[perching_aix]

Haven't worked with Cloudflare yet first hand, and I'm not familiar with web map tech. But if the site really is pretty much just serving lots of static files, why is Hetzner in the loop? Wouldn't fully migrating to Cloudflare Pages be possible?

[internetter]

The tiles need to be rendered. Yes frequent tiles can be cached but you already have a cache… it’s Cloudflare. Theoretically you could port the tileserver to Cloudflare pages but then you’d need to… port it… and it probably wouldn’t be cheaper

[hyperknot]

They are actually static files. There is just too many of them, about 300 million. You cannot put that in Pages.

[jonathanlydall]

Is CloudFlare’s R2 an option for you?

[piperswe]

That, or enabling Cache Reserve to automatically have a global cache in R2 instead of only caching on the PoP-level

(disclaimer/source: I am a CF employee)

[hoppp]

It would cost a lot. Hetzner is hardware and them you can hammer it, free bandwidth. You get a very good server for cheap.

cloudflare would be pay per request, a hefty sum if ddos happens

[perching_aix]

Did a quick cost calc (with the help of gpt5, so might be wrong) when I read their comment about Pages not being suitable for this many files.

They say they're receiving $500/mo in donos and that it's currently just enough to cover their infra costs. Given 300 million 70 KB files, R2 + high cache hit ratio would work out to about $300 in storage-months + request costs, or $600/mo with Cache Reserve and then they'd always hit cache if I understand the project right: meaning the costs shouldn't blow up beyond that, and that request count would essentially just not matter.

[hoppp]

Yea but the cost is not a fixed monthly sum and things can go wrong as we can see from the blog post. An accident could bankrupt the dev.

A dedicated server will always cost the same so you always know how much you pay.

It will cost 40 Euro/month to have 6 cores/12 threads,64gb of ram and 1Tb of ssd.

Dirt cheap compared to any other alternative

[cuu508]

Factor in that you also need resources to generate and upload the tiles weekly.

[ohdeargodno]

Noone renders tiles on servers anymore. The vast majority of services have moved on to sending out vector tiles.

[perching_aix]

Oh interesting, okay. For some reason I had the impression that the tiles were static and rendered offline.