[jerluc]

I'm surprised they didn't consider hosting their own vector tile server, instead of painstakingly rasterizing their entire dataset and optimizing it over and over to fit into the Mapbox data caps.

My company recently hit the need for maps showing several of our own proprietary layers at various zoom layers, and considering how much of the data is already in GeoJSON, converting that to the Mapbox Vector Tile binary format (MVT) was a breeze to implement on our own servers, compared to rasterizing all of the layers and re-rendering whenever any part of our datatset changes.

[dylrich]

I'm surprised about this as well. Even if they didn't want the overhead of running their own tile server, one of the best parts of the MVT format in my mind is that one-off tilesets like this layer can trivially be thrown into S3 and served extremely cheaply as well. That removes a ton of the effort they put into circumventing MapBox's limitations and is cheaper to host.

[Brakenshire]

And presumably be cached through a service worker, which might be very useful.