We are constantly working on improving our services. As a result of that effort, we are announcing major infrastructure enhancements today! To make it possible, we have to change the URL structure: read instructions below.
Improved response times and caching rates
We’ve designed our new infrastructure with speed and scalability in mind. A lot of requests can be handled sooner in our pipeline than before, resulting in fewer hops and faster response times. The load balancing was improved to make sure the requests are always directed to the geographically closest and fastest available datacenter.
The cache hit rate was also significantly increased (especially for our standard tiles and maps), so there is now a much higher chance that the requested map tiles can be served from a local cache node rather than having to contact one of the datacenters.
It’s important for our customers to have precise usage statistics. This is a major point that we were trying to keep in mind and improve as much as possible. As a result, we are now able to accurately count each and every individual request to our servers.
512x512 rendered tiles
The display sizes have grown significantly in recent years and it directly corresponds with the raster tile sizes (read more about how zoomable maps work). Previously, it was a standard to use 256x256 raster tiles and you needed to load only a few images to cover the whole display size. Using the larger 512x512 tiles results in fewer requests and often faster loading times.
However, there’s a variety of different application and libraries, where the 256x256 tiles are the only possible option, so the MapTiler Cloud provides you with both tile sizes - this ensures the maximum possible compatibility. You can find the 256x256 tiles endpoint addresses on the map detail page in MapTiler Cloud administration.
New domain
Previously, the MapTiler Cloud service was called TileHosting and that’s why the URLs our customers are using in their products are beginning with “maps.tilehosting.com” (which we know might have been a little confusing). Although we plan to maintain compatibility as long as possible, it’s time for a change.
We had to change the domain (and modify URLs) to make the above-mentioned (and many future!) improvements possible.
Here is a short to-do list for you:
- Log-in to MapTiler Cloud administration and open the relevant map
- Find the new URLs with api.maptiler.com domain
- Copy & paste the code of your application and replace the old tilehosting.com links
- Make sure your code is ready for 512 tiles (e.g. by adding “tileSize: 512,” variable for Leaflet). Otherwise, you will get unreadably small labels
- NOTE! It is needed to change the whole URL, not only the domain.
Please make sure to migrate your applications before 15th June 2019! On that day, we are going to start returning the new URLs inside of all our TileJSONs, Style JSONs and XMLs. As a result of this, the map tiles inside of your applications will start to load from the new domain. It should not cause any issue unless your application is running in some controlled environment (e.g. behind a proxy with whitelisted domains).
The old domain will be turned off completely by the end of this year, so please do the migration as soon as possible.
