As a European (but who lived for 10 years in Montreal, that's why I have an account here) I applaud any initiative to move digital infrastructure away from the US. Good luck.
It's very ironic for deflect to use cloudflare for their security checks when visiting their ToS.
Other than that, it seems ok as an alternative.
What are your Cloudflare metrics for unique visitors? I'd be very curious how it compares to your billing in Deflect.
I run a small Lemmy instance and I'm showing an insane 5M unique visitors per month. I'm sure that's mega-inflated by federations or bots though. If Deflect charged me for even a fraction of that I'd be bankrupted.
5M seems really high, we're at 7.8M but I've become pretty aggressive about blocking bots / scrapers from China
We're a registered non-profit in Canada though - https://deflect.ca/non-profits/
Very cool !
Thank you for this massive upgrade Shadow!
Deflect is based in Montreal Quebec ๐
That's some great news. Even without the current horrible state of the US, just CloudFlare itself is getting to be a problem anyway.
What's used/would be used for DNS? I got a bunch at CF.
Same for us, deflect. If you're looking for a good Canadian provider https://easydns.com/ is solid. We do our domain registration through https://www.canspace.ca/ and I think they also offer some DNS.
Thank you!
Post this on Reddit too, so more people come here. /r/BuyCanadian is a good sub for posting this.
Last I saw, they had rules against self promotion. I'm not sure if this qualifies, but at the very least we could post it in their self promotion specific thread.
Lets be honest, they'll probably just perm ban you from that sub, but at least some people might see.
Why don't you post it for them?
Sweet I've been interested in Deflect as an alternative to CF since I noticed Cory Doctorow using it on his 'pluralistic' website.
Thanks for the transparency!
@shadow@lemmy.ca very cool, and nice recommendation with deflect...
The pricing concerns me (especially since we using Cloudflare is a $0 cost)... At $10/5000 unique users, what if I get hit by a DDoS and my costs balloon?
Anyway I suppose that's a question for them, not you ๐
It's free for non profits, also our traffic is pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things.
I can't speak for your stuff though ๐
wait what? I thought like 99% of the point of edge services was to protect you from DDoS? I would hope that they wouldn't bill you in cases like that.
I thought that was strange to but here's what they say on their website that makes it sound like you wont be charged for DDoS or bots
How We Count unique IPs (UIP)
The total number of unique IPs is tallied based on total number of legitimate individual IP addresses at the end of the calendar month. If a reader visits your website every day from the same IP address, that will equal 1 unique visitor for that calendar month, no matter how often they visit your website.
Unique is fair
Other providers might charge you based on website hits, website visits, megabytes of bandwidth, services offered and many other metrics. Some providers charge premiums during attacks. We opt for fair, consistent and predictable low-cost pricing that serves our clients fairly. Malicious bots or traffic generated during an attack are not something that you will pay for either, as these IPs will not be counted in your monthly pricing.
This seems sensible, but does have some edges...
Like, if I use my phone at home, and out and about on cell, and at work, and at my in-laws, and at the library, then that's at least 5 "users" from one user as I change IPs.
And if I'm on Tor, who knows how many users I count as, but definitely a lot more than 1.
So I get what they're trying to do... but I don't think it'll work out fairly...
On the other hand with cgnat deployments being common on mobile devices and lower end isps, they would end up underreporting on those users.
Overall it does seem tricky. Billing per legit request or mbit would make more sense to me.
Is there any chance that Deflect might have a good alternative to Cloudflare tunnels for self hosters?
Not that I know of, and I don't think that's the direction they're going with it.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
237 points (99.6% liked)
Lemmy.ca's Main Community
3930 readers
247 users here now
Welcome to the lemmy.ca/c/main community!
All new users on lemmy.ca are automatically subscribed to this community, so this is the place to read announcements, make suggestions, and chat about the goings-on of lemmy.ca.
For support requests specific to lemmy.ca, you can use !lemmy_ca_support@lemmy.ca.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS