FAQ about Stackhero for Elasticsearch cloud

Stackhero aims to always deliver a recent and stable version of Elasticsearch, ensuring access to recent features and full capabilities of your Elasticsearch database.

Yes, Elasticsearch is open source again. Since August 2024 (version 8.16), Elastic publishes Elasticsearch under the GNU AGPLv3, an OSI-approved open source license, alongside the Elastic License v2 (ELv2) and the SSPL. Elasticsearch was originally open source under the permissive Apache 2.0 license until version 7.10, became source-available in 2021 (SSPL + ELv2), and returned to open source with the AGPLv3 option in 2024. On Stackhero, Elasticsearch is provided under the AGPLv3 open source license.
Sources: Elasticsearch is open source, again and Elastic licensing FAQ.

Since version 8.16 (August 2024), Elasticsearch is tri-licensed under the GNU AGPLv3 (an OSI-approved open source copyleft license), the Elastic License v2 (ELv2), and the Server Side Public License (SSPL).
AGPLv3 is a true open source license, while ELv2 and SSPL are "source-available" licenses: the code is readable and modifiable, but you are limited on what you can do with Elasticsearch. Before that, Elasticsearch was permissively licensed under Apache 2.0 up to version 7.10, then SSPL and ELv2 only from version 7.11 (2021).
Stackhero provides Elasticsearch under the AGPLv3 open source license. See the Elastic licensing FAQ for more information.

Elasticsearch was open source under the permissive Apache 2.0 license from its early releases until version 7.10.
In January 2021, starting with version 7.11, Elastic relicensed Elasticsearch under the SSPL and the Elastic License v2, which are not OSI-approved open source licenses. This led Amazon and the community to create OpenSearch, an open source fork of Elasticsearch 7.10 licensed under Apache 2.0.
In August 2024, with version 8.16, Elastic added the GNU AGPLv3 open source license, making Elasticsearch open source again.
Source: Elasticsearch is open source, again.

We support official Elasticsearch plugins like analysis-icu, analysis-kuromoji, analysis-nori, analysis-phonetic, analysis-smartcn, analysis-stempel, analysis-ukrainian, ingest-attachment, ingest-geoip, ingest-user-agent, mapper-annotated-text, mapper-murmur3 and mapper-size.
You have the ability to easily add or remove them with a single click.

No, and that is the value Stackhero provides. There is no server for you to manage: Stackhero handles the operating system, security patches, service configuration, TLS certificates, firewall, monitoring, and daily atomic backups.
Everything you would normally do over SSH is available as a supervised action in your dashboard, with a single click: change the configuration, upgrade to a new version, resize the instance, open or close a port, or restore a backup.
You keep full access to the service itself, its admin console, its APIs, and your data. Nothing that belongs to your application is out of your reach.
This also reduces your attack surface: there is no SSH key to rotate, leak, or brute-force.
If the dashboard does not offer an option you need, let us know. Extending the configuration page is how the platform grows.

No. That is the whole point of Stackhero: you get a production-grade Elasticsearch without hiring anyone to operate it. No provisioning, no operating system to patch, no backup script to write and test, no monitoring stack to assemble, no on-call rotation to staff.
Your team can focus on what makes your product different, and the infrastructure work that used to take weeks simply disappears.

Absolutely! Your instance has its own firewall where you can decide which IPs have access to which port in 2 clicks.

Premium support is included in every plan at no extra cost. There is no support tier to buy and no priority support to pay for. Support is available by email and online chat during office hours, from 9am to 6pm Central European Time. The usual first response is within the hour.

Outside those hours, your services are still monitored. Stackhero watches them around the clock. If downtime is detected, automated remediation runs immediately, and an on-call engineer is paged if the problem is not resolved. You do not have to notice the incident first. You do not have to staff an on-call rotation of your own.

Everything. The price shown on the pricing page is the price you pay: the service itself, the dedicated and isolated infrastructure it runs on, unmetered and uncapped network traffic, daily atomic backups and their storage, free and unlimited backup restorations, updates and version upgrades, TLS certificates, your custom domain, the firewall, monitoring, and premium support.
There is no setup fee, no per-user or per-seat billing, no support add-on, no traffic bill, and no charge to restore a backup.

At the beginning of each month, our system computes how many hours your services were up and a detailed invoice is created.
You receive a single monthly invoice, containing all your services, clearly explained and easy to understand. Your accounting department will love that!
There is no commitment: you stop the billing of a service in a single click, and you are billed only for the hours it ran.

Stackhero is a French company operating under European and French laws.
Servers are located, depending on your choice, either in the European Union (France) or in the USA.
Backups are stored in the European Union.

Your data is backed up automatically at least once a day on every service and every plan. Extra backups are also taken automatically during sensitive operations such as updates or upgrades.
Retention: one backup per day is kept for 7 days, one per week for 1 month, and one per month for 3 months.
Every backup is stored in a vault located at least 200 km from the datacenter running your service, so a physical incident cannot affect both locations.
You can restore backups at any time, as often as you need, with a single click. There are no restoration fees or limits on the number of restores.

The problem with traditional backup systems is that files are saved at different times interval.
Let's say you have 2 files, a.txt and b.txt. Your backup starts at 9am and it finishes at 10am.
The file a.txt will contain data from 9am and b.txt will contain data from 10am.
This is traditional in backups systems and is a big issue leading to consistency problems.

This is why we developed an in-house backup system that takes an atomic image of your instance at a precise moment.
Atomic in a way that we can guarantee that all files from the backup have been taken exactly at the same time.
If your backup starts at 9am, all files will have data from 9am. You have a perfect consistent and reliable backup.

Backups are first transmitted to a dedicated server, which verifies and validates the data. Once these checks have been approved, the backups are encrypted and archived.
Encryption uses ECDH and Curve25519 as part of the OpenPGP protocol, with a unique key generated for each backup.

Your service is made up of multiple subservices, each running in containers within an environment dedicated entirely to you.
This environment is private and isolated from other customers, providing strong security and high performance.
The whole thing is hosted on a bare-metal server running Stackhero DC OS, our own Linux distribution, with disks physically attached to your instance to deliver maximum IOPS.

This isolation is enforced by a dedicated virtual machine for each customer, not by shared containers on a multi-tenant host.

We use disks physically plugged to your instances.
We don't use network disks, contrary to traditional cloud solutions, that are slow and expensive.
This way we ensure best performances and exceptional IOPS.

We created our own cloud software solution, making us completely independent from cloud providers. We deploy this innovative solution directly on bare-metal servers, providing you with incredible performance and stability.

Stackhero is a French company founded in 2009. The platform itself launched in 2018, after two years of development, and has been running production workloads ever since.
The company is profitable and independent, with no external investors and no exit to prepare. This stability matters when you choose a provider to host a service you cannot easily move. Stackhero is built to be here in ten years.

Both use the same platform. A startup can launch its first Elasticsearch in production in two minutes on the smallest plan, then scale to dozens of vCPUs as the product grows, without changing providers or migrating anything.
Larger organizations get the features they require (included for all companies on all plans): ISO 27001 certification, a GDPR-compliant Data Processing Agreement, a contractual 99.9% SLA, dedicated and isolated infrastructure, and a single monthly invoice that is easy for accounting to process.
In both cases, you only need to change the size of the instance.

The primary mission of Stackhero is to provide a platform that is easy to use, extremely reliable, and highly secure.
A key element in achieving this mission is the annual attainment of the ISO 27001 certification, a globally recognized quality and security label.
This certification, awarded following a rigorous audit conducted by an independent external body, attests to compliance with the strictest international standards in information security.