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Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project

pawelurbanek.com

31–40 of 128 posts

Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project

#32
post #3

I am talking internally with the customer support team about what happened to this customer's traffic. It is definitively not the case that doing "four requests per minute" gets you rate limited.

Is it possible that this person's free-plan traffic was routed through a POP that was under attack? Then, upon upgrading to Pro the routing rules for the account were modified to avoid under-attack data centers.

Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great first step would be to take responsibility for what the customer has proven to happen. "It is definitively not the case that doing" is directly at odds with what the author provides, you might want to reframe your message to "it shouldn't be like this but unfortunately it is like this right now, sorry" rather than dismissing the author with that they are not correct.

I am taking responsibility for what the customer is reporting here.

I think they are taking your use of "would" literally, and not reading it as an implied "should".

Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project

#34
post #2

This seems a bit outrageous if true. They advertise as a DDOS protection service and then do this?

I've been using Cloudflare for a site that has around 400k requests per day on a Free plan (although I did buy a dedicated certificate and a domain from them) and Cloudflare has been very reliable to me except few hiccups in the past. I've had an instance of Cloudflare failing only on a single region, but after talking to support it turns out to be some route caching issue on their side, which subsequently fixed. I would not assume anything until there's some clarification on Cloudflare side. It might just be a bug.

Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project

#38
post #29

Today there was a topic on HN about customers who complain about limiting free tiers. That’s a great example of it, especially from someone who provides paid SaaS product. Free tier is awesome for small websites, keeping domains and many other things. But if you run business who earns, then just pay for that god damn thing, and stop ranting. :-)

Someone came on HN to report that a free-tier product is failing in a way that’s undetectable and doesn’t make sense as described by the products’ marketing materials, and the resolution is to pay (a small amount) for the upgraded version. One of the Cloudflare engineers* immediately responds to the article saying he’s looking into things because this shouldn’t be happening. Everything seemed to be going so well in this story. I only continued reading the comments to find the first one where someone turns this into a story of blame for the poster being cheap, and your post was it.

ETA: * The CTO of Cloudflare

Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project

#39
Could this be explained by something like “there was some bug causing this person’s config to be in a weird state (on the cloudflare side), and changing the payment tier merely gave the system a kick that got it out of the bad state? After all, the person payed $20pm not because they thought it would give a better reliability but because they wanted better support for a weird issue. I’m not really very appalled by the idea that free users don’t get great support.

Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project

#40
post #3

I am talking internally with the customer support team about what happened to this customer's traffic. It is definitively not the case that doing "four requests per minute" gets you rate limited.

While we are on the subject of rate limiting and such, does Cloudflare allow using its service for serving video files for a media heavy social media app where we store the videos on Backblaze B2? I’m working on such an app, and am hoping to use Cloudflare + Backblaze B2, because of the bandwidth alliance. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/bandwidth-alliance/ However, the Terms of Service say: > 2.8 Limitation on Serv…

For what is is worth, I've been using their Free Tier to serve over 10k requests per hour with ~60% html / ~40% media (mainly pictures, very few videos) and I've never had a problem.

However, for a CDN for video content YMMV. Perhaps you should try contacting them directly to have a written estimate.

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