Map files hosting and distribution
Map hosting and bandwidth is a key part of the application. Especially bandwidth costs are something to be careful. Also, after reading #77, I've thought on a couple suggestions to ease it:
- Use some sort of CDN to deal with bandwidth scaling. I'm thinking on Cloudflare free plan, which has no bandwidth limit, but with a per file limit of 512mb. I haven't tried myself, but looks like it might work.
- Use torrent for map distribution: OSM already publishes their weekly world file via torrent at https://osm.cquest.org/torrents/planet-latest.osm.pbf.torrent. This distribution method has the advantage of being far more easier to contribute to, since deploying a torrent sever is far easier than deploying a typical http/ftp mirror. In fact, as a way to give back to OSM, I'm contributing my own bandwidth by just keeping the map file up to date on a few home and small VPS servers, without incurring in extra costs (each server uploads less than 10gb a week of the 52gb planet file).
I hope this helps in improving distribution a bit and opens discussion and further proposals on the issue.