Best Places to Host Your GIS Data Online: A 2025 Review
- Anvita Shrivastava
- Nov 4
- 4 min read
In today's world of geospatial data, having Geographic Information System (GIS) data and content outdoors is no longer a luxury; it is a necessity. Whether you are working with large raster surveys or vector layers or even LiDAR point clouds or interactive services, you need a technology platform that can deliver scalable, interoperable and secure data, and is easy to integrate into a web-based system. As part of the review for 2025, we will go through the important technical criteria for GIS data hosting.
What to Look For in a GIS Data Hosting Platform
When considering the online hosting of your GIS data service in 2025, there will be the following technical considerations:
Scalability & storage-architecture
Supporting large raster datasets (e.g., high-resolution orthomosaics, multispectral imagery) and dense point-cloud/DSM/DTM layers.
Elastic (cloud-native) storage & compute to be able to scale in times of increasing data volume.
Optimised delivery (e.g., tiling, streaming vector tiles and on-the-fly reprojection) to mitigate latency to end-users.
Interoperability and Formats
It supports open standards, for instance, OGC WMS (Web Map Service), WFS (Web Feature Service), WTS (Web Tile Service), and vector tile APIs.
It supports geospatial formats, including GeoTIFF, MrSID, LAZ/LAZ, LAS, SHP, GeoJSON, and FlatGeobuf.
Reprojection on the fly (e.g., to EPSG:3857, EPSG:4326) and dataset provenance metadata management.
Performance and Global Delivery
Delivery of tiled data using edge/cached for a global audience.
High IOPS storage and streaming of large datasets (such as LiDAR tiles)
GPU/compute support if hosting is to leverage raster analysis or machine learning inference workflows.
Security, compliance, and collaboration
Access management: enforced permissions based on roles, SSO/SAML access controls, and OAuth.
Governance: logs of activity, version control of datasets, and backup/restore of datasets.
Regulatory compliance: GDPR, CCPA, if you're hosting sensitive spatial data.
Collaboration: collaborative workspaces, collaborative datasets, public/private preview ports.
Integration & APIs
Robust, reliable REST APIs / WebSockets for ingestion, querying, and streaming of spatial data.
SDKs and libraries (like Python, JavaScript, etc) to integrate into GIS pipelines or analytic modules.
Support for workflows from ingestion → processing/analysis → publication.
Analytics: host not only raw storage but run geospatial algorithms (raster classification, feature extraction, change detection).
Cost model and licensing
Clear cost models (provisions for storage, compute, and egress).
Licencing terms that allow for sharing / integrations (particularly for organizations making data open).
A flexible cost model for small projects and enterprise-scale alike.
Top Platforms for Hosting GIS Data in 2025
GeoWGS84.ai is a new platform focused on geospatial intelligence in the cloud and an online raster/AI workflow.
Why it stands out:
Their platform has features for "cloud-based GeoAI solutions for spatial analysis and predictive modelling."
They advertise "online annotation and visualization tools for geospatial data," and "large geospatial datasets, such as LiDAR, are analysed ... to support improved decision-making."
This represents not only hosting, but a built-in processing capability, and a differentiator, especially if you are not simply looking to store your data, but to gain insights.
Good for organizations that relied on large raster/remote-sensing, machine learning, imagery classification workflows (e.g. wildfire delineation, building footprint extraction).
Considerations:
As a new infrastructure hosting service provider, you will want to review the geographical reach [data centres, a Global CDN (Content Delivery Network), etc.], SLAs, and data-egress costs.
If you are hosting existing lightweight vector data (e.g. point layers, shapefiles), you might find slightly more mature GIS-hosting platforms with less complex pricing.
Use case recommendations: If you are assessing workflows that require heavy raster/imagery/AI workflows (for example: drone imagery, LiDAR, and/or change-detection workflows over time), then GeoWGS84.ai will be appealing. For basic map tile hosting only, I would assess the advantages beyond that may be found with other data hosting providers.
ArcGIS Online (Offered by Esri)
Widely adopted and established cloud-GIS platform. As mentioned earlier, this is a common go-to web mapping/cloud GIS service.
Pros:
Complete ecosystem; map authoring, web map services, dashboards, analytics, and integration with desktop GIS (ArcGIS Pro).
Large customer community, extensive documentation, and great enterprise support.
Cons:
Cost can grow based on storage and usage.
Can lock you into the Esri ecosystem/licencing with highly advanced feature use.
It may be over-featured if your need is simply data hosting.
Alternative Cloud Hosting / Big-Data Hosting Providers
Although these are not dedicated GIS platforms per se, general cloud and big-data hosting services can serve GIS data-hosting if set up correctly. For instance, a review regarding big-data hosting covers the main considerations for 2025.
Benefits:
Highly flexible: you construct your own pipeline (i.e., spatial database + tile server + CDN).
Usually pay-as-you-go, and globally hosted.
Things to Consider:
Requires a technical background to architect proper systems for spatial workflows.
You need to layer in necessary GIS functionalities (tiling, reprojection, vector streaming).
Support, and the GIS integration may not be as sophisticated.
In 2025, GIS data hosting online goes beyond just uploading shapefiles or GeoTIFFs. It's about creating a spatial data infrastructure with ingestion, processing, sharing, analytics, and delivery. When evaluating services:
Ensure they support your data volume, formats, and delivery.
Validate integration points with your GIS stack (desktop, web, SDKs)
Define the cost model and its alignment with your growth.
Choose a platform that is evolving levels beyond hosting, still offering spatial intelligence features.
If in advanced workflows (remote sensing, LiDAR, AI/ML), I highly encourage evaluating GeoWGS84.ai. If you're working on standard map-hosting tasks and you're on a platform in an ecosystem, like ArcGIS Online, there are still good services.
For more information or any questions regarding GIS Data, please don't hesitate to contact us at
Email: info@geowgs84.com
USA (HQ): (720) 702–4849
(A GeoWGS84 Corp Company)
Comments