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You will pretty much always have to pay for the tileserver service though. The main benefit I saw was that you could trivially switch to any other tile service

You will pretty much always have to pay for the tileserver service though. The main benefit I saw was that you could trivially switch to any other tile service without being tied in to a particular one like if you used the google maps library.

deleted 5y ago
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smelendez 5y ago
Depending on the use case, you may be able to host tiles on any web host/cdn
- SilverRed 5y ago
  You still have to pay for the server you host it yourself on. Which usually means generating the tiles from scratch rather than relying on some precached ones. The prices for something like mapbox are not outrageous for what they provide.
  - aendruk 5y ago
    Here’s an example of statically hosting map tiles on GitHub Pages: https://seagl.org/maps/2019 https://seagl.org/maps/2019 Source: https://github.com/SeaGL/seagl.github.io/pull/148 https://github.com/SeaGL/seagl.github.io/pull/148
  - Cyberdog 5y ago
    > You still have to pay for the server you host it yourself on. I mean, I guess? Can't it be presumed that if you have a web site upon which you wish to place a map, you've already got a web server set up one way or another? > Which usually means generating the tiles from scratch rather than relying on some precached ones. Well, yes. The way I've set it up for my client is basically that we start from a large image which will be the map at its maximum "zoom in level" and run a script which scales the map 50% smaller, dices the image into 256x256 tiles, and saves those tiles with a pre-defined naming scheme (something like Xcoord_Ycoord_Zoomlevel.png - I can't recall the details), then scales the original map by 25%, creates tiles from that, and repeats until the entire map can fit into four tiles (512x512). It's not terribly difficult stuff for a reasonably capable developer to do, though working with the larger maps can eat up a lot of RAM on the system we run this script on.
vgeek 5y ago
If you want to roll your own tiles, you get tons of flexibility with your own tileserver, which is great if you want to change naming rules/styles/etc.. It is a rabbit hole to go down, since mapping is inherently fun. http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/12/37.7706/-122.3782 http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/12/37.7706/-122.3782 - they have free tile servers (obviously, donate if you use them) that are relatively styled. They don't get updated and may not be 100%, but for small scale uses, they are good enough versus risking going over the free tiers at Mapbox or getting stuck in the Google ecosystem.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

smelendez 5y ago

Depending on the use case, you may be able to host tiles on any web host/cdn

SilverRed 5y ago
You still have to pay for the server you host it yourself on. Which usually means generating the tiles from scratch rather than relying on some precached ones. The prices for something like mapbox are not outrageous for what they provide.
- aendruk 5y ago
  Here’s an example of statically hosting map tiles on GitHub Pages: https://seagl.org/maps/2019 https://seagl.org/maps/2019 Source: https://github.com/SeaGL/seagl.github.io/pull/148 https://github.com/SeaGL/seagl.github.io/pull/148
- Cyberdog 5y ago
  > You still have to pay for the server you host it yourself on. I mean, I guess? Can't it be presumed that if you have a web site upon which you wish to place a map, you've already got a web server set up one way or another? > Which usually means generating the tiles from scratch rather than relying on some precached ones. Well, yes. The way I've set it up for my client is basically that we start from a large image which will be the map at its maximum "zoom in level" and run a script which scales the map 50% smaller, dices the image into 256x256 tiles, and saves those tiles with a pre-defined naming scheme (something like Xcoord_Ycoord_Zoomlevel.png - I can't recall the details), then scales the original map by 25%, creates tiles from that, and repeats until the entire map can fit into four tiles (512x512). It's not terribly difficult stuff for a reasonably capable developer to do, though working with the larger maps can eat up a lot of RAM on the system we run this script on.

vgeek 5y ago

If you want to roll your own tiles, you get tons of flexibility with your own tileserver, which is great if you want to change naming rules/styles/etc.. It is a rabbit hole to go down, since mapping is inherently fun. http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/12/37.7706/-122.3782 http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/12/37.7706/-122.3782 - they have free tile servers (obviously, donate if you use them) that are relatively styled. They don't get updated and may not be 100%, but for small scale uses, they are good enough versus risking going over the free tiers at Mapbox or getting stuck in the Google ecosystem.