Guidance on self-hosting & scalable setup for production use #1009

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.