[Photon] Photon API availability

[Sarah Hoffmann]

Hi,

On Wed, Jun 28, 2023 at 08:36:41AM +0000, Cristian Schuszter wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> I'm writing to you as a very happy user of the Photon API. We have a service that uses it quite reliably for the past 2 years, but from time to time it seems to experience downtimes. (talking about https://photon.komoot.io/ )

The public API is explicitly for demo and testing purposes only. We do
not give any guarantees regarding availability.

The recent problems with the API are twofold: on one side, OSM data is simply
starting to be too large for the server. This might be something we can
improve. On the other side there are simply too many people who
thoughtlessly overuse the service. This is a free service which is
currently powered by one machine. That's all. Sending 20 requests/s
is simply inconsiderate. So after many years of trusting users to do the
right thing, it may be finally time to put server-side restrictions on
the number of requests, especially on requests coming from scripts.

> 
> Could you let me know if there's any dashboard we can check about planned interventions or downtime?
> 
> We were thinking of self-hosting it, but it all depends on what you would suggest me to do.

Yes, please self-host. We make it really easy to do so by providing
ready-to-use dumps for the planet and for each country. Quick
instructions are available in this post:
https://nominatim.org/2020/10/21/photon-country-extracts.html

There are some additional steps needed for a full deployment (setting up
nginx etc.) which are currently not documented. If somebody wants to
write up full instructions for deployment, I'd be happy to see them
added to the official photon repo (as DEPLOY.md).

Sarah