Yes! Anyone is welcome to use HOT's managed server for fully public, community run mapping campaigns.

Your use case may not. However, if you require private data collection for internal projects, or support many simultaneous users, it may be best to have your own instance. Managing a software server is no easy task and we can deal with lots of the complexity for you. The paid service also ensures regular updates and long term support. HOT is an NGO that produces open-source software, so your support ❤ is highly appreciated.

The deployment for a hundred users is an optimised version of the self-deployment method. This could quite possibly handle more users, but is not guaranteed.

The deployment for a thousand users or more is via an industry standard tool called Kubernetes. This tool is highly resilient to load and reduces possible failures, but also brings more complexity.

To contrast what is provided in the free self-hosted option against what is provided in the paid packages.