are all open source. The vast majority of hosting providers include at least one MySQL database with every hosting account, as part of the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Some developers prefer to use MariaDB, which was created in reaction to Oracle, which builds their own closed-source database of the same name, purchasing MySQL.