Last year I made a website for my gf where I had to build a custom map of Paris, and I struggled a lot trying to figure out how to actually make a map from scratch while avoiding paid services like mapbox.
I finally managed to hack something up using openstreetmap data, then some manual work in QGIS to customize the look, and voila - I had a bunch of folders filled with raster tiles.
This site is deployed for free on Netlify and is basically just a React SPA, a public folder with tiles, and I give the tile URL template to the OpenLayers lib to display it all nicely on the screen. Simple and it works!
I always wanted to improve the map a bit by using vector tiles as I think it looks nicer, but I thought you need a dedicated server for that? (unless I'm mistaken, correct me if I'm wrong)
Yes, you need a dedicated server with 128 GB RAM to generate the tiles. For hosting the tiles, you can use anything with 300 GB disk space, CPU is not important.
Me and my girfriend moved to Paris at the beginning of 2020, to a nice little apartment in the Le Marais district. The first Covid lockdown started a couple of months after we came and we were soon all trapped in our tiny spaces, with not much to do, and unable to fully enjoy our very first warm and gentle Paris spring.
Our living room overlooked a closed courtyard and (if you were impolite enough!) you could see in all the neighbors apartments. One guy used to play a record of Buckley's Hallelujah every evening, just as the sun was about to set. Never missed a day, and I found it amusing, at times irritating, but now I remember it very fondly.
You can watch Tarkovsky's movies, for example.
And one of my personal favorites - Kin-Dza-Dza! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYHv8eJrW2Y