> You still have to pay for the server you host it yourself on.
I mean, I guess? Can't it be presumed that if you have a web site upon which you wish to place a map, you've already got a web server set up one way or another?
> Which usually means generating the tiles from scratch rather than relying on some precached ones.
Well, yes. The way I've set it up for my client is basically that we start from a large image which will be the map at its maximum "zoom in level" and run a script which scales the map 50% smaller, dices the image into 256x256 tiles, and saves those tiles with a pre-defined naming scheme (something like Xcoord_Ycoord_Zoomlevel.png - I can't recall the details), then scales the original map by 25%, creates tiles from that, and repeats until the entire map can fit into four tiles (512x512). It's not terribly difficult stuff for a reasonably capable developer to do, though working with the larger maps can eat up a lot of RAM on the system we run this script on.
I mean, I guess? Can't it be presumed that if you have a web site upon which you wish to place a map, you've already got a web server set up one way or another?
> Which usually means generating the tiles from scratch rather than relying on some precached ones.
Well, yes. The way I've set it up for my client is basically that we start from a large image which will be the map at its maximum "zoom in level" and run a script which scales the map 50% smaller, dices the image into 256x256 tiles, and saves those tiles with a pre-defined naming scheme (something like Xcoord_Ycoord_Zoomlevel.png - I can't recall the details), then scales the original map by 25%, creates tiles from that, and repeats until the entire map can fit into four tiles (512x512). It's not terribly difficult stuff for a reasonably capable developer to do, though working with the larger maps can eat up a lot of RAM on the system we run this script on.