Yes, you can use MS Access datasources on any Hostek ColdFusion/Windows hosting plan. Our WCP (Windows Control Panel) has full support for MS Access and will allow you to create and manage MS Access datasources as needed.

The first and most important thing to know about MS Access is that it’s not a production database engine, and should not be considered a suitable choice for a production environment. This essentially means that you will likely experience service or site crashes or hangs when using MS Access. Many legacy ColdFusion apps use MS Access as the datasource.

At Hostek, we encourage our customers to use whatever they are most comfortable with. However, it is important to understand that you will experience issues when relying on MS Access has a use case in the desktop user space, but it was never meant to be used on a server. Additionally, Microsoft stated in a release that has since been removed (due to article age):

“Microsoft Access was not designed for server use. When multiple, concurrent users make requests of a Microsoft Access database (or database driver), unpredictable results may occur”

For these reasons, we strongly discourage the use of MS Access as the database for your ColdFusion application(s). You may be surprised how easy it is to switch to a better database engine.

If you are currently using an MS Access database, then we recommend switching to either MSSQL or MySQL. Since MS Access is a Microsoft product, you may find that MSSQL is much more similar in usage and syntax. There are free tools available online that will allow you to convert your MS Access datasource to either MSSQL or MySQL.

Please note that you may need to test compatibility with your new database engine of choice. In some rare cases you’ll have to make changes to your SQL query code itself in order to work with the new database. If any of your SQL queries need to be updated, you will need to do that yourself or consult with your ColdFusion developer.