hosted apache solr

Earlier this year, I completely revamped Hosted Apache Solr's architecture, making it more resilient, more scalable, and better able to support having different Solr versions and configurations per customer.

Today I'm happy to officially announce support for Solr 7.x (in addition to 4.x). This means that no matter what version of Drupal you're on (6, 7, or 8), and no matter what Solr module/version you use (Apache Solr Search or Search API Solr 1.x or 2.x branches), Hosted Apache Solr is optimized for your Drupal search!

I started Hosted Apache Solr almost 10 years ago, in late 2008, so I could more easily host Apache Solr search indexes for my Drupal websites. I realized I could also host search indexes for other Drupal websites too, if I added some basic account management features and a PayPal subscription plan—so I built a small subscription management service on top of my then-Drupal 6-based Midwestern Mac website and started selling a few Solr subscriptions.

Back then, the latest and greatest Solr version was 1.4, and now-popular automation tools like Chef and Ansible didn't even exist. So when a customer signed up for a new subscription, the pipeline for building and managing the customer's search index went like this:

Original Hosted Apache Solr architecture, circa 2009.

After a few months of testing, I'm happy to announce Hosted Apache Solr now supports Search API Solr with Drupal 8! Both Search API and Search API Solr have been getting closer to stable releases, and more people have been requesting Drupal 8 search cores, so I decided to finish testing and updating support guides this weekend.

Recently, I was upgrading the infrastructure for Hosted Apache Solr, and as part of the upgrade, I jumped from Nginx 1.8.x to 1.10.x, which includes HTTP/2 support. I had previously used SPDY support in my server configuration to help the site run better/faster on modern browsers with SPDY support:

After the server upgrades, I was getting the following error on Nginx restarts:

So I switched the configuration to use http2 instead of spdy on the listen line, and restarted nginx.

Everything worked great in Safari and FireFox, but when I tried loading the page in Chrome, I was greeted with the following error: