The basic requirement of the site is to provide a plateform for blogging and single interface for managing various social network, emails, blog etc. For blogging I am using .netblogengine. And facebook and gmail and blogger are currently being managed by signing in via their api. I am using mysql and blog content is being saved in mysql column.
My first question is.. Suppose instead of saving blog content in mysql table column I just save the content in a txt file and save the name of the file in the column.. Doing so will reduce the size of table but will it also affect the performance?? I know I will not be able to search within the content but mysql size grows up quickly (50 mb with 8 users). The minimum number of users are atleast 30.
My second question.. I am thinking of asking all the acount (facebook, gmail etc) username and password and store them in the db. When even a user sign in all related account will be signed in using the saved data so that separate logging is not required. How ever username/password hacks are common headlines now days. I want to know how secure are the shared server environment in this regard? Will I be required to take some extra effort to secure these data or I can be sure that as long as my mysql logging details are safe all data are safe.