I've found this alternative to Algolia which is open source, self-hostable and free, however I've been having some problems with it.
Let me paint you my use case. I wanted to do a full text search on a lot of data. In this regard FlexSeach is quire performant. But to persist that data I have to save it in a JSON file, then before searching I import it, and only then FlexSearch splits the data into searchable Indexes, in Algolia those are Documents.
The problem is that as far as I've found this full text search engine is not in-memory, which means whenever a request is sent to search (for example if we talk about an API endpoint for searching) it needs to load that JSON first, then index it, then search, and only after that it returns the results.
My question is, did anyone try this out? And is there maybe a way to make it in-memory? For example, like Elastic Search, where it gives you a Docker container that has the engine inside and runs it the whole time.
And also, in that case with the docker images, what would be the best (cheapest) way to host it?