Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay $120000 within 24h
Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay $120000 within 24h
TL;DR: We've been on the Cloudflare Business plan ($250/month) for years. They suddenly contacted us and asked us to either pay them $120k up front for one year of Enterprise within 24 hours or they would take down all of our domains. While this escalated up our business we had 3 sales calls with th...
Also, interesting comment I found on HackerNews (HN):
This post was definitely demoted by HN. It stayed in the first position for less than 5 minutes and, as it quickly gathered upvotes, it jumped straight into 24th and quickly fell off the first page as it got 200 or so more points in less than an hour.
I'm 80% confident HN tried to hide this link. It's the fastest downhill I've noticed on here, and I've been lurking and commenting for longer than 10 years.
Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h
Yikes. That sounds bad.
I'm a SysOps engineer at a fairly large online casino.
Okay all my sympathy is gone. Online casinos deserve to die.
That said, my feelings towards economic vampires aside, the way the events unfolded is concerning to say the least. Cloudflare has been racking up evil-corp points quite rapidly in recent months.
Found the thread on HN. Here's what (I'm guessing) a mod had to say:
It set off the flamewar detector, got flagged by users, and got downweighted by a mod.
The 'customer support of last resort' genre is common and not usually a good fit for HN [1]. If people feel this story is unusually relevant and interesting, I'm not sure I agree—long experience has taught us that one-sided articles like this nearly always leave out critical information—but I also don't mind yielding in an occasional specific case, so I've rolled back the penalties on this thread.
The issue from our point of view is not about story X or company Y—it's a systemic one: the most popular genres of submission (especially the rage-inducing ones) get massively over-represented by default, so countervailing mechanisms are needed [2] if we're to have a space for the more intellectually curious stories that the site is meant for.
HN thread is here and it's on the front page 7 hours old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808
Many mentions made that a significant part of the issue seemed to be Cloudflare IP addresses getting banned in some countries. They wanted the customer to switch to a bring-your-own-IP plan.
Also, the discussion took place over 1 month, not 24 hours.
I think the HN thread is reasonably informative and nuanced. CF didn't do great but it was somewhat a fog of war situation.
Realistically, this is why you pay for Akamai. You don't get these shenanigans.
How the fuck were they still on a $250 dollar a month plan when they pumped through $2000 a month worth of traffic? That's shady on the companiy's part and Cloudflare shouldn't have allowed it to happen in the first place.
Each party played their part here and did shitty things. Sounds like the tech equivalent of a crackhead arguing about selling stuff to the pawn shop employee.
The irony here, is this is the kind of vague and obtuse fuckery online casinos and sportsbooks pull with their customers all the time.
The tl;dr seems to be this was a money losing account for Cloudflare, and they couldn't squeeze them so they weaseled out with some TOS violation to prevent losing money on what was promised to be unlimited traffic, they have better lawyers so they're not worried.
Cloudflare 100% in the wrong here, they are closing accounts for TOS violations when they are just unprofitable, I would very strongly consider how tightly to couple with them knowing how cavalier they are about squashing small businesses.
If enough of these happen though, they'll get destroyed by a class action lawsuit, and they'd deserve every bit of it
Regarding the HN shenanigans, their algorithm does some weird things.
If a new post gets too many upvotes and not enough comments, it gets demoted very quickly.
If any of the activity appears manufactured, it basically delists the post.
Very exploitable, but also prevents popular articles that don't stimulate conversation from sticking around on page 1 for too long, and makes botting upvotes do more harm than good.
Repoint your DNS, send everything to legal, delete Facebook hit the gym
Don't believe anything advertised as unlimited , cause it isn't, they always cover their asses in the fine prints in their TOS.
First of all, congrats! Your business must have become pretty successful. How exactly did CF decide to “ask” you to switch to Enterprise?
Maybe...
* You violated their terms of service...
I wouldn't say Cloudflare is innocent, here, but this business handled Cloudflare the cudgel that was used to beat them. They admit to doing something with their domains that was expressly prohibited in the service they were paying for.
Yet more evidence that CloudFlare is inherently damaging and hostile to the Internet.
Right. And if you depend on them for your logic with cloudflare functions you will never be able to migrate to another CDN.
Never let a vender do anything for you beyond standardized features. That's why a "selling point" if we go with this guy we can do this... never makes sense. Because if option B can't do it also you wouldn't want to do "this", and you should probably implement it in a more old-school way.
Not a huge surprise, they've got a long history of doing all kinds of scumbag shit. Nobody should be surprised when the leopard eats their face.
Yeah pretty much all red flags from cloud flare
Can't wait for this to become a louis rossman video
I wonder how this is going to go
this is disgusting and knowing this, i will never pay cloudflare for anything nor recommend them to anyone ever
Lemmy points counter at 666 as I read this post. Is this a sign?
Sounds like any Cloudflare customer should reconsider their hosting setup . Mark Anderson has decided to strip the customers to increase the bottom line... And once the numbers are up but the customers are gone.... Will move on to the next company
- what is HN? Edit: never mind, answered below: hacker news (ycombinator)
- daaamn... I hated cloudflare before for their shitty and non-adblocker-compatible (often not working at all) "I am not a bot" checks, but fuck me are those EVIL motherfuckers....
Good.
While I have been reading through this topic, I have been feeling worried since I was thinking about using Cloudflare to protect a site of mine for some time. This is because I found out from somewhere that they have protection against AI LLMs scraping page data from websites, which is what I'm mainly worried about since there are things and stories that I put a lot of thought and work into. And finding out about Cloudflare shutting someone else down here over what sounds like the level of traffic has me feeling I might not be able to use them and not sure what other options there are.