Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#401

Post by dntbnmpls » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 12:06 PM UTC

andrewstuart wrote: post #125

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.

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…

> Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed.

Pretty much every technology company already have "ombudsman" for their important clients.

> That "contact a friend in the business who can actually get things done" is a necessary part of a large support organisation and it simply does not exist yet in any tech company that I know of.

I can assure you that every tech company has these "friends" available for their most important clients/customers.

Whether it makes sense for companies to make these contacts available to every customer is another matter.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#402

Post by Aeolun » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 12:25 PM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #333

Aeolun wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, but DNS entries are actual data. I certainly don’t know what all the DNs entries on my 15 domains are, so if they disappear it’s not going to be easy to get it all back.

> I certainly don’t know what all the DNs entries on my 15 domains are, so if they disappear it’s not going to be easy to get it all back. I hope for your sake that right now you are fixing that problem?

More like another thing has been added to the TODO list.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#403

Post by zadokshi » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 12:53 PM UTC

stevekemp wrote: post #176

znpy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered Route53 ?

Wrapped with git; https://dns-api.com/

Love the idea of this. I was about to switch providers then discovered that they are 3-4 times more expensive than my current provider for small-mid sized websites (currently on dnsmadeeasy.com)

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#404

Post by nickjj » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

KptMarchewa wrote: post #397

nickjj wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's useful and it's very much worth it to give support a salary where they are enthusiastic to be employed. If someone uses your product or service and has an issue, the first contact they have with your company is through support. A crappy support experience could easily be the difference between having a life time customer valued at thousands of dollars, or your customer feeling frustrated and going to ano…

In my experience companies use not only "tickets closed per hour", but combine those with "average score" of 1-5 stars.

Yeah but at a large company the ratings don't matter too much in the end because it ends up being a spreadsheet game focused on hiring for the lowest cost while maintaining a level of support that's barely 1 notch above "horrible support".

So if you end up hiring someone who produces a bunch of 1-2 star ratings, you just fire them and try again with someone else until you get someone who produces mostly 3s+.

In the end you would think this would result in better support but it never does. You just end up turning over a lot of support employees, and the user experience for the customer is still bad because you need to first get through a robot menu, then talk to an entry level support who will happily let you pour your soul out on the details of the problem for 5 minutes, and then at the end they are like "oh, I can't do that, but I can forward you to someone who can".

And now you get to be put on hold again, anticipating by coincidence you'll probably lose the connection, and if you're lucky now you get someone who is capable of understanding the problem and you get to re-tell the whole situation again.

Before you know it, with wait times included you're 20 minutes into this and you just barely got to the point where you might get help for the issue. Businesses could solve this problem, but they don't. Instead of hiring better support folks for more money, they put the burden on the customer to have to wade through a bunch of BS and essentially train their entry level support for free -- and it's worse than free too because you're paying that company money for their service and you're trading time from your life to do it.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#405

Post by lexicality » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 2:08 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #41

lexicality wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think it is a problem when you talk about fear of ideas. You can label anyone as a Nazi today, and when you ban people, you kinda give them power. It shows you're afraid of their ideas, and the persecution can embolden them or give them a sense of legitimacy. It can being the Streisand Effect to their cause, taking a no-name site no one knew or cared about and blowing it up into something everyone is deeply aware o…

> You can label anyone as a Nazi today

Again, this is in reaction to literal neo-nazis getting deplatformed.

If your first reaction to seeing nazis get in trouble is to ask "well what if I get called a nazi?" then you might need to do some introspection my dude...

Also - deplatforming is incredibly effective at severely limiting people's reach. Anyone know what Milo Yiannopoulos is up to these days?

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#406

Post by andreitp1 » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

I had the same thing happen to me with the same domain - twice. It just disappeared from Cloudflare without any notice. I run multiple domains on the same CF account, yet this has only happened with that specific one, which uses a somewhat unusual TLD (.do).

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#407

Post by tristor » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 2:13 PM UTC

Intermernet wrote: post #391

martin1975 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He already knows what I'm talking about. And the evidence is out there, just search "Matthew Prince censorship". Abusing 1A rights because he feels like it, hiding under the corporate veil. It's about as un-American as it gets.

When you use the phrase "un-American" please remember that you're talking to an international audience who see being American as a completely orthogonal issue to any type of behaviour. It makes you seem parochial, and slightly nationalistic.

To be clear, the parent comment is written by someone who is upset that CloudFlare terminated service to violent neo-Nazis. The fact their language is nationalistic is unsurprising.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#408

Post by lexicality » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

dependenttypes wrote: post #248

lexicality wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had heard that they were still at it? But if not - that's good

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#409

Post by icedchai » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

Legogris wrote: post #373

icedchai wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been self hosting DNS for 20+ years. It's easy as pie. I have a couple name servers on my home network (business cable) and another on a VPS.

Cool, do you have any software to recommend for a casual power user who would like something a bit more lean than BIND from a configuration perspective? pdns seems nice, and there's an official terraform provider for it as well.

I use BIND. It is actually fairly lean. I used to run it on 386 systems with 16 megs of RAM.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#410

Post by sbarre » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

wolco wrote: post #168

sbarre wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds nice in theory, but you know that tons of people would just go straight to the ombudsman, thinking they can jump the support queue or bypass established process. The "shit filtering" workload would be tremendous..

The way this works everywhere is you go through the normal support process until you reach top level support if the situation isn't resolve you go to the ombudmen. If you go before you tried support they will direct you to support first.

Yes I understand the process, but as I said that "they will direct you to support first" work would be non-stop..

Not saying it doesn't work, just that a lot of people wouldn't follow the process, and anyone who sets this up should be prepared for a lot of triage work.