Guidance on self-hosting & scalable setup for production use

[Hari-Bonda]

Hello team 👋

I’m really excited to explore and use this repository. I’m fairly new to the development world and currently learning through “vibe coding,” but I’m serious about taking this project to a production level.

My use case involves 10+ million requests per year, so I’m trying to be mindful of long-term scalability and cost. Because of this, I’d prefer not to use Photon in production.

I’m exploring the possibility of self-hosting and wanted to ask for your guidance:

Is self-hosting a recommended approach for this project?

I don’t need the full global dataset — only top cities around the world. Is there a lightweight or recommended way to handle this using OpenStreetMap data?

Are there any best practices or tooling you’d suggest for this kind of setup?

I’m also a big fan of Cloudflare, especially Workers and their database offerings. If there’s any Cloudflare-based architecture or service that would work well for this use case, I’d love to hear your recommendations.

Thanks a lot for building and maintaining this project — really appreciate the work you’re doing here 🙏
Looking forward to your suggestions and guidance.

[lonvia]

Self-hosting is super simple. We provide read-made database dumps. So any hosting arrangement that gives you a Linux environment will do. There are even some docker-based setups around, if that better fits the setup. I don't know about Cloudflare.

If you want to have a more light-weight database, then you can use the JSON dumps and filter out the data you need.

With your load, it might also be worth exploring commercial setups especially if your experience in system administration and webhosting is limited. They might be cheaper than spending your own time on a setup. A couple are listed in our wiki.