Hello!
Our server was previously hosted in the USA. What does this mean for you? Well not much really. It's mostly just an ideological decision. I've had a ton of signups in the past month of users saying that they're trying to move away from US tech. The server is provided by a company in Montreal, QC. We also have double the ram and a few more CPU cores as we did before along with more storage space while also not increasing costs too much, though we don't really need any of that.
We're also moving away from Cloudflare. Why? We've had multiple hours-long outages due to Cloudflare being down. Also, there's privacy and centralization concerns which are just antithetical to the whole reason that I started a Fediverse instance. Over the past month I've disabled Cloudflare protection and haven't noticed any issues whatsoever, if anything performance seems better. If we start seeing massive bot traffic that hurts performance I may turn it back on temporarily, but so far so good.
We are still using Cloudflare R2 to store our images (and only images), but I am looking into alternatives. I also use them to pay for the domain and manage the DNS records, but I don't believe there's any issue in that. We send our server backups to Backblaze which is in the US however it is fully encrypted before leaving the server so there is no privacy concerns
As a fun aside it seems like every other Canadian hosted Lemmy instance is behind a CDN like Cloudflare, meaning that once join-lemmy.org refreshes our server information we should be the ONLY Lemmy instance listed as being hosted in Canada! Take that, @Shadow@lemmy.ca :P
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If you’d like to help contribute to our ongoing costs, or would like to show some appreciation, you can at OpenCollective: https://opencollective.com/thelemmyclub
This instance is mostly self funded with no return whatsoever. The costs aren’t too high (~$500/yr) but community donations are always very appreciated. At the moment, we’re about 25% community funded. Either way, The Lemmy Club isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Hi, I caught this in trending posts - I personally have spent a lot of time recently looking in this area and wanted to drop https://bunny.net/ and https://cloudns.net/ in your ears - both services are Europe based and provide several solutions (in the case of Bunny, a Cloudflare-like experience). Pretty much every other competitor in this space is tied to US tech besides these two (i.e. use AWS under the hood).
I was more just after DNS hosting myself and am so far pretty happy with Bunny DNS so far as it's more cost effective than CloudNS. OVH Cloud (France) has a datacenter near Montreal as well with great prices for large VMs ($5 US for 4cpu/8g ram/75g vdisk) if you need a VM fast for some ad-hoc work (backups?) in the same region, but a different provider for disaster recovery.
I'm still trying to find the "right" ICANN accredited[1] domain registrar that isn't a small tiny shoppe and has good prices - in the top 20 you really only have Regery, Above and Z which are not US based and have pretty good prices, but many of them end up being more expensive in renewals (e.g. US companies market at $12/yr for com/net/org, EU trends at $16/yr)
Hope this helps! The struggle is real - even using these services, I'm still paying with Paypal. :-/
[1] this may not be so important if you're using a localized ccTLD - I use zone.ee (zone.eu) for .ee and .fi domains for example, great prices easy service but not specifically an ICANN registrar, so their com/net/org prices are lackluster
I use cloudns they are fine