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

Thanks for being a member of The Lemmy Club!

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.