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I always wondered who actually pays for the bills in OSM? Who pays all the servers, all the traffic, etc...?
by alexandernst 8y ago
I always wondered who actually pays for the bills in OSM? Who pays all the servers, all the traffic, etc...?
- craftyguy 8y agoThe Openstreetmap Foundation[1]. They publish financial info too [2]. 1. https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page 2. https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dharma1 8y agohttps://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances https://hardware.openstreetmap.org/thanks/ https://hardware.openstreetmap.org/thanks/
- Doctor_Fegg 8y agoDonations and a little assistance in kind (discounted/donated hosting). But OSM is incredibly efficiently run. Turnover in 2017 was just £185,395 and that includes the State of the Map conference. The foundation has just one part-time employee for administrative support. Compare to Wikimedia which has turnover of around $80m and 280 employees.
- dmortin 8y agoWith OSM you have to host the map tiles yourself if you add maps to your website, because OSM servers only provide limited traffic hosting via the API.
- imhoguy 8y agoAnyone providing service on top of OpenStreetMap can or ideally should host/render stuff on own mirror server. However for small uses I recommend utilising simple reverse proxy caching e.g. with nginx. Here is snippet of nginx config from my geo side-project: https://pastebin.com/brTQ68nw https://pastebin.com/brTQ68nw
- ascorbic 8y agoI use Carto's free tiles, which are great. I only found them when I did a project where the client had a Carto licence. I've used the free tiles (with Leaflet) for every map project I've done since.
- rmc 8y agoThere are OSM tileservers.. that's what you see when you go to https://www.openstreetmap.org https://www.openstreetmap.org. You are encouraged to host your own tiles if needed.
- Qwertie 8y agoThe main OSM org doesn't actually host any of the servers that end users use. They host a website for editors to contribute and publish data dumps. Devs providing access to OSM download the data dumps and host it on their own servers.