VPS has two main drawbacks:
Many don't guarantee persistent disk storage It's not ideal for CI/CD scenarios where you need ephemeral databases for testing But you're right - if you need a simple, always-on database, a $5 VPS might be a good choice.
Just to point out, if the data is important you'll want backups anyway. Even with S3.
Just in case. :D
Much more likely, though, is that you, or some sysadmin at your company, or even some user will accidentally hit the "delete" button on something important, and then without a backup, you can't get it back. Which is honestly the thing that people usually need their backups for, anyway. This is what most "data loss incidents" are: people just messing up and deleting things they shouldn't have. Wetware is much more prone to failure than hardware, after all.
In case something goes wrong. ie your account has a problem unexpectedly, or if they do indeed have a data loss/corruption problem, etc.
I mean kinda? It's free for public repositories, but free doesn't mean free for anything. The use of GitHub actions, like most thing in life, has terms of service[1]. This use-case arguably breaks the term "for example, don't use Actions [...] as part of a serverless application". If you start using this for demos, you'd probably also be breaking "You may only access and use GitHub Actions to develop and test your application(s)".
It's up to GitHub if they choose to enforce any of these terms. I just want to point out that there are limits to "free".
[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
> for example, don't use Actions as a content delivery network or as part of a serverless application, but a low benefit Action could be ok if it’s also low burden
Just as the wesql article states, Use Cases is Not Recommended For:
- Long-term database hosting or production workloads. - Maintaining an always-on public database endpoint. - Circumventing GitHub Actions usage policies.