If you are not planning to host the sites yourself, I suggest developing using the platform used by your preferred webhost(s).
Should a customer require specific server software, they will need to purchase server hosting, and license any software they need themselves. It will then most likely be up to you to set up the hosted server with the needed software, unless you use a consultant for this ( recommended unless you have a lot of experience setting up servers )
As for performance differences for serving up binary data, I do not have any hard numbers on this.
Since you have a MSSQL server and MySQL is free, I suggest setting up a benchmark for them.
Soon, I will be getting ready to take on clients for my little web development business, and I will be developing some databases to hold some of the sites data. Knowing of course that there's SQL Server and MySQL, I would like to know if any of my future clients will need to actually SQL Server, should develop a database for them using my own licensed version of SQL Server 2014 Enterprise 64-Bit.
Will the web hosting folks accommodate this, or should I just start writing stuff in MySQL just to save time. Would I lose scalability with MySQL? Also, can MySQL handle streaming and video datatypes, as SQL Server? I plan to build a video streaming site at some point. I would appreciate the knowledge. Thanks.
