Is it good to store User Settings on seperate files without having a database?

I'm creating a web application, (actually my first Web App, I've been working on C# and other desktop oriented programming languages previously). One of my college said that usage of separate files for data storage is easier to access from different platforms (Though as I understand it is hard to move the data from one place to another). I'm currently using Rijndael-128 Encryption for my separate files stored in my server.

My Question is, is it good or bad to store files separately instead of configuring a MySQL database on the server?