I found a way to get WbSrch online inexpensively, through a combination of code optimizations and an inexpensive high-disk-space internet provider. It doesn’t need fast SSD storage to serve the index data, so it works just fine on a mechanical hard drive, and it’s easier to get a lot of space inexpensively with on of those. Through a bunch of memory and query optimizations, it’s more zippy now on an inexpensive VPS than it was on a 12-core server with 192GB of memory and 8 SSDs. For now I’m running the crawler and indexer from home and pushing index updates to the server as they’re done.
I’ve been using it as my main search engine even though the indexes are a bit out of date, and the results have better than I expect. It has definitely improved over the years.
Try it out: