At Erlounge in London I recently had the chance to catch up with the Couch.io guys J Chris Anderson and Jan Lehnardt. The conversation was interesting as ever and I was intrigued by JChris’s ideas that CouchDb has twisted conventional data storage logic on it’s head by making it easy to create many databases with relatively small amounts of information; the one database per user concept.

More importantly though I discovered it was okay to talk about the hosted Couch instances that Couch.io (who also do CouchDb consulting if you need some help and advice) are offering. The free service offers you a Basic authentication account with 100Mb of storage to play around with Couch to your heart’s content. Paying brings more space but also more sophisticated authentication options.

The service is the perfect way to play around with Couch and learn how you could use it go get an account today! It’s on the Cloud as well: schema-less data on the Cloud, how buzzword compliant is that?!

On a more serious note, this is an excellent service and one I have been asking for as it allows people who have no desire to build and maintain Erlang and Couch to use the datastore as a web service rather than as a managed infrastructure component.