Techniques for provisioning databases for users on a wide area network such as the Internet include a first party managing one or more database systems. Second parties subscribe to database services supported by the database systems managed by the first party. The first party provides, over a network, to database applications controlled by the second parties, access to the database services to which the second parties are subscribed. The database systems may use database appliances hosting both database process(es), and non-database process(es) tailored to the needs of the database process(es). A user is therefore able to obtain database resources from an Internet Database Service Provider (IDSP) without the user incurring the full costs of database administrator(s), dedicated database equipment facilit(ies), or even dedicated database device(s), depending on usage. Meanwhile, the IDSP incurs minimum staffing loads because of various self-service tools Costing model and automatic billing features are also described.