Doing a whois on the domain name, shows the registrant is from North Brabant, Netherlands. Their primary cloudflare stuff pings back to Canada, but the secondary and tertiary locations I get are in the US.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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FYI everyone who's sharing a Cloudflare location is only mildly doxxing themself
How dare you make us click a link and read for ourselves? Not what I signed up for.
Well of course not, you joined lemm.ee
After re-reading the fine-print I hereby fully commit my soul to the spirit of lemmy.
They probably use Cloudflare for Loadbalancing and Anti DDOS. This doesn’t mean it is hosted on Cloudflare, it is only a proxy. The point is not to show you the real IP so you can’t attack the origin server.
AfaIk, they are hosted at Hetzner, so physically in Germany or Finland.
Edit: Source https://lemmy.world/post/22397634
~~Edit 2: The ip online tool on the website below indicates that it may actually be physically hosted in US (on a virtual server as, according to Wikipedia, Hetzner doesn't offer bare metal servers in US).~~
https://www.ipaddress.com/website/lemmy.world/
Edit 3: The IP is from Cloudflare, the servers are from Hetzner in EU.
AfaIk, they are hosted at Hetzner, so physically in Germany or Finland.
If I remember correctly, the main servers are in Hetzner's data centre in Finland with back-ups in Germany. Although they have a complex set-up so it may not be as cleanly divided up these days.
I suspect half the Fediverse runs on Hetzner at this point.
The US IP address is for Cloudflare, who are acting as a front end for things like DDoS protection. A lot of lemmy servers use them, which is unfortunate, but there don't seem to be any viable European alternatives.
You can check the details with the whois command. The relevant bit when querying for one of their addresses is:
NetRange: 104.16.0.0 - 104.31.255.255
CIDR: 104.16.0.0/12
NetName: CLOUDFLARENET
NetHandle: NET-104-16-0-0-1
Parent: NET104 (NET-104-0-0-0-0)
NetType: Direct Allocation
OriginAS: AS13335
Organization: Cloudflare, Inc. (CLOUD14)
RegDate: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2024-09-04
Comment: All Cloudflare abuse reporting can be
done via https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse
Comment: Geofeed: https://api.cloudflare.com/local-ip-ranges.csv
Ref: https://rdap.arin.net/registry/ip/104.16.0.0
Thank you. So that's why you 'see' an US IP address while the physical server may be located anywhere, e.g. in Germany.
By looking at their Wikipedia, I've already found out that Cloudflare doesn't do hosting.
Cloudflare don't hoat sites, but they do end up being a 'man in the middle' attack on any site they proxy for, regardless of where that site is nominally hosted. That ends up exposing all traffic on those sites to a US corporation, and ultimately the US government. Considering that Cloudflare proxy somewhere between 19% and 40% of all websites, I think that's pretty alarming.
It's not an attack of you pay for it
You'll be attacked and pay for the priviledge! I suppose what you're really paying for is knowing who's attacking you. Mind you, I think it's free for small sites, which is probably quite an attractive trade-off for many.
I don't get the 'man in the middle' part. Is the ssl key for the encrypted https connection not from LW, but from cloudflare?
It's still problematic that they have metadata of the connections.
For cloudflare to encrypt the traffic they need the key.
But isn't for https the traffic supposed to be e2e encrypted between the client web browser and the server hosting the web page with the same cert? Does cloudflare decrypt and then re-encrypt the traffic data?
You see the problem. Yes, cloudflare decrypt the request from the browser, inspect it, then reencrypt it and send it to the host server. Then they take the response, decrypt that, inspect it, reencrypt it and send it to the browser.
Basically there are two TLS flows, one from the browser to cloudflare, and one from clourflare to the host server. Between those, on the cloudflare system, both the traffic and response are in plain text. That includes usernames, passwords (for HTTP basic auth anyway) and any sensitive data you send or receive.
Given that they front sonewhere between 19 and 40% of all websites, d£pending on whose stats you trust, that should be pretty alarming.
Thank you. I didn't know that.
It's Germany. You can tell because the ToS mentions the service being subject to German law.
Hetzner also has US servers now, FYI.
Hosting tools point to Toronto, Canada via Cloudflare.
You have all information here.
So Server Host for lemmy.world is Cloudflare, Inc.
Cloudflare doesn't do the hosting, just DNS/domain related related stuff. LW says they're hosting at Hetzner.
lemm.ee is also hosted on Cloudflare.
You'd be kinda stupid not to use some form of cloud hosting solution as a small time website these days. Cloudflare or AWS or whatever you prefer.
Why is that? Mostly security I guess?
Security, but also ability to scale and not have to host your own equipment.