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I'm the founder of a startup building a geography based social networking mobile application in which many users basically post things on a map. We are researching the best and ideally most affordable way to create and host an app like this where a lot of people will be viewing a map on their phones. OpenStreetMaps and Leaflet seems like a great answer to our need, but we are trying to figure out if the combination of the two would work as a substitute to something like GoogleMaps or MapBox, which are expensive for large amounts of users. To use Leaflet and OSM, I figure I'm going to have to host the OSM data somewhere, and I was wondering what the best way to do this is. I'm new to OpenStreetMap, but intuition tells me that even a generous project like OSM can't just provide that much data traffic for free-that we will have to find a way to host it. Is my intuition right? What is the best way to use Leaflet with OpenStreetMap in a mobile application with thousands and eventually millions of map-tile requests a day? |
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Welcome to the OSM world! :-) Great that you are considering this step. Mapbox mostly (only?) uses OSM data, by the way. Our documentation wiki will be helpful for you: see e.g. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Deploying_your_own_Slippy_Map or have a look at other mobile apps (many open source). The usual process is to create map images ("tiles") of our raw data which are displayed by some toolkit like leaflet. Yes, you are right, we are running only on donations and cannot handle much traffic to our tile servers. But, as described in the last link, you can download the raw data and make and host your own map tiles, or pay some company for the usage (likely much cheaper – and more flexible – than google). 3
www.switch2osm.org has instructions about setting up your own tile server. A couple million tiles a day can be delivered from a single server, but you may want to consider having several, for availability. Free help is available on this help system, and some professional consultants are listed on our wiki page.
(05 Apr '16, 21:39)
Frederik Ramm ♦
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Leaflet is a javascript library to display a slippymap, and Mapbox users often use leaflet too. I encourage you to try runing your own tile server, but also check the total cost of doing so. The price of the Mapbox service might seem much more reasonable once you know what build-your-own entails. For some details about using the tiles from openstreetmap.org, see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy .
(06 Apr '16, 10:50)
Vincent de P... ♦
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what is "meteor.js"? which you've added as tag...
If you have a more specific question regarding Leaflet in a mobile application, please ask as a new question with all the other general stuff stripped.