I benchmarked and nginx can host 30 Gbps on cold cache, on actual real world load. (I played back a log of 1 million real world requests).
So using nginx in a 1 Gbps server is definitely not asking too much of it, or I might not have understood your comment clearly.
Why would Facebook decide to use my tile server? When a company's business depends on having reliable map tiles, they either self host or have an Enterprise deal with Mapbox, etc.
I just used it as an example of some large service. The point is that I expect someone will take advantage.
It’s interesting to know that the limiting factor is bandwidth and not nginx/disk speed though. I’ll admit I don’t see 30Gbit of map tiles happening any time soon.
You are right in that I'd be afraid if this was hosted on AWS or on Cloudflare Workers. This whole idea is only possible because there are some hosts like Hetzner, which offer flat rate bandwidth.
Nginx is fast, but I think that’s asking too much of it.
Of course that problem hasn’t happened yet, but it’s what I’d be worried about.