It is surprising. A month ago they were Canadian servers, @[email protected] moved it to lunanode (Canadian). Perhaps CDN was moved or the whole machine was moved to a cheaper hosting platform since it got very big from then and is under new admin management as of a week ago-ish.

Edit: found the answer from @[email protected], TL:DR is CloudFlare

Correct! The server running this and all data is stored in Canada.

Here’s a blurb from a doc I’m working on:

Lemmy.ca is hosted in Canada at OVH in Beauharnois, QC with all data on a dedicated server. Backups are PGP encrypted and pushed to the OVH backup service, however these will be moved off-site in the near future.

We use Cloudflare as a security and performance layer in front of the server. They accept the traffic for Lemmy.ca through a worldwide network of ingestion points, scrub it of abusive traffic, cache the images, and pass it through an encrypted tunnel to our server. This means they can see in plain text the data sent between us including your credentials, posts, comments and images. You can read more about their policies at https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/.