Serving Tiles – Switch2OSM

Tiles from a third-party provider are the simplest way to make the switch to OpenStreetMap, and offer clarity of cost. However, if you’d like to take full control of your destiny, you can render and serve your own tiles. This section explains how.

Both generating and serving tiles incur significant hardware requirements, especially if you need global coverage and regular updates.

Serving your own maps is a fairly intensive task. Depending on the size of the area you’re interested in serving and the traffic you expect the system requirements will vary. In general, requirements will range from 10-20GB of storage, 4GB of memory, and a modern dual-core processor for a city-sized region to 1TB of fast storage, 24GB of memory, and a quad-core processor for the entire planet.

We would recommend that you begin with extracts of OpenStreetMap data – for example, a city, county or small country – rather than spending a week importing the whole world (planet.osm) and then having to restart because of a configuration mistake! You can download extracts from:

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