im trying to cut down on my digital ocean bill and have a few small freelance websites, im paying 15$ a month for a mysql db and kinda feel ripped off

i know mongodb atlas offers mongo for free, does any service offer mysql for free and would you recommend using it for a clients website?

Oracle cloud free tier is pretty generous but I've only really dicked around with it, aws for work stuff.

6 small VMs (or one larger) and 20gb database, plus other stuff, free forever

does any service offer mysql for free and would you recommend using it for a clients website

question 1: maybe.

question 2: definitely not, not ever, never, not in a million years, you should reconsider your life choices for even entertaining the thought.

Any chance you could switch to SQLite? It's surprisingly performamt

Digital ocean sells complete VPS'es for 8 euro that allows you to run as much MySQL and sites as you want. I advise to dockerize every customer project with it's own dedicated mysql server and caddy for vhosts / ssl. It's very clean and easy to move to a new server when needed.

Hmm, I just checked and those VPS'es are quite bad, maybe hetzner has better pricing.

But the story: just take one VPS to do all. If the sites are very small, 2 cores and 4 gb will do. I'm running molodetz,a complete mail system and the devRant antispam system on such VPS and running builds that generate heavy statistics on it. Works fine. Also easy with backup normally, you can make snapshots. I can help with dockerizing / https server and stuff if you want.

Like @ScriptCoded said, use sqlite. The thing is, if you don't need to scale horizontally it will preform really well.

The reason why it performs good is you skip network overhead with sqlite.

The suggestion from @retoor is also something you should consider, even if you chose sqlite.

Having docker images will make way easier to test and hop between cloud providers so you can get optimal pricing.