Bonsai Review

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What are the best hosted Elasticsearch services?

Pros

Pro
Instant cluster provisioning

Bonsai shared cluster plans are created instantly and charges are prorated to usage, for easy and elastic development and testing clusters.

Pro
Heroku Support

The first Heroku addon provider for Elasticsearch, with good pricing and support for a wide range of development and production cluster types.

Pro
High performance SSD based infrastructure

All Elasticsearch databases run on high performance Solid State Drives (SSD).

Pro
Multi-node clusters by default

All clusters run on at least three nodes (Elasticsearch best practice) for data replication and redundancy.

Pro
Free developer plans available

Pro
High availability and uptime

Transparent and reports its uptime here.

Pro
High level of Lucene expertise

The team also runs Solr as a service (Websolr - the first hosted Solr service) and has a high level of experience and expertise running search as a service.

Pro
Knowledgeable support team

Experienced developers and engineers answer email support questions thoroughly.

Pro
Most experienced provider

Bonsai was the first to offer hosted Elasticsearch as a service.

Cons

Con
They do not support old versions without a 5x price increase

Instead of deciding to drop support for their older versions and cutting people off with an 'end-of-life', Bonsai offers continued support for clients who are unable or unwilling to switch to the latest version. This, however comes at an increased price.

Con
Limited Elasticsearch API on shared plans

Bonsai shared cluster plans take an opinionated approach to multitenancy. They limit user access to some of the low-level administration-oriented APIs for security and stability reasons.

Con
No node stats on shared plans

Since users on shared plans have to share the node with other tenants, the stats on the _node/stats endpoint would not be very useful for the single tenant since the reports there are for the whole node.