Web mapping

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.