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!

  • @[email protected]OPEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Thank you for the wonderful comment!

    The only reason I’m looking to host in Europe is because of the prices: this server will not allow for sign-ups (i.e. it will only be for me). I will likely only need 1GB of RAM and very little CPU power to get this to work. The prices in Europe for low-cost VPSes are better than in the US. I don’t actually care about which country/continent I’m hosting it in, this decision was purely financial.

    I have a question: I believe I can set Lemmy to auto-sync content from communities I’m interested in (I can set the frequency for the auto-sync) - would it be possible for Cloudflare to cache the content if it is already in the database of my Lemmy instance? I know that CDNs can only really cache static content but I do not know enough about CDNs/Cloud Networking in general to be able to figure out just what it would be able to cache.

    Thank you, yes I had the protections offered by Cloudflare in mind when I asked this question. I do not plan to do anything illegal so I hope I’ll be fine.

    Could you also tell me why Cloudflare asks me to change the authoritative nameservers on my registrar’s page to their nameservers? I think my networking is getting a bit rusty, I really can’t figure it out.

    One more thing; is there a difference in configuring a Cloudflare CDN vs a Cloudflare reverse-proxy for a VPS instance? I see people in c/homelab talk about this but I never really delved into it, but if I could access my network remotely using this it would a great bonus.

    Thanks!

    • @[email protected]English
      4•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?