[Tilecache] wms-c hosting

[James McManus]

Using your standard commercial web host for serving WMS tiles is like 
trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Media temple looks more 
promising. Conceptually, I was thinking about doing the same thing your 
described below. Render the tiles on my machine, using 
tilecache_seed.py, and then uploading them to a sever with better band 
width. However, I've not worked through the technical details, so thanks 
for the OpenStreetMap que.

Jim
Beau Gunderson wrote:
> Oops, sorry for not replying to the list! I always manage to forget 
> that that isn't the default in gmail.
>
> I think there may very well be a market for a cooperative venture in 
> terms of WMS data-serving. If enough people have a need to display 
> data through WMS then it become economical pretty quickly, though 
> you'd have to calculate out the bandwidth usage in advance to avoid 
> overage charges.
>
> Right now I have my own server though I was looking at Media Temple to 
> see if I could use it to gain a little more speed as my current server 
> is shared.
>
> The only problem I see is that if you use a less expensive server it 
> probably won't support either SSH access or serving Python 
> scripts--which is what you'd want for TileCache. The way around that 
> might be to pre-render everything to a directory structure and then 
> upload that to a host, and then write an adapter for OpenLayers to 
> create URLs based on the directory structure instead of calls to a WMS 
> compliant script. I think OpenStreetMap has code to do that, from what 
> I remember offhand.
>
> On Feb 2, 2008 7:20 PM, James McManus <jmpmcmanus at yahoo.com 
> <mailto:jmpmcmanus at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
>     Beau,
>
>     Thanks for the information I will check it out. Write now $20/mo
>     is more
>     than I was thinking of paying. But I may use it in the future, if I am
>     successful. I'm also looking at CoralCDN, although I've read that
>     it may
>     have high latency.  I have my own server, but want to find ways of
>     increasing its performance and make it more reliable, in case of
>     increase use or unexpected outages. I'm also not sure if I want to get
>     into the server business.  It's nice having one to experiment
>     with, but
>     I would prefere not having to maintain one for costumers.
>
>     Part of my business plan is to market maps to costumers who have a
>     need
>     for specialized maps, but are using a Web host instead of having their
>     own server.  Marketing maps to them would be more difficult if I
>     have to
>     set up a lot of specialized software on there website. Therefore, my
>     plan is to just set up an Openlayers web page on their site, and to
>     serve the tiles from another location.
>
>     I'm thinking there are other people with similar business concepts, so
>     there may be a need for a service that specializes in serving WMS
>     files,
>     and other services such as WFS, for small businesses. One idea
>     would be
>     to start a WMS Coop, where small businesses could store and serve
>     there
>     tiles. It could also be a clearinghouse for WMS data. Is such a
>     concept
>     be tossed around in the WMS community, or am I out in left field?
>
>     Jim
>     Beau Gunderson wrote:
>     > Media Temple provides cheapish ($20/mo) hosting that you can access
>     > via SSH; it's Linux-based. Optimized for MySQL and Ruby, though I
>     > think Python will work as well (so you could run something like
>     > TileCache... Not sure about MapServer).
>     >
>     > Does that meet your definition of inexpensive?
>     >
>     >
>     > Beau
>     >
>     > On Feb 1, 2008 1:07 PM, James McManus <jmpmcmanus at yahoo.com
>     <mailto:jmpmcmanus at yahoo.com>
>     > <mailto:jmpmcmanus at yahoo.com <mailto:jmpmcmanus at yahoo.com>>> wrote:
>     >
>     >     Hi - I'm looking for a free, or inexpensive, web host that
>     would allow
>     >     me to store tiled maps, and access them using WMS from other
>     >     sites. I've
>     >     found plenty of free web host, but they all seem to
>     discourage using
>     >     their sites to store image files, explicitly for linking to
>     other
>     >     sites.
>     >     Am I reading to much into their requirement? Are there sites
>     set up to
>     >     server the WMS-C community?
>     >
>     >     Thanks
>     >     Jim
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