Previous iterations of this on the vector side have either been a ton of small files(pbf) or a large file that needed a front end to serve the individual tiles (mbtiles).
At this point, you can take an OSM dump and convert it to a country level basemap in minutes on a stout machine, or hours for a continent, which you can then self host on a plain old web server with a custom style sheet.
I've made an even easier path which is to just extract the relevant tiles from a daily build: https://docs.protomaps.com/guide/getting-started
This can take seconds to minutes for small-medium areas and doesn't need a powerful computer at all. The drawbacks are that the build is only daily, and the lower-zoom tiles aren't clipped so include extra information beyond your specified area.
I'm looking at this currently for a couple of clients, and I think that for what we're doing -- we're going to wind up serving both a view and analysis version separately.
We were taking daily CSV files, turning them into vector tiles, syncing them with S3, and displaying in mapbox-gl map. The biggest cost was S3 file operations. We had to aggressively cluster to reduce our cost down and got to a point where the tiles numbered ~75,000. At the frequency we wanted to update this was costing $500/mo in S3 ops.
Now we process the files into a single PMTiles file, deploy that one file and cut the costs down to pennies.
For a map that we make public, it was incredibly enabling. You can checkout the Canadian hotspot data for all of 2023 if you're curious: https://lens.pathandfocus.com
It's essentially what the internal layers are in the base layer -- there are land use, buildings, transit, physical, and border features that are combined with a stylesheet to make the base layer map tiles.
There are some subtleties for packing the overview data for the wider zooms, and what happens when you have tiles that are too big because of number of features or metadata size -- where you can drop on density or coalesce on density.
> PMTiles is a single-file archive format for pyramids of tiled data. A PMTiles archive can be hosted on a storage platform like S3, and enables low-cost, zero-maintenance map applications.
> PMTiles is a general format for tiled data addressed by Z/X/Y coordinates. This can be cartographic basemap vector tiles, remote sensing observations, JPEG images, or more.
> PMTiles readers use HTTP Range Requests to fetch only the relevant tile or metadata inside a PMTiles archive on-demand.
> The arrangement of tiles and directories is designed to minimize the amount of overhead requests when panning and zooming.
https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/