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Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay $120000 within 24h

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.

KonalaKoala ,
@KonalaKoala@lemmy.world avatar

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.

UncleGrandPa ,

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

DarkCloud ,

Today's tech business model:

First you get the power, then you extort the money.

RickRussell_CA ,
@RickRussell_CA@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Trae ,

Then they offered to resolve it in whatever way CF deemed appropriate and CF refused to elaborate exactly which domains were the issue.

RickRussell_CA ,
@RickRussell_CA@lemmy.world avatar

resolve it in whatever way CF deemed appropriate

CloudFlare deemed the upgrade to Enterprise service appropriate.

anticurrent , (edited )

Don't believe anything advertised as unlimited , cause it isn't, they always cover their asses in the fine prints in their TOS.

x0x7 ,

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.

nutsack ,

The same thing happens in fastly with the VCL

ssj2marx ,

casino

lmao get fucked

KillingTimeItself ,

THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS MY FRIEND

harmsy ,
@harmsy@lemmy.world avatar

True, and this time "The House" wasn't the casino.

KillingTimeItself ,

somebody has out gambled the gamblers. It's finally happened!

UnderpantsWeevil ,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

Sounds like a shake down, and it couldn't have happened to a more deserving group.

Still, real lesson in how Cloudflare does business.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    Midnight1938 ,

    Where did you go?

    timewarp ,
    @timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    Midnight1938 ,

    I thought you meant CF

    thatirishguyyy ,
    @thatirishguyyy@lemmy.today avatar

    Multi CDN integration is a thing.
    And fuck CF. Unlimited means unlimited. Stop trying to lie to your customers and change the rules.

    If the IP's were an issue, then they wouldn't have offered to make the issue go away with $$$.

    mholiv ,

    I mean more money would solve the IP issue.

    Step 1: Get more money
    Step 2: Buy additional dedicated IPs for the casino
    Step 3: Profit from the profits of a casino.

    RickRussell_CA ,
    @RickRussell_CA@lemmy.world avatar

    But, the guy admits that what they were doing with the domains was expressly permitted in the "Enterprise" class service. If it was expressly prohibited in the "Business" class service, then they set themselves up for the shakedown.

    Chriszz ,

    250$ a month for their service seems like cloudflare was straight up losing money on the deal. Although cloudflare seemed to have given them extra time than they said before terminating service, which they didn’t have to do. That being said, I think both sides suck here.

    bane_killgrind ,

    Nah. CF initiated a contract renegotiation, and then suspended services right after being informed the customer was price leveling.

    That's crappy.

    They gave less than a single billing period notice for a price increase.

    That's crappy.

    They sent a price increase for 40x the current billings, with no corroborated cost or value.

    See where I'm going here?

    pete_the_cat ,

    I agree. It's shitty for Cloudflare to just straight up destroy this company's DNS, but also it seems like the company violated the ToS. They had about two weeks to migrate to something else, but instead they just continued debating with CF. Also, this company doesn't have a secondary DNS server in case CF ever went down? That's pretty stupid on their part. Redundant systems are key, I hope they learned that lesson haha

    viking ,
    @viking@infosec.pub avatar

    Isn't CF advertising themselves as the solution to needing multiple DNS' with their failsafes, switchovers and load balancing?

    If I need to maintain multiple anyway, what's the benefit of CF to begin with? There are a million CDNs out there I could use instead, if I still have to maintain the network architecture.

    KevonLooney ,

    Do you believe everything that companies tell you? If Google or Apple tell you "we're the solution to everything, you never need to buy anything else", do you listen to them?

    viking ,
    @viking@infosec.pub avatar

    No, but if I use a service to solve a specific problem only to see the need to have a failover in place regardless, I might as well not use the service.

    pete_the_cat ,

    Regardless of what they tell you, if you care about uptime, you ensure this yourself. I feel this is 60% the company's fault and 40% Cloudflare's.

    Chriszz ,

    Thanks for actually reading my comment unlike the other guy

    Xtallll ,
    @Xtallll@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    $250 a month unlimited business plan, is for a business with a Website, like a restaurant website that has a menu and takes reservations, maybe a small online store that handles a few dozen SKUs. When the website is the business they move you to an enterprise solution.

    QuantumSpecter ,

    Lemmy points counter at 666 as I read this post. Is this a sign?

    Gestrid ,

    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.

    [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22last%20resort%22%20support&sort=byDate&type=comment

    [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20countervail&sort=byDate&type=comment

    starman OP ,
    @starman@programming.dev avatar

    Okay, that's understandable

    flambonkscious ,

    Cracking insight - well done!

    nutsack ,

    I love hacker news. The internet needs more things like this

    Eyeuhnluuung ,

    The irony here, is this is the kind of vague and obtuse fuckery online casinos and sportsbooks pull with their customers all the time.

    Aux ,

    The irony here is that the article author confirms that they break TOS of CF and he still has a Pikachu face. Reddit discussion is pretty positive that CF is right in their decision and that new provider will shut them down at some time as well.

    juliebean ,

    even if they were breaking tos (and i don't think it sounds quite so cut and dry), shouldn't the response be to notify them and allow them to fix it, or just terminate the account? demanding a ton of money to make the problem seems a skeevy way of handling it on cloudflare's part.

    lepinkainen ,

    They had two weeks to fix, instead they stood their ground and argued.

    They very well knew that they were costing a lot more than the $250 they were paying and couldn’t get a deal anywhere else

    rekabis ,

    Yet more evidence that CloudFlare is inherently damaging and hostile to the Internet.

    fine_sandy_bottom ,

    It's fine to not like CloudFlare but this isn't really "evidence" of any kind. It's a one-sided rant on sub stack.

    Aux ,

    Seriously? The article author admits they're doing illegal shit and break CF TOS and CF is inherently damaging? You ok, mate?

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