Accounts and Billing Overview

If you have questions about Account Setup, Billing, User Roles and managing Users on the SearchStax Managed Search service, check out the resources in this section:

• Account Setup
  • Signing Up
  • Billing and Payments
• Managing Users
  • SearchStax Managed Search User Roles
  • Managing Users
  • Updating User Preferences
• Canceling your Account

Questions?

Do not hesitate to reach out to the SearchStax Support Desk. We always strive to improve our service!

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Whether you plan to host Solr yourself, or use a provider like the SearchStax Managed Search service, there will always be additional Cloud costs to consider outside of the deployments themselves. Transferring data across geographic regions and processing large volumes of data can be factors in understanding the total cost of ownership for your search project. This page details the included limits for each deployment plan tier, how consumption is measured, and some options you have to optimize your deployment’s data usage.

Plan Data Usage Limits

A Deployment’s Data Usage limits are based on the deployment’s subscription level as follows:

* Gold support is no longer offered to new clients, but is still honored.

Data Usage Limits are designed to provide a predictable cost of ownership for the majority of search projects. Some projects will require additional bandwidth due to complex or high workload requirements. Connect with your accounts team to learn more about additional bandwidth. Not sure who your account manager is? Reach us at our support desk support@demo.searchstax.com. 

Measuring Deployment Data Usage Consumption

Data Usage Credits are flexible and can be applied to either cloud data processing or cloud data transfer operations.

One Data Usage Credit is equivalent to:

• 10GB of data processed by the deployment’s load balancer or application gateway, or
• 1GB of data transfer out of the cloud region by the deployment’s nodes.

SearchStax measures the consumption of data usage credits on a monthly basis via reports directly from the deployments’ Cloud Provider.

Resolving Data Usage Overconsumption

A SearchStax account manager will perform outreach to registered administrator users for your account if a deployment is consuming more Data Usage Credits than allowed by the deployment’s subscription level.

SearchStax account management will assist with exploring the following options with your team:

• Deployment strategy best practices.
• Cost optimizations through deployment plan upgrades or by purchasing additional Data Usage bandwidth add-ons.

Failure to resolve plan data consumption beyond the commercially allocated limits can result in SearchStax terminating the deployment after 30 days’ notice has been provided.

Optimization Tips

Below are some guiding principles for using Solr effectively from a data usage cost and hardware utilization perspective:

• Deploy Solr in the same Cloud provider and region as your application. Deployment prices vary from cloud provider to cloud provider, but having Solr in the same Cloud region improves performance and reduces the amount of data transferred out of the region.
• Consider multi-region Solr deployments for global search. If your application is hosted in multiple geographic regions, deploy Solr in those regions as well to keep latency and cost low.
• Optimize Solr requests and data. Below are some examples:*
  • Reduce Solr request complexities to reduce data processing volume.
  • Reduce request payload sizes to reduce data processing volume.
  • Limit the minimum records returned in Solr API responses to reduce data processing and data transfer volume.
  • Reduce data transfer volume by using filters and facets to narrow results sets before returning them to the client application. 
  • To reduce data processing and data transfer volume avoid indexing unnecessary fields. Specify only select fields in your queries to reduce large payloads being retrieved for a search.  
  • Limit Index updates using bulk updates or commit within transactions to reduce data handling overhead and processing.

*SearchStax support does not include consultation on data usage optimizations with Solr. These suggestions are designed to put you on the right path toward generic optimization with any Cloud provider. Consult Solr documentation or Cloud Provider-specific documentation for further guidance on Solr functionality or cloud data processing and cloud data transfer optimization tips.

Questions?

Do not hesitate to reach out to the SearchStax Support Desk. We always strive to improve our service!

The post Deployment Data Usage Limits appeared first on SearchStax Docs.

To get started with the SearchStax Managed Search service, visit the SearchStax website and create a SearchStax account.

Contents:

• Signing Up
• Billing and Payments
  • Billing Contact
  • Payment Method
  • Switch to Prepaid Annual Billing
  • Update/Delete Cards
  • Usage Projections
• Canceling your Account

Signing Up

To sign up as a SearchStax user, go to the SearchStax website.

Click the Start a Free Trial button. (There is a two-week grace period before billing begins.)

Billing and Payments

Please follow these links for more information about Managed Search options:

• Cloud Providers and their Regions.
• Supported versions of Solr.
• Support License Agreements.

Dedicated deployments (“platinum,” and “platinum plus” SLAs) are prepaid based on individual contracts.

Billing Contact

The optional billing contact is a person or entity who should receive a detailed receipt each time the account’s credit card is charged. The information entered here has no impact on the credit-card billing process. It is a reporting feature only.

This is where you can enter your Value-Added Tax number so it appears on your receipts.

• To enter this information, go to the Billing & Payments screen.

Payment Method

A pay-as-you-go account must specify a credit card. SearchStax does not accept other forms of payment for monthly billing.

1. Go to the Billing & Payments page.
2. Open the Billing Overview tab.
3. Fill out the form as shown below:

Switch to Prepaid Annual Billing

You can switch any “silver” level deployment from month-to-month to prepaid annual (or three-year) billing directly from the Dedicated Infrastructure screen. Prepayment is rewarded by a substantial discount.

Editing Payment Methods

You can enter multiple credit cards for an account. The most recently-added card will be the default payment method. (It has a green checkmark in the list of cards.)

