Simple and inexpensive way to integrate an interactive map into a website
I once had to implement an interactive map for a website, which had to display dynamical weather data. As it was a rather small project without the access to expensive resources, it needed to be relatively fair priced. Is there an easy and inexpensive method to implement such a project?
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An interactive map requires to save a lot of vector tiles for each zoom level and location. These tiles include, for example, information about streets or the terrain. As these vector tiles are available as open-source version I first planned to host them on my own server. However, due to the size of these tiles (hundreds of gigabytes), this would have required a lot of resources and computing power and exceeds the budget of any small project.
As I was looking for alternatives, I found several map services, which host these tiles and offer them over their API. I finally chose Mapbox, since it allows 50,000 free map loads per month, which is perfect for smaller/hobby projects. Furthermore, it offers a lot of additional features (e.g. dynamical data display, tooltips), which I was able to make use of.
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I think that the presented solution for the problem sounded very promising. If I had to solve the same problem, I would take a look at this solution because it does not only actually solve the problem, but also provides a cheap version (in terms of money and memory) to integrate an interactive map in one's web application.