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Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

openfreemap.org

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Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#61

Post by lipitic »

This is amazing!

Last year I made a website for my gf where I had to build a custom map of Paris, and I struggled a lot trying to figure out how to actually make a map from scratch while avoiding paid services like mapbox.

I finally managed to hack something up using openstreetmap data, then some manual work in QGIS to customize the look, and voila - I had a bunch of folders filled with raster tiles.

This site is deployed for free on Netlify and is basically just a React SPA, a public folder with tiles, and I give the tile URL template to the OpenLayers lib to display it all nicely on the screen. Simple and it works!

I always wanted to improve the map a bit by using vector tiles as I think it looks nicer, but I thought you need a dedicated server for that? (unless I'm mistaken, correct me if I'm wrong)

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#63

Post by jack_riminton »

hyperknot wrote: post #8
jack_riminton wrote: post #3

I'm relatively new to mapping, can you explain the difference between running Leaflet and a free map tiling provider compared to your product?

As far as I know, there are no "Free Map Tiling provider"-s. This project aims to be exactly one. You can use it with Leaflet using the https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-leaflet plugin.

Interesting thanks, I've used map tilers in the past without paying, maybe I just never came up against any rate limiting

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#64

Post by ryandrake »

hyperknot wrote: post #27
noahjk wrote: post #2

This is neat! After the huge price increase a couple years ago with GMaps, it looks like you’ve come up with a creative way to offer much of the same functionality for most users. It’s unfortunate to still see small business sites to this day with error messages on their map widgets because of the API change from Google. I know nothing about mapping, but I’ve always had a dream of making a private neighborhood map wh…

Thanks! I don't know where you'd be able to get property boundaries, I guess it's usually not open-source / public data? Probably depends on the country / city.

In the USA, parcel outlines are commonly handled at the county level. You can often do a search for “[your county] GIS maps” and find their ArcGIS map of the county property lines with metadata about who owns what. Who knows if any of them are willing to share the data, but that’s where it lives.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#65

Post by linsomniac »

hyperknot wrote: post #14
nathancahill wrote: post #7

Would be interested in seeing a cost bar vs donations bar on the website.

Currently I'm paying for 3 dedicated servers at Hetzner and getting total donations of $11 USD per month. Making this automatic might not be easy, but I might do it one day, it might help with the donations.

>getting total donations of $11

That total has gone up. :-)

Not currently having any plans of using openfreemap, but I like the cut of your jib. I'm currently in the process of generating aerial tiles for Colorado, and updating 2 of our map tile sets (bitmap tiles, Here and OpenStreetMap), but at some point we should switch to vector tiles. When we do I'll try to get a business sponsorship going, but it is nearly impossible for me to get the company to pay for sponsorship. :-(

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#66

Post by xd1936 »

jsilence wrote: post #49

Anybody know of a similar service for weather information?

US-only, I've had good luck with the NWS JSON API[1]. Someone posted a while ago on here[2] about taking in various NWS models and creating "Pirate Weather"[3], a drop-in replacement for Dark Sky.

1. https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34329988

3. https://pirateweather.net/

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#67

Post by hyperknot »

bauruine wrote: post #58
hyperknot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Protomaps is a really full stack map platform, they are competing with kind of like 3-4 projects at once: - There is the Protomaps schema. It's competing with OpenMapTiles and Shortbread ( https://shortbread-tiles.org/ ) - There is the Protomaps file format. It's competing with MBTiles and say Btrfs images in OpenFreeMap. - There is the Protomaps styles. It's competing with OSM Liberty and OSM Bright styles ( http…

I did 150TB+ on a 40 Euro Hetzner server for years without any issue and also did the same amount in a similar price range on multiple different providers. The cloud and CDNs charge a huge markup.

That's great to know! I know of one story where someone got terminated on Hetzner because of the bandwidth but it turned out he was also running a Tor node.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#69

Post by bdon »

hyperknot wrote: post #21
zarazas wrote: post #12

I would be interested in the differences between this and protomaps

I'll write a detailed blog post for that, definitely. Basically Protomaps / PMTiles allows you to do this serverless, but it has it's downsides. There are two ways to use PMTiles with Cloudflare: - Putting the file in a public bucket and use HTTP range requests. - Deploy a worker to access it. For the range request version, you can test PMTiles here: https://pmtiles.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdata.source.coop%2Fpro... . I…

I'm the developer of Protomaps, to summarize:

The latency you see on https://pmtiles.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdata.source.coop%2Fpro... is representative of how PMTiles works on AWS S3, coming from the us-west-2 region. It will be reasonable to load for those in the western US and likely quite slow from Europe or Oceania.

If you want to make a direct comparison of Protomaps to OpenFreeMap, you need to compare serving OpenFreemap with NGINX from btrfs on disk, to running `pmtiles serve` on a `.pmtiles` file on disk, as described here: https://docs.protomaps.com/deploy/server

The OpenFreeMap page for me (in Taiwan) takes 1-2 seconds per tile, which is more than double the load tile for the PMTiles in us-west-2 example linked above.

The best solution to get latency competitive with commercial providers, for a global audience, is to cache tiles at CDN edge locations. I describe automated ways to do that with Cloudflare Workers and AWS Lambda + Cloudfront here:

https://docs.protomaps.com/deploy/cloudflare https://docs.protomaps.com/deploy/aws

I'm also experimenting with http://tigrisdata.com which lets you geo-distribute a static storage bucket like in this example: https://pmtiles.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdemo-bucket.protomaps....

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