We've been self-hosting protomaps (aka pmtiles) for several years. The only thing you need server-side is a web server that can serve static files and supports range requests (so anything works; I've tried caddy and nginx). The map is one large file, it's easy to share it between however many servers you need.

https://docs.protomaps.com/guide/getting-started

Downsides? Nothing major that I can think of. You have to add another client-side dependency (support for their custom protocol); the library is pretty small and easy to audit.

Editing map styles is slightly more difficult because generic maplibre styles won't work with it: they add a bit of custom sauce on top. IIRC this editor worked fine, you can import one of protomaps styles and base your work off it:

https://maputnik.github.io/editor

That's probably it.

We use mod_tile+renderd: https://github.com/openstreetmap/mod_tile

In short: We have a script that builds a pbf of the area we are interested in (Colorado, USA) from OSM, then set up a openstreetmap-tile-server container with that data, bring in our styles, and then set up renderd.

Have used pmtiles to self-host a “find your nearest store” map, which only needed to cover Australia. Created two sources: (1) a low-detail worldwide map to fill out the view (about 50 MB), and (2) a medium-to-high detail source for Australia only, up to zoom level 15 (about 900 MB). In this case, there’s no need for up-to-date maps, so we were able to upload these two files to S3 and forget about them. Works great!

I had to go down this path for a print-on-demand book project. If you need high-DPI assets for physical print the commercial static map APIs are prohibitively expensive or restrict usage rights for resale. Self-hosting was basically the only way to generate 300dpi rasters at scale without destroying the margins.

I do. The pros are hosting own data and have total control over stack and cloud hosting. The cons are having to code your own stack and do cloud management. I use PostGis to storage and serve vector tiles. And I use a simple backend with AWS S3 to store and serve raster data (GeoTiff COG).