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Comment by hyperknot | Hacker News Reader

My main project is MapHub, it gives me my income. It's not an income like you'd get in a FAANG job, but still, I'm running it for making a living.

For MapHub to work, I had to invest in my own tile server infrastructure: there is no way I could have made MapHub financially profitable with a 3rd party tile provider. So I kept iterating and iterating on the tile server infrastructure and after 9 years I arrived at a state which was worth open-sourcing.

I'm happy if this project gets to the point from sponsorship where my hosting bill is covered ($175 per month), but it doesn't have to be financially successful on its own.

I'll keep working on it because it's part of my main business, not because I beg for donations.

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Have you been running this for long? I've looked for something in this space for the last couple of years but only came across MapTiler /AGOL and a few others, that were either pretty expensive (for small datasets) or restrictive functionality.

If so I'd say you need to work on the SEO and findability side.

I've literally just launched it.

As long as it stays with one server that’s fine. But what do you do in the hypothetical scenario that Facebook decides to use your tile server?

Nginx is fast, but I think that’s asking too much of it.

Of course that problem hasn’t happened yet, but it’s what I’d be worried about.

I benchmarked and nginx can host 30 Gbps on cold cache, on actual real world load. (I played back a log of 1 million real world requests).

So using nginx in a 1 Gbps server is definitely not asking too much of it, or I might not have understood your comment clearly.

Why would Facebook decide to use my tile server? When a company's business depends on having reliable map tiles, they either self host or have an Enterprise deal with Mapbox, etc.

I just used it as an example of some large service. The point is that I expect someone will take advantage.

It’s interesting to know that the limiting factor is bandwidth and not nginx/disk speed though. I’ll admit I don’t see 30Gbit of map tiles happening any time soon.

You are right in that I'd be afraid if this was hosted on AWS or on Cloudflare Workers. This whole idea is only possible because there are some hosts like Hetzner, which offer flat rate bandwidth.

I have actually worked on Facebook's mapping infrastructure. They moved away from Google Maps and Mapbox because they wanted maximum control.

The specific example you give is not going to happen.

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