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!
No problem! You change the name servers on your registrar to cloudflare’s so that when traffic goes to your.domain, cloudflare is the one that processes the dns request.
If you kept the name servers of your registrar then the traffic would just be processed by the registrar, cloudflare wouldn’t even see the traffic.
Basically the name server defines your domain’s current dns provider.
Hope that makes sense
Ah, this is what I’m confused about. I get that traffic would need to flow through Cloudflare’s network, but why would Cloudflare require me to change my nameserver for that? How about a CNAME alias instead? What are the technical limitations for which Cloudflare asks this of me? I just want to understand the working behind them asking me to change my nameservers.
Thanks!
Setting your nameservers is simply a requirement for Cloudflare. While they theoretically could work via CNAME – they don’t. On the other hand, their DNS is really nice and is free.
When you use their DNS, for each DNS record, you have the option to proxy traffic through Cloudflare. The proxy is what enables their CDN (and many other features such as forwarding, rewriting URLs, DDoS protection, automatic HTTPS certificates, and so on). It’s a simple on/off switch for each DNS record if you don’t want to proxy a particular host.
Thank you, that would mean that technically there is no need for cloudflare to ask one to change their default nameservers to cloudflare’s nameservers - it’s just that they want to run their analytics on the data transmitted in exchange for free services. I understand now. I believe some of the paid plans allow for one to use CNAMEs, which makes sense.
Thanks, now I understand. I will need to read more on the networking tech behind a Cloudflare based reverse-proxy setup (and maybe even set up my own through another VPS box someday). I’ll go through the docs, thanks again!
When you make a dns request, it goes to the nameservers first to see which server is has the dns config. A CNAME record is in the dns config
I’m sorry, what I don’t understand is how does changing my nameservers to cloudflare’s nameservers help propagating my traffic through their CDN infrastructure?
Because changing your nameservers to cloudflare’s allows you to use their DNS service, which comes with the CDN infrastructure.
Here is the cloudflare dns for my lemmy server’s domain:
The switch where it says proxied means that I am using the CDN to obfuscate the real IP of the server.
Thank you, but I’m still having trouble understanding the technical reason for Cloudflare to require users to change their nameservers. Let me try and summarise what I understand:
When a user changes their nameservers to Cloudflare nameservers, all requests to the domain are routed to Cloudflare’s DNS endpoints. Because we are using a CDN (and are proxying traffic to our site through Cloudflare), the CDN endpoint (because it is the proxy) intercepts all traffic directed towards our domain. If we were to not change the nameservers for our domain to Cloudflare’s nameservers, Cloudflare would not be able to link our domain to the specific CDN endpoint it has likely set up for us at the back-end, which would defeat the purpose of the CDN and the proxying wouldn’t work.
Do I understand this correctly?
Pretty much yes.
If you want a more in-depth explanation of DNS and how nameservers work etc check out this article from cloudflare.
Specifically the part; “There are 4 DNS servers involved in loading a webpage:” It explains it much better than I can.
Thank you, I conceptually understand what nameservers (and their types) are, it’s just that I’m struggling a bit to link my understanding of DNS to how Cloudflare is proxying traffic through its own network. I assume that my previous comment had an OK explanation, a high-level overview of what happens.
Thanks for your time!
Cloudflare has several reverse proxies all around the world. When you enable their proxy service, CF decides which proxy is used for your traffic. To be able to control this better, they need to have control over the DNS record.
If you have an issue with changing your domain’s nameservers (perfectly valid), my guess is you’ll also have an issue with the fact that using CF proxy essentially means they are a man-in-the-middle for all your HTTPS traffic and decrypt everything before proxying it forward.