Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs

Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by mabbo on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:09AM (#18390614)

> Thanks to Google for giving us free Maps for some years

This attitude is something I truly appreciate. So often posts like these are angry rants about 'how dare they do this to me'. You seem to presume good intentions, which should be the default reaction in life.

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by ed_balls on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:28AM (#18390747)

One could argue that Google used search revenue for predatory pricing, which breaks anti-trust laws, to subsidise Maps and other services in order to build a monopoly.

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by rejschaap on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:53AM (#18390929)

It seemed a bit passive aggressive to me, but maybe I'm reading into it too much.

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by _Codemonkeyism on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @09:34AM (#18391303)

Sorry English isn't my native tongue, didn't intend it to be passive aggressive but meant it.

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by magduf on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @10:24AM (#18391801)

It kinda reminds me of someone thanking a cocaine dealer for giving them some free hits.

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by aikah on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:17AM (#18390675)

https://web.archive.org/web/20181102141738/https://www.event...

> we're haven't been slashdotted for a long time, sorry!

MapExample.png file is 1.1MB, it shouldn't be higher than 100KB given how little detail that picture has. Also 4.1MB of css for a page that has barely any styling?

Whatever you are doing you might be losing potential customers because they are unable to access that page through HN, because of poor optimization and scaling.

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by _Codemonkeyism on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:36AM (#18390819)

We use a CDN which reduces image size for our main site, not the blog though[0]. CSS is usually what the theme brings with it, but you're right of course.

[0] something on my agenda

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by 255kb on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:16AM (#18390663)

What I don't understand is that you basically use an embedded map with a marker. But this remains free under the new pricing (I am using it on some of my projects) both on mobile and desktop, see there: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/embed/usage... https://mapsplatformtransition.withgoogle.com/calculator

So what were you paying for?

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by _Codemonkeyism on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:30AM (#18390763)

My understanding this works only for addresses and places, many of our customers want to move the marker around because default mapping doesn't reflect the location of their venue (ship, museum entry, backyard,...).

Will add this clarification and your links to the article if site works again though, thanks.

[Also currently not online are maps with search results, we removed to cut costs but will add back again]

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by dpq on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:13AM (#18390650)

Hi, why not set up Cloudflare to handle the traffic? Sorry if this sounds off topic.

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by _Codemonkeyism on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:16AM (#18390668)

Oh this isn't that easy for GDPR reasons ;-) Also this is just the blog, I don't to play with DNS and risk site problems for our blog. But I've thought about it, thanks!

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by mrunkel on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:42AM (#18390869)

could you expand on that? What exactly is preventing you from proxying your blog through cloudflare?

You're not processing customer data there are you?

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by _Codemonkeyism on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:54AM (#18390939)

No Cloudflare specialist, isn't Cloudflare depending on DNS mappings sending all domain traffic through Cloudflare? How would we send only www.eventsofa.de/blog through Cloudflare?

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by matt4077 on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @09:34AM (#18391299)

You could switch to blog.eventsofa.de.

That wouldn't solve today's traffic spike, and there are probably some lower-hanging fruits that should at the very least keep the site online. Anything sold in the last five years with an ethernet port should easily be able to handle a static site even during rare spikes in traffic.

But the Cloudflare DNS configuration isn't something to be scared of: I used to feel similarly nervous when fiddling around with DNS, but haven't had a single problem configuring 20+ sites with Cloudflare. (I would, however, be slightly more nervous about google's reaction to the move to a subdomain this would require.)

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by _Codemonkeyism on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @11:36AM (#18392508)

Thanks for the long feedback, we have a long tail of content in the blog so we won't migrate to a subdomain. Google says no problem, but we had SEO problems in the past when migrating subdomains although everything done by the book with redirects.

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by namibj on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @09:43AM (#18391364)

Doesn't work, but the assumption was on that most blogs have a separate subdomain, so that the subdomain could be redirected to cloudflare. That said, if you can't handle a mild HN attack, you should be weary of your DDoS resistance, and consider ways to do more caching in front. It's a lot easier to just tank DDoS traffic than to reject connections based on some guessed measure of whether they are legitimate or evil, and in this case here they are legitimate, so these filters wouldn't work anyway.

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by _Codemonkeyism on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @11:34AM (#18392493)

Thanks for the feedback, but we do handle our blog different than the rest of our platform, it's low specced and hosted differently, we do not consider the blog essential to our service.

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by gopi_ar on Wednesday November 07, 2018 @02:03AM (#18397536)

Nice post! Seeing that you integrating with 2 different services, I'm wondering if you looked at other, more integrated, options? Mapbox, HERE and LocationIQ (shameless plug) are options that offer geocoding and maps.

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by donalhunt on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:38AM (#18390842)

Any plans to expand to other countries? Would love to see something like this in Ireland.

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by _Codemonkeyism on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @09:15AM (#18391114)

Event venue market place? I already have stock images for Ireland and Irish cities, but it's not the top spot sadly for expansion (Though I would love to go there!)

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Re:Migrating away from Google Maps and cutting costs by rashomon on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:11AM (#18390631)

Any way you could copy the text in here or are there more relevant graphics?

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