I used to use Access MDB files for storing data on the web server, but I upgraded to SQL Server as a back-end about a year ago. I outgrew Access which is just fine for small sites. but I've got over 40,000 customers now, and I could have 100 people active at any given time. Too much for Access to handle.

Was the active users the only problem, or was there a limit on the amount of data which could be housed?

Active users. An Access Database can store up to 2 GB of data, and even then you can use multiple MDB or ACCDB files, so number of records isn't usually the problem. Number of concurrent active users is. When you get even a moderately sized database (10,000 records or so) and a few dozen or more users hitting the database at once, Access starts to slow down A LOT. Like I always say, it's a great small to mid-sized business database, but if you get more than 10 or so users, you need to upgrade your back-end. You can still keep Access as a front-end (forms and such) but SQL Server is definitely needed for high-VOLUME databases.

Plus a database SERVER speeds things up a lot as far as processing goes. If you want a list of your customers, sorted by email address, with orders between January 2019 and now, Access would have to pull ALL of that data through the wire, sort it, filter it, etc. A database server can crunch the numbers on the server side and only send the relevant data down the wire. So for networked databases on a LAN, a server makes sense.

On a web server, only the relevant records are shown in the browser, but the way an Access database is handled in the background is completely different than the way SQL Server (or MySQL or any other server program) deals with the data. It's much more efficient. Access files have record-locking issues and don't deal with many concurrent users that well. So if I have 100 people on the web site and they're all trying to view their Course Listing, it can slow down. I used to have the Theater database in an MDB file, which I thought would be fine because there's only a couple hundred classes. But if I got 200 concurrent users, the site would crawl.

Now that I've got the site running on SQL Server it's much faster. Almost every page you see is pulled from my database. I built a "blog engine" where I can edit pages in my web browser and post them and they look like real pages. Everything is stored in a database, backed up by the minute to my off-site database by a routine I run in-house (another Access database LOL). Plus GoDaddy (my ISP) backs up everything too. I've had enough crashes in the past where I'm very skeptical now. I back up EVERYTHING.

Do you have a course that shows how to have an access database online such as a google site?

I think I am over building my Access database.  I have one table with 17K records in it already.  I haven't seen the problems yet which I have seen before.  Hopefully I will get it all built correctly.  The information you have provided has been very interesting and I already know I will need to switch the back end to MySQL.  I have been very afraid to mess with it as I have tried in the past and cannot seem to get it to work.  My boss will definitely like it better when I switch to MySQL and give him some web pages to use to use the database on his Mac.

Garry: I have a couple of lessons where I show you how to load web sites from Access using the WebBrowser ActiveX Control including Access Expert 24 and the Web Data Sync Seminar. However in Access 2019, Microsoft has a new Browser object that is native to Access and part of the normal Control Box. I'm going to cover how to use this soon. PLUS, you can also use XMLHTTP in your VBA code to pull data from a web page without using any form controls. Real cool stuff, and that's coming up soon.

Timothy: any reason for MySQL and not SQL Server?