Documentation > Migrations

Migrating from Hosted Apache Solr (hostedapachesolr.com) to Opensolr — Complete Guide

Migrations
Migration Guide

Migrating from hostedapachesolr.com

The service is gone. Your search does not have to be.

Heads up — hostedapachesolr.com shut down permanently on October 31, 2022. If a Drupal tutorial, blog post, or old README sent you there, the service no longer exists and its indexes are unrecoverable. The good news: a modern replacement takes about 30 minutes to set up, and the Drupal side is a module swap, not a rebuild.

Why this page exists

For a decade, hostedapachesolr.com was the default answer in the Drupal community for “where do I host Solr for Search API?”. Hundreds of tutorials, forum answers, and site builds reference it. Since the shutdown, those links are dead ends — but the underlying need (a managed Solr index that Search API can talk to) is exactly what Opensolr has provided since 2011, on every plan including the free one.

Migration for Drupal (Search API) — step by step

  1. Create a free Opensolr account at opensolr.com/register — no credit card needed.
  2. Create an index from the dashboard: pick your Solr version (5 through 10 — match what your Search API module expects) and your region (EU, US, or APAC). The index is live in about 30 seconds.
  3. Install the free Opensolr Drupal module (Opensolr Search or Search API Opensolr from drupal.org). Enter your Opensolr API credentials — the module discovers your index, uploads the correct Search API config files for your Solr version automatically, and wires the connection. No manual schema.xml surgery.
  4. Reindex: drush search-api:index (or trigger indexing from the Drupal UI). Since the old host is gone, the index is rebuilt entirely from your site's data — nothing needs to be exported from the dead service.
  5. Verify: run your site's search pages, then open the Opensolr Control Panel → your index → Query Analytics to watch live queries flow.

Not on Drupal?

The same path works for any stack: WordPress has a free plugin, and everything else (Symfony, Laravel, Rails, Django, Node.js, custom code) connects through the standard Solr endpoint plus the REST API. If you still have your old schema.xml and solrconfig.xml from any previous provider, upload them as-is via Control Panel → Configuration — the live config editor lets you adjust anything in the browser afterwards.

What you gain over the old setup

  • Live config file editing — schema.xml and solrconfig.xml, in the browser, with validation.
  • Web crawler — index any site by pointing at a sitemap, no code.
  • Vector & hybrid search — semantic search without running a second system.
  • Query analytics + live query stream + 7-day error audit — see exactly what your users search and what fails.
  • Backups & restore — on-demand and scheduled, self-service.
  • 99.9% uptime SLA with multi-region hosting and per-index HTTP authentication.

Your search can be back online today.

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