As with many things we learn to improve approaches only when we hit stumbling blocks. Mine being that I publish data infrequently to ArcGIS Online and generally use the simplest approach. However, when you have large datasets and begin using lots of ArcGIS Online Credits for Publishing information that can simply be done on your own machine and then uploaded, thereby not using any (or far less) credits, you look for better approaches. I came across this article/post yesterday https://www.edc.uri.edu/blog/tile-layers-keeping-credits-low/ which I hope others find useful.
Thank you to the University of Rhode Island (Environmental Data Center) for this post
On December 16, 2014, Posted by Aimee Mandeville