To delete a card, click the Edit link in the upper-right corner of the list. This exposes delete buttons in the credit-card list.

The Choose Another Way to Pay link lets you add another credit card to the list. The most-recent card is the default for billing.

The link about using an invoice helps you file a support ticket requesting this service. One of our Customer Success agents will help you set it up. Note that you will need to file another ticket if you ever decide to return to credit-card payments.

Usage Projections

The Billing & Payments page displays a bar chart of Month-to-Date Usage.

• Last Month: The amount billed to your credit card last month.
• Month-to-Date: Charges accrued to your account this month up to today.
• Forecast: Projected monthly charge to your credit card based on current burn rate.

Note that this graph refers to credit-card charges only. Also, the forecast includes backup fees to date without projecting the cost of scheduled backups in the future.

Canceling Your Account

Only the account Owner can cancel the account. This automatically terminates all deployments.

If you still want to cancel, navigate to the Account Settings tab of the Managed Search dashboard. Click the big red button.

Questions?

Do not hesitate to reach out to the SearchStax Support Desk. We always strive to improve our service!

The post Account Setup appeared first on SearchStax Docs.

Complex projects require a fine division of user roles for supervision, development, and security. The SearchStax Managed Search service allows the account owner to invite assistants in multiple roles to meet this need.

Contents:

• SearchStax User Roles
• Managing Users
  • Adding Users
  • Transfer Ownership
  • Change a User’s Role
  • Deleting a User
  • Bulk User Actions
• Updating User Preferences
  • Profile
  • Password
  • Single Sign-On
  • Two-Factor Authentication
  • Notifications

SearchStax User Roles

By default, the person who opens the SearchStax account is the “Owner” of the account. This user can invite other users to participate in the account, up to a limit imposed by the account’s Service-Level Agreement (SLA).

The owner may assign each user to a role, which grants or denies specific powers to that user.

• Owner: The Owner has full control. This is the only user who can terminate the account or transfer ownership to another user. There can be only one Owner at a time.
• Admin: An Admin has full access to technical features, users, and billing information.
• Technical Contact: This role has full technical access, but cannot modify users or billing information.
• Billing Member: The Billing Contact has access to credit-card and billing information only.
• Team Member: The Team Member is a read-only role. This user can view but not make changes.
• Marketer: The Marketer role has the same privileges as the Team Member role.

Account Management

These are the account-management permissions associated with the user roles.

Dedicated Deployments

This table explains the permissions of the user roles when operating on Dedicated Deployments.

Managing Users

The account’s Owner and the Admins can manage the users of the account. This includes:

• Add users to this account.
• Transfer ownership.
• Change a user’s role.
• Delete users from the account.

Adding Users

The Owner and the Admins can add users to the account. (A user can have access to multiple accounts, but will have to be added to each account separately.)

The maximum number of users per account is determined by your Service Level Agreement (SLA). The Silver (self-service, pay-as-you-go) SLA permits the account owner plus one other. Premium support plans provide for various numbers of users. See We need more SearchStax users! for details.

It is possible to add SearchStax users to an account for $10/user/month. Contact the SearchStax Support Desk to explore this possibility.

To add a new user to an account:

• Navigate to Settings > Users in the navigation bar at the left edge of the screen.
• Click on Add User.

• Fill out the user enrollment form:

The system sends a welcoming email message inviting the new user to register with SearchStax. The registration link is good for 24 hours. If the prospective user lets the time run out, the Admin can reissue the invitation using the Bulk Actions menu described below.

Transfer Ownership

The Owner can Transfer Ownership of the account to another user who is enrolled in the same account.

• Navigate to Settings > Users in the navigation bar at the left edge of the screen.
• Click on Transfer Ownership.
• Select the new owner from a list:

Change a User’s Role

Either the Owner or an Admin can change the role of a current user using the Bulk User Actions menu described below.

Deleting a User

Only an Admin can delete a user from an account. Note that this revokes a user’s access to that account, but does not delete the user from the system. The user might still have access to other accounts.

To delete a user:

• Click on Users in the navigation sidebar.
• Click the red Delete button next to the appropriate user.
• You will be redirected to a confirmation screen, where you can click on Sure, delete this user in order to proceed.

Bulk User Actions

The Bulk Actions menu is available to the Owner and Admins only. The menu is inactive until you check one of the boxes beside the user names.

The Owner or Admin can perform the following actions on one or more users simultaneously:

• Delete users: Delete the selected users from the current SearchStax account.
• Set Roles: Give selected users a new role.
• Resend invitation: Re-invite a user who did not respond to the welcome email within 24 hours.

Updating User Preferences

Profile

Any user in can change his/her contact information and preferences on the Account Settings screen.

From the SearchStax Dashboard, click on User Preferences.

Edit the information in the form below:

Note that you cannot change your verified email address. For that, please contact SearchStax Support.

Password

See also Change Your Password.

To change a password, click the Password tab and fill out the form.

Single Sign-On

Please see the Single Sign-On page for detailed instructions.

Two-Factor Authentication

Please see Two-Factor Authentication for detailed instructions.

Notifications

The Notifications tab lets you opt out of the courtesy emails that SearchStax sends to announce SLA compliance, new deployments, scheduled maintenance, and failed backups.

Questions?

Do not hesitate to reach out to the SearchStax Support Desk. We always strive to improve our service!

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