Data is at the heart of every application, so it is important to understand how your application stores information across various databases and tables.
Data is stored in various formats, structures, and methods. It will also contain various relationships to other areas of your application and may involve certain encryption techniques.
A database object is a row of information stored in a database table. For example, details of a particular contact within a CRM count as one record or object, whether it includes just their name and email or more detailed information such as gender, date of birth, phone number, job title, and nationality.
Understanding how to structure your database tables is crucial not only for the longevity, scalability, and performance of your application but also for determining the appropriate hosting plan. It's preferable to create your databases as relational so you can store less overall data and make them dynamic, which will make them easier to edit and maintain over time.
Since an object is a row of information within the database, you can store either a single piece of information about something or detailed information with hundreds of fields for the same piece of data.
The different types of data objects include:
Insites offers a unique pricing model that allows you to pay based on the amount of data you use, regardless of the number of administrators or users for your application.
Your usage includes system data objects such as system fields and custom fields, but these have minimal impact on your overall usage and plan requirements.
It's important to note that the Insites Event Stream does not count towards your usage, and there are currently no limits or retention policies on events and history logs stored on staging or production instances.
In addition to the different plans available on multi-tenant instance hosting, you can also purchase small increments of specific feature usage called overages, which can help manage costs if you are slightly above a certain metric and don’t need to upgrade to the next plan with all the inclusions. For more information on overage costs, please see our pricing page.
Whilst many elements in your application are related to data objects, not everything within your instance will be counted toward your usage. Some examples of things not counted toward your data objects include:
It's crucial to understand and monitor your data storage in order to optimize your application and costs.
You can check your total database objects usage and breakdown within the Insites Console and Insites Instance Admin (IIA).
The usage is categorized by module, along with usage over time, so you can monitor and plan your data retention policies or determine when you should upgrade to the next plan.
We recognize that estimating the number of data objects you will use can be challenging. Therefore, by answering a few questions, we can help you determine which instance hosting plan would be most suitable for your application.
Try Insites for as long as you like with our free starter plan and free staging instances.
Then purchase a production instance when you are ready to go live.
