OSM, Self-Hosted where to start?

Hi Guys,

I’ve been doing some reading on OSM, however just need a small nudge in the correct direction. OpenStreetMaps looks incredible, and I would like to use it as a basis for a meteorological project, and in turn contribute back some of the information we gather.

Where can I gather information, or can you share some links to hosting your own OpenStreetMap setup?
I have also stumbled over http://leafletjs.com/ which looks like a nice front end.

Any help and nudges in the right direction appreciated.

This website is a very useful guide: http://switch2osm.org/
It explains how to use tiles, and how to setup a tile server.

Hi Vclaw,

Really appreciate that, I spent hours reading about setting up a “Tile Server” and what’s involved. Software side I seem sorted, my next step is hardware.
It’s serving our internal use, and on a small traffic website. Immediate updates isn’t time critical, so I was looking at something like the following:

Intel E3 Xeon Quad Core
16GB Ram
8x 1TB Hard Drives Raid10
2x SSDs for Caching (flashcache)

Would anyone here whom currently runs a tile server consider this adequate?