When spinning up a new server, you used to have the choice between MySQL and MariaDB. As of today, MariaDB is no longer an option. MariaDB will continue to work on existing servers with SpinupWP.
When we first started SpinupWP, MariaDB was ahead of MySQL for features and performance. However, that gap has closed over recent years, and we now recommend MySQL over MariaDB due to the improved encryption support. We decided to drop support for MariaDB on newly provisioned servers as continuing to support both MariaDB and MySQL is a lot of work and our time could be better spent elsewhere. Again, servers already running MariaDB will continue to be supported.
MySQL’s caching_sha2_password authentication plugin provides more secure password encryption than mysql_native_password. Due to the improved security and performance characteristics of caching_sha2_password, it is the default authentication plugin in MySQL 8.0 and SpinupWP has been updated to use it. Servers running older versions of MySQL or MariaDB will continue to use mysql_native_password.