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Why are elasticsearch service providers like Bonsai that expensive? What is my advantage of using them?

What stops me from building and configuring elasticsearch on my own using a much more cheaper hosting server with no constraints?

Jayni
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  • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14290822/should-i-use-elasticsearch-from-service-prodiver-or-heroku-addon-or-from-my-own – Pentium10 Oct 20 '14 at 11:29
  • I've read this post.The show some options, but they don't talk about the pros and cons and the pricing. That's what I want to know and I haven't found anything about it. – Jayni Oct 20 '14 at 11:49
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    Hosting your own cluster is way cheaper than purchasing a service. You also need to consider the man power you need to setup the cluster and maintain yourself. – Pentium10 Oct 20 '14 at 13:55
  • So they automatically care for backups, a stable run and the config? – Jayni Oct 20 '14 at 14:52
  • Okay thank you. That's what I wanted to know – Jayni Oct 20 '14 at 18:17

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(Full disclosure: I am a founder of Qbox, which provides Elasticsearch as a service)

It is indeed possible to run Elasticsearch on your own infrastructure or in any of the various cloud infrastructure providers. For some, this might be a requirement due to compliance restrictions, regulatory restrictions, or maybe you have your own pricing negotiated.

However, if your nodes become unresponsive, these infrastructure providers will only be able to tell you if your server is available or not. There are a million reasons why an Elasticsearch node is unresponsive. So, if you want production-quality uptime and availability support, a hosted provider is not a bad choice.

I can not speak for Bonsai, but I can speak for Qbox Elasticsearch hosting. In our case, the pricing is based on the on-demand price for the underlying infrastructure provider. Anybody can do back of the envelope calculations to see what our margin is. We feel that this is the best way to ensure that the pricing model doesn't conflict with the myriad ways in which Elasticsearch is used.

The same questions have been asked of managed service providers since the dawn of computing. You could definitely do it yourself, but is it the best use of your resources? We will concede that for some companies, self-hosting will always be the right decision, but we know that a meaningful percentage of the market appreciates the time and money saved by not having to hire full-time ES expertise or consultants.

Mark Brandon
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