I think she's kinda like Harris in the US. She probably would have done a good job, but is too similar to (and tainted by) the person before. It's not worth the risk right now to choose her and lose to the cons.
With an sre team sure, but there's a difference between the amount of infra I'm willing to setup vs what I want to maintain and be responsible for on my own. I could set this up, spend money on VPS and have something that's difficult for anyone else to maintain.
Or I could just turn on cloudflare.
I'm am expert with all the tech you mentioned, but I'm trying to avoid a complex setup where if I got hit by a bus my fellow admins would struggle to maintain things.
Lemmy.ca does about 2tb a week in traffic, 1tb of which is absorbed by Cloudflare caching images / static resources. We do have the server / network capacity to serve directly, but at the cost of reduced performance and higher latency for users. Our server is in Vancouver, if you're in Montreal you could expect images to load slower for you since they'd no longer be cached locally once one user viewed it. Another advantage is that if we ever do get DDOS'ed, it becomes possible to manage and deal with in a reasonable amount of time + energy.
I'm open to discussing dropping them, but we don't pay them anything as we're just on a free plan. We're just costing them a little money, we don't even register our domains through them.
I yoloed from a year old version up to the latest, it was fine.