I was doing a couple of POSTs a minute on a paid plan, and I saw a random 2-3% of request to be failing they never hit my backend, speaking to support wasn't helpful at all, that's when we moved away from Cloudflare, I wouldn't base my business on it.
Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project
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Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project
#62You can blame Cloudflare for not meeting their promises on free tier. But you can't blame them for "hiding" the errors. You are responsible to monitor your service, and it's good practice to have that happen externally from your environment. If you have a public API, monitor it publicly. Things like Pingdom and synthetic monitoring exist for this reason.
Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project
#63I've always seen free plans as a way to get started. A great way for a startup to get things up before they get money rolling in. Then as you grow, you outgrow the free plan but by then you have the money to upgrade.
Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project
#64"I used a free service and it wasn't great"
Then use another service or pay for it.
This is highly unlikely to be as simple as the author conjects, we're talking about a service that processes an enormous amount of traffic and if what the author suggests is true, would someone else not have noticed by now? It's certainly possible that different infrastructure is used by free/paid plans, and perhaps this specific site was hosted on an unhealthy instance. But we don't have any external data points here to analyse - only those reported by Cloudflare, along with anecdotal reports.
Edit: I see the title has now been changed, at least we're reducing clickbait.
Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project
#65Has OP tried cloudfront (seeing that he uses AWS)?
this was my first question, but it seems like this was a price driven decision.
Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project
#66Is the issue with free services in general? Does any other vendor (AWS, Fastly or Akamai) offer a decent free service? It does seem to be more Marketing if you want to lock in customers before they get too big to switch.
Free Services like this are offered for 3 reasons
1. Marketing...
2. Data collection (after all if you are not paying you are the product) There is monetary value in collection, observation, and tracking of a vast amount of internet traffic.
3. Education. If you get people just starting out in their careers using your product or service for they hobby, personal project, etc then when they have a business need for some like your product or service they will just naturally choose you. Adobe and MS has been doing this for decades with low or no cost education licensing
Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project
#67Today 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 t…
It’s not the case with everyone, OP could wait until supports get back to him and investigates everything, and then push a pice on that. Bug -> Contact Support -> Wait for answer & solutions -> Happy or not ending.
What if he accuses them without justification? Which is probably a case here.
Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're on free plan you have no way to know if this has happened to your website.
> no way you can (and should) put monitors on the outside of your infrastructure as well as inside. I've multiples hitting the login page and robots file where I work, and never got an unaccounted 503
Like I wrