What is Hosted Elasticsearch?
Elasticsearch is a search engine based on Lucene. It has both open source and paid versions. You can use it to search a database of documents or your website. In this article, we will see what are the advantages and disadvantages of using a hosted version of elasticsearch. Elasticsearch also comes with an analytics platform Kibana and logstash (for collecting, parsing, and transforming logs).
Hosted elasticsearch providers host elastic search on their servers and give you a simple to use interface to control search features. Non hosted versions of elastic search involve spinning up your own machine on cloud providers such as Digital ocean and installing elastic search on it.
Advantages of using Hosted elastic search
- Security– You need not worry about security. Trusted hosted elastic search providers to take care of security. If you are hosting an elastic search on your own machine, you might have to take your own precautions.
- Scaling- With hosted providers, you get a simple interface to increase or downsize your machine size. Increasing machine size could be a bit difficult especially for non-coders in certain hosting providers.
- Data Loss secure- Due to multiple backups, the chances of search downtime are pretty low.
- Plugins- In hosted methods, adding new plugins released by elastic search is pretty easy and quick.
- Lesser Downtime- Due to multiple fallback machines, depending on your hosting provider you might face lesser downtime.
Disadvantages of Hosted elastic search providers
- Upgrades– You don’t have any control over when you can upgrade your elasticsearch instance. It solely depends on the development turnover time of the vendor.
- Cost– Depending on your search traffic and requirements, hosted elastic search solutions could prove to be costly. Choosing to build it in-house on your own servers could prove to be more efficient.
- Lesser Visibility and customizations- You might not be able to upload your own customizations or have clarity over when a certain feature could be introduced.
