Skip to content

Hosting Tours on Your Server

MapsAlive gives you the option of hosting your tours on your own server instead of having them hosted on the MapsAlive server.

One reason to host your interactive maps on your own server is so that you can tell people about them using your own URL. While we like mapsalive.com, you probably like your domain name better. Another reason is that some companies are required to host their web content on their own web server.

Most people use MapsAlive's automatic hosting. If you do too, you can skip this topic.

How to make a tour private
  • Choose Tour > Tour Manager from the Tour Builder menu
  • Check the Private box in the Advanced Options section
  • If the tour has already been published, choose Save. This will delete the published tour so that it is no longer accessible on the internet.

The Private feature is available with the Pro Plan.

Hosting Options

Hosting by MapsAlive

Tours you create with MapsAlive are automatically hosted on the MapsAlive server. When you publish a tour, MapsAlive creates a folder having the same name as the tour number. The folder contains all the files needs to run the tour’s interactive maps in a web browser using a URL that looks like this where ##### is the tour number:

    https://tour.mapsalive.com/#####

Hosting On Your Server

To host a tour on your own server, you first download it from the MapsAlive server and then upload it to your server.

How to download a tour
  • Go to the Tour Builder
  • Choose Tour > Export from the menu
  • Click the Download Published Tour link on the Export screen.
  • When prompted, save the tour's zip file to a location on your computer.
    The file will have a name like mapsalivetour12345.zip.

Be sure to read the ReadMe.pdf file in the zip file. It contains important instructions on how to use your downloaded tour.

How to upload tour
  • Unzip the downloaded zip file into a folder on your computer.
  • Rename the folder as you like. For example, if the tour is for a museum, you could rename mapsalivetour12345 to museum.
  • Upload the folder to your web server using an FTP program or other upload mechanism.
  • Test that you can run the tour from a browser using the URL on your server, for example:
https://www.somedomain.com/maps/museum

Updating a hosted tour

If you change the tour, you'll need to publish, download, and upload it to your server again.

Hosting Requirements

A tour you create with MapsAlive must be run using a web server such as Apache, IIS, and others.

You cannot run a tour without a web server unless you built the tour using V3 Compatibility Mode. V3 tours can be run on a PC or Mac without a web server.

The set of files in a downloaded tour is 100% self-contained which means they don’t depend on anything that is not in the tour folder.

Tours can be displayed using a recent version of modern browsers such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari, but not Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Hosting Sensitive Data

If information in your interactive map should not be seen by the general public, you must host the tour on your own server. You must also check the Private option on the Tour Manager screen.

The Private option is a Pro Plan feature

When the Private option is checked, you can download the tour’s files, but they won’t be published to tour.mapsalive.com and thus no one can access them there.

If you had previously published the tour and then choose the Private option, MapsAlive will warn you that it is going to delete the tour files from tour.mapsalive.com.

With the Private option selected, you can still use all Tour Builder features, including Tour Preview, but the only way for someone to use your interactive map is for you to tell them the URL for the tour on your server, and if necessary, provide them with credentials for accessing the tour at that URL.