[Talk-GB] [Semi-OT] affordable hosting for own tileserver?

[Phil Endecott]

Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> Am wanting to develop Freemap (coubtryside-orientated OSM site) and 
> its mobile client, OpenTrail, further but the thing that's always holding 
> me back, and forcing me to restrict it to certain areas of the UK only, 
> are the limitations of the server.

> So is anyone aware of any hosting provider which costs no more than say 
> GBP25-30 a month (am willing to pay that much, but no more as this is a 
> not-for-profit project) and would allow me to maintain Freemap and update 
> the database weekly without encountering memory issues? Rendering is not 
> such a problem (IMX) as caching can be done - it's the actual database 
> import that's the problem.

Use Amazon AWS, or some other cloud provider, where you can change the 
size of the server (or the number of machines in the cluster) dynamically.

See http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ and 
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ .  A "micro" server has about 600 MB 
of RAM and burstable (i.e. shared) CPU, and costs $0.02 / hour = about 
£10/month.  When you want to do something intensive like a database 
import, shut it down, reconfigure it as a "quadruple extra large high 
memory" machine, bring it up again, and for $2/hour (or less on the 
"spot market") you have 68 GB of RAM and 4 dedicated Xeons.  You also 
need to pay for storage and bandwidth.  As a new user you would get a 
free allowance that, I think, would cover one permanently-running micro instance.

I would avoid anything saying "unlimited".  What they means is "we're 
not telling you what the limit is".


Regards,  Phil.