> just syncing the map data from osm regularly would require decent hardware
We need servers with at least 24 CPU threads and 256 GB RAM and moving the data into PostGIS, region by region takes a week or two. Plus you manually have to fix the process when it just spits out an error and aborts after 15 hours of churning.
Have you tried imposm? Your process sounds magnitudes too slow.
Re:OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
by 6487698hhhh on Saturday February 17, 2018 @10:13AM
(#16401003)
Agreed. I can load with osm2pgsql on my home PC (AMD FX 8370, 32gb ram, 1tb SSD) in a couple of days, and that's generating 78 output layers. imposm is supposed to be faster still.
> just syncing the map data from osm regularly would require decent hardware
You can get country level extracts, which can be updated every day. Nearly any server which can import OSM data is able to keep it up to date.
Even if you could make the general setup and maintenance incredibly easy somehow, just syncing the map data from osm regularly would require decent hardware: the extra cost of each dev doing this themselves just doesn't compare to using a central tile host.
On top of that, if every dev was regularly updating their own OSM data, OSM would have a lot of extra strain on their data download servers to deal with. Not sure if this could be comparable to the hardware overhead of providing a tile hosting service though.