Setting up tile servers is one of Geofabrik's main areas of business. We pride ourselves in adjusting the server setup to precisely match the client's needs. No two tile servers are completely the same becuase our clients use them for different things. We'll present one sample tile server that we have set up.
The tile server used by the Copenhagen cycling web site I bike Cph has been set up by Geofabrik, and adapted to the resources available on the virtualised cloud.dk architecture. The server covers Denmark and Southern Sweden on medium zoom levels, and Copenhagen only on the high zoom levels. Tiles are updates every night. During the project development, a freely available map style was used ("solar" by Mike Migurski); later, the client had a design agency make a custom style for the project.
Every Geofabrik tile server setup is accompanied by a detailed documentation that doesn't just explain how to operate and maintain the tile server, but also contains all the steps that were executed to install the server. The document will enable the client to repeat the setup on further machines if desired, or re-install the tile server should it become necessary.
No tile server installation is complete without a suitable update mechanism, as OSM data changes all the time. New data is added, and errors are corrected. Every day, more than a million changes are made to the database (see statistics on the OpenStreetMap wiki). Our tile server clients benefit from this editing activity. There are various methods to keep data on a tile server updated, and we'll select and implement the best method for the use case at hand.
Number of Nodes added each day (from OSM Wiki)
