Hi, I wanted to host a personal Lemmy instance online (for just myself, I don’t think I can take the upkeep for other users - please let me know if this is not possible) and wanted to understand how to “attach” a CDN service to it.

The idea behind doing this is that I’m in the US but I’m looking to host a server in Europe. I am looking into Cloudflare’s free CDN service, but it would be great if someone could point me towards how I can configure this setup to speed up the loading time for my Lemmy instance (which is going to be far away from me, geographically).

I would also like to know about your setups and how you have hosted Lemmy.

Thanks!

  • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Adding to the hetzner comment: I think AWS has free very crappy servers. If you’re a student, the Github Student Pack has free digitalocen credits.

    In theory, cloud flare could pre-cache content before you request it. Unfortunately, that would require significant effort from Lemmy to let cloud flare know that there is new content, and then it would be up to cloud flare to decide to cache it for 1 client. Both these things aren’t happening.

    CF needs to dynamically control where requests for your server end up, and for that they need to be the authoritative DNS for it.

    Cloud flare indeed acts as a reverse proxy (because that’s how CDNs work), but unlike a self-hosted reverse proxy, theirs will be on their servers, so will not have much more more access to your network than yourself outside of it. I think they have some sort of offering to actually give your more access, but A) idk if that’s free and B) that requires an always-on computer in your local network, at which point why not just host your Lemmy instance on it?

    • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thank you for your comment!

      I am opting for the very low cost providers like Racknerd and CloudServer (see: $1 VPS offerings) - which host most of their servers outside the US.

      Thank you for the explanation, I would like to know more about the “effort” from Lemmy’s side to let Cloudflare cache content before it is requested.

      CF needs to dynamically control where requests for your server end up, and for that they need to be the authoritative DNS for it.

      Could you explain this point a bit more? Why would Cloudflare need to control DNS for my domain? How is this linked to them proxying my traffic? I’ve been trying to understand this for a bit now - how does having CF’s own nameservers let CF proxy my traffic?

      I was also considering hosting Lemmy in my own network, but I can’t seem to find any guides on which ports to forward - if I could just find a decent guide on the networking required to host Lemmy I might even do it on-prem.

      Thanks a bunch!