Page views? Great. MySQL is great for read-only databases that don't need any transactional capabilities. As long as you realize that its just a file system with a (very basic) SQL interface, then fine.

I know of one company doing hight volume credit card transactions that has been using MySQL, and is moving to Oracle because MySQL can't handle the load without corrupting data which is another issue warned about in the article.

And I hope you never have to back up that database/filesystem while the data is changing :)

As for other free options, theres PostgreSQL