June 02, 2023
Chris Brady
|
I recently joined SearchStax after 11 years of working at Velir, a digital marketing agency based in the Boston area. Velir also happens to be a terrific partner of SearchStax.
While I was at Velir, I worked super closely with the Drupal community. Throughout the past several years I’ve been acknowledged by my peers for my general contributions in the search space, but what some might not know about me is that I have a passion for the Drupal community. I’ve been to a number of DrupalCons and other events where I interacted with Drupal developers and heard about their projects, the technical challenges they face, and the business hurdles they need to overcome in order to make digital experiences happen under pressure and with limited resources and staffing (I thank my former colleague Kevin Quillen for helping to get me familiar with all things Drupal! Everyone should buy a copy of his new book.)
Which is why I’m excited to blog about some of the recent developments at SearchStax. First of all, as a former agency partner, I’ve worked closely with lots of organizations with super-skilled, unbelievably talented developers – who, despite their technical prowess, would struggle with the chicken-egg problem of getting projects off the ground. One clear example of that would be the fast-moving custom app developer who would be looking to drive some change in their organization by prototyping a concept and demonstrating how it could improve engagement with digital assets and other high-value content. The problem, though, was that they couldn’t get budget approved to do a quick prototype, nor could they find an environment in which to demonstrate a proof of concept without purchasing a subscription.
One painful missing area for this was in Solr infrastructure. Imagine having the vision needed to develop an app that shows massive benefit to conversion rates for specific CTAs that draw inbound leads for a financial services SaaS offering, only to be sidelined because you aren’t able to find a quick, easy, frictionless way to stand up Solr infrastructure. Maybe not as bad but just as frustrating – you might find a way to stand up Solr, but it’s a little too costly or requires management overhead from the provider that you don’t want to deal with. If you’re super nimble and looking at a small deployment, all you care about is getting up and running immediately.
Which is why I’m even more excited than I’ve ever been to be attending DrupalCon with my teammates this year. We’ll be discussing our recent product launch of SearchStax Cloud Serverless, which further abstracts away operational requirements of cloud-managed Solr, to the point where you don’t even need to think about sizing. It’s a fraction of the cost of what we call our Dedicated Cloud offering – SearchStax Cloud Serverless is designed specifically for smaller-scale deployments with up to 50GB index size and up to 30M monthly requests. The best part is that it starts at a super low entry price point, which for the developer means super low friction, aka “keep moving fast and don’t let any BS slow you down.”
To add to that excitement, we are also addressing the pain that nonprofits in particular have. It’s the problem I described above, but on steroids, since they are typically even more resource constrained and budget limited. We’re announcing the availability of SearchStax For Good, a program designed to empower the non-profit who needs an upgrade to their search experience. With SearchStax for Good, qualifying non-profit organizations are eligible to receive six months of SearchStax Cloud Serverless for free. After the six month period ends, organizations can continue using the service at a 40% discounted rate.
This is HUGE! Imagine you just hop on, fill out a form, and once we send you the email with your account info, you’re building a search experience on the industry’s only true SaaS offering for Solr. You don’t even need to provide a credit card. You just focus on building, and let us focus on managing Solr infrastructure. Your users win, you win, and your community wins.
We’ll be at Booth 331 at DrupalCon, so definitely stop by and say hi. We’ll be handing out these cards – you’ll want to make sure you come by, grab one, and chat with us about how awesome search experiences can be if you have the right tools, the right support, and the right partners.
The Stack is delivered bi-monthly with industry trends, insights, products and more
Copyrights © SearchStax Inc.2014-2024. All Rights Reserved.
SearchStax Site Search solution is engineered to give marketers the agility they need to optimize site search outcomes. Get full visibility into search analytics and make real-time changes with one click.
close
SearchStax Managed Search service automates, manages and scales hosted Solr infrastructure in public or private clouds. Free up developers for value-added tasks and reduce costs with fewer incidents.
close
close