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Comment by aw3c2 | Hacker News Reader

Give OpenStreetMap a try. It is free and open. Just they way these things ought to be. You can set up your own geocoding server with Nominatim: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim#Reverse_Geocodi...

There is a VM to play around as well: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/AndrewBuck/diary/17698

Also there is Mapquest's API which uses this: http://open.mapquestapi.com/geocoding/

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Note: I have setup a nominatim server. Unless you have 128gb of ram and some SSD's or 15k SAS drives, be prepared to wait over 1 month. The indexes are intense and they take, literally, over a month to create if you end up swapping. To avoid swapping you need at least 128gb of ram....

That is way to pessimistic and fear mongering in a way.

There are some numbers available at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osm2pgsql/benchmarks (eg getting it into EC2 in a day for ~30USD). Even just a week would be a pessimistic estimate.

I guess if all you want is geocoding, you could exclude a lot of data before importing it. Eg landuses without names, lots of single nodes that have nothing to do with addresses, etc.

Have you set it up? I have...and I am giving you the amount of time it took to do a world import on data from January. This was on a quad core xeon 5345 with 32gb of ram and a dedicated SSD for swap, with database living on a RAID10 of 8 7200 rpm drives. In other words, the box is decent.

I am not trying to fear monger, I am just trying to say "hey, BTW unless you have a big hardware budget, you might want to just pay a third party".

I have not but looking at the numbers I linked there seems to have been something wrong with your importing.

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