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!
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?
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.
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!
Using Cloudflare nameservers helps to proxy your traffic because if proxying is enabled (“orange cloud”) those servers aren’t handing out your IP address to people who request your domain, they’re handing out addresses belonging to Cloudflare machines near the visitor instead. They have machines in data centers all around the world, and they would like the traffic to end up in the data center closest to where it’s needed.
Doing that means they can do stuff like reduce cross-region network traffic: for instance, if your VPS is in Europe but a bunch of visitors from the US suddenly request a certain image on your site (because you’ve just posted to a popular community, perhaps), they only need to have that image data cross the Atlantic once before they can serve it up many times in the US. Besides saving bandwidth that also allows it to be served faster to most visitors, because most requests for it are effectively served from a local data center instead of from one on another continent. They’ll also continue to be able to serve your image even when your VPS is down for whatever reason, as long as it’s already in cache.
Theoretically they could probably do all of that using CNAME records instead, I don’t know why they don’t. Maybe there’s some technical reason or maybe they just prefer this slightly simpler setup. I suppose it would add an extra DNS roundtrip, but that wouldn’t really be noticeable to most users.
(Most of that is probably oversimplified and but hopefully that clarifies it a bit)