It looks like Cloudflare Inc is the 1st (American), 4th is DigitalOcean, then there are some servers hosted on Amazon, Oracle, Google… Maybe I understand something incorrectly, but I’d like to avoid those hosting providers. Also I don’t get this frontend, backend thing, but apparently there’s difference when it comes to interpreting hosting providers. Anyone can help?
It’s probably misleading as Cloudflare sits between a site and the Internet which allows it to speed up page delivery and, probably why it’s being used here, it can help mitigate attacks on the site.
If I had to guess, the hosting of Lemmy instances probably breaks down like:
Providers like Oracle are in there because they provide a free tier of hosting that is handy for a small instance, if you are going by numbers of users served, then Hetzner will be on top. This is at least partly down to it being difficult to find a cheaper good-quality service, which is critical if you are relying on donations.
Lemmy’s frontend is separate from its backend, which means you can add new frontends if you want, like old.feddit.uk. I might be missing something but I don’t think this will have much bearing on picking a hosting provider.