While we do get data from OSM, we run our own tile server
called
Kartotherian, mainly for the following
reasons:
- OSM's infrastructure is fragile
and has cache challenges
- Their datacenter is in London,
which means latency becomes an issue
- OSM's rendering stack can't
scale horizontally well enough to be sure they could
handle our load
- Their map style is not mobile
friendly
- We require multilingual and
vector tiles, which their stack can't do (currently)
- We wanted to provide nicer map
styling in general