mbtiles-php VS mod_mbtiles

You can host .mbtiles files with PHP very easily. I wrote a tiny piece of code 9 years ago that I used for a high traffic map server and it worked just fine. https://github.com/infostreams/mbtiles-php

I'm sure there are newer solutions out there, which might have more features and are actually maintained. But this did (and still does) the job.

Here's a little bit of code I wrote that lets you host from a normal webserver, where that "normal webserver" is Apache: https://github.com/systemed/mod_mbtiles

This is great. Servers have been the weak link in the open mbtiles stack for a good while and an out-of-the-box recipe like this will make a real difference.

(For those running on bare metal, I knocked this up a few months ago - https://github.com/systemed/mod_mbtiles - which is an Apache module that does pretty much the same thing.)