Midwestern Mac has been offering Apache Solr hosting for Drupal websites for the past three years, but this service has never been given too much attention or made easy to sign up for and use—until now!
Today we're announcing the re-launch of our service with a new website: Hosted Apache Solr.
The website was built on Drupal 7, and uses a custom base theme shared with Server Check.in (our server monitoring service built with Drupal and Node.js). We built a small payment integration module for PayPal subscriptions (though we're considering using Drupal Commerce, so we can use different payment processors more easily), and have built a very simple to use front-end for managing Solr core subscriptions.
If you don't know much about what Apache Solr can do for your site's search and listings, here's a one-sentence summary: Solr enables highly customizable and speedy content indexing, faceted and advanced search filtering abilities, and raw speed—indexing and searching are many times faster than database-backed search (like Drupal's default search or basic Views filtering).
There are a few other companies that offer hosted instances of Apache Solr, notably Acquia, but most other solutions require more expensive contracts or are not tailored specifically towards Drupal sites. We hope you like our offering, and would love to hear your feedback—what can we do to help you choose Hosted Apache Solr as your Drupal search solution?
Check out Hosted Apache Solr, and sign up to improve your search experience!
Midwestern Mac will be soon be posting more stories about Hosted Apache Solr, Apache Solr itself, and Drupal/Solr integrations, so please consider subscribing to our RSS feed to stay informed!
Apache Solr is a trademark of the Apache Software Foundation. Drupal is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert.