[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.