Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#241

Post by jrockway » Mon, Feb 24, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

samcrawford wrote: post #139

iruoy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NS1 could be another one to look at. I have never used their services (directly), but I've noticed Netlify uses them for their DNS services.

I've used ns1 for a few years, they've been great!

We used ns1 at my last job, they were indeed great to us. We moved from self-hosting DNS because the DNS servers would randomly become unresponsive and would start returning fake records. After switching to ns1 and getting our first bill, we realized that a lot of our network equipment apparently did a DNS lookup for every log line. This resulted in an exceedingly large bill, which ns1 happily reversed (we did fix our stuff ;).

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#242

Post by bradknowles » Mon, Feb 24, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

jlawer wrote: post #200

jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20 won't stop anyone with using it. If it is refundable, make it $300. That is high enough that only people and businesses with a showstopper situation will use it.

$300 becomes a pretty high barrier for a lot of people. There a places with decent connectivity where that is a good weeks wages

A single dollar is a high barrier for some people.

You need an adjustable amount that is based on the annual income/revenue of the person/entity making the request.

Make it high enough to be non-trivial, but not so high that it blocks all effective usage of the safety valve.

Now, if you can solve that problem, I've got some bridges for you in Arizona.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#243

Post by p1necone » Mon, Feb 24, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

jgrahamc wrote: post #83

This is being looked into internally and I am involved. Likely won’t post an update here as it pertains to a customer account (unless customer agrees). BTW If you, dear reader, ever find yourself so frustrated with Cloudflare that you feel like your only recourse is a blog post... my email is jgc@cloudflare.com and I’m happy to hear from people.

The problem is that big companies don't care about giving quality support for their products, and for the most part they get away with it. From their perspective there's no problem to solve.

Your solution basically boils down to "companies are failing at escalated support issues well, so they should escalate support issues well."

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#244

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 24, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

awill wrote: post #152

andrewstuart wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've put this idea forward a number of times here on HN in regards to other big tech companies. Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed. The Ombudsman must not be part of the technology companies ordinary support processes, it must be entirely separate, and have highest level authority to demand action within the company. To avoi…

This is a really great idea, but I don't think it's possible for this to not get overused for every little issue. Once it's overused, it becomes useless.

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#245

Post by PetahNZ » Mon, Feb 24, 2020, 9:12 PM UTC

jcrites wrote: post #187

daenz wrote: post #6

This happened to me with AWS somewhat recently[0], and I never found out exactly what happened. I just chalk it up to some dev made a mistake and didn't tell anyone. It's pretty alarming when things like this happen though. 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21326014

I've been involved in using Route 53 to manage thousands of DNS zones, and haven't come across something like that. I'd recommend putting in a support request via the account that was affected to ensure that it gets looked at. If you haven't already, you might consider checking the CloudTrail logs for the account in question to see if there were any API commands related to the zone.

Although not DNS related, I have had weird things happen on AWS, such as spikes of 5xx errors reported from CloudFront which was backed by ELB/EB, but the ELB is showing no errors. Even after contacting AWS support they couldn't resolve it, said they required application logs, but there is no logs because the requests never reached the application servers.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#246

Post by iudqnolq » Mon, Feb 24, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

wu_187 wrote: post #207

nodesocket wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder; when a domain is suspended, why don't you send out a courtesy notification e-mail?

what if their email address is @ the domain

I think it's pretty common advice that anything domain-related needs to be a different email. I've heard that, and I've only ever admin'd my personal domain. For exactly that reason I registered for Cloudflare with a gmail account.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#247

Post by iudqnolq » Mon, Feb 24, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #223

bithaze wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, the horror of recommending a public forum. (/s, of course.) A fair number of questions aren't unique - product questions, how to use an API, etc. Someone may have asked a similar question, in which case you'll find an answer, find it faster than it'll take to hear back from the support team, and it deflects an unnecessary (already answered) ticket. That should be a win all around. Now if you do have a novel quest…

When your entire site and suite of applications are offline, especially during business hours, waiting who knows how long for a support queue isn't really an option. Outages like this can kill a business or cost millions.

(op here). To be fair to Cloudflare a business with millions on the line should be paying a lot more money to Cloudflare than I, a college student with significantly less on the line, would. If I had the option to pay $1,000 right now and get everything back up instantly I wouldn't take it because it isn't worth that much to me.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#248

Post by dependenttypes » Mon, Feb 24, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

lexicality wrote: post #31

djsumdog wrote: post #17

I really had a strong dislike for Cloudflare after they banned certain customers for political reasons[1]. The CEO mentioned how maybe it wasn't the right thing to do .. and then they did it again. There aren't really any self-hosted solutions for DDoS protection like Cloudflare since it requires things happening in the network layer. Implementing a solution would require access to monitor and reshape the local netwo…

While there are a lot of reasons not to trust cloudflare, the fact that they stopped hosting nazis and pedophiles doesn't seem like a good one to open with imo

> and pedophiles

Is that a reference to 8chan? Because if so I am pretty sure that they removed controversial boards of this form a few years back - long before cloudflare banned them.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#249

Post by clowd » Mon, Feb 24, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

wu_187 wrote: post #207

nodesocket wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder; when a domain is suspended, why don't you send out a courtesy notification e-mail?

what if their email address is @ the domain

Well, that's poor planning on the user's part. In this case the OP stated he registered using a gmail address.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#250

Post by falcolas » Mon, Feb 24, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

iudqnolq wrote: post #173

falcolas wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, a lot of cellular providers have an email gateway for delivering SMS messages. There's also paid SMS gateways, and options for providing arbitrary push notifications to smartphones.

I'm pretty sure the free email gateways have no posted SLA. Plus, that requires a reliable email server, which would also need its own monitoring.

This was a few (3) years past, but they accepted root@localhost sendmail messages just fine in most cases, and delivered alerts within a minute or two of sending. We didn't rely on this long term, but it was a "good enough" first pass.

I'd probably recommend using one of the gateways (or a more fully-featured service like Pagerduty) for more serious businesses, but for personal use (or where an outage detected the next day isn't crippling), it's remarkably useful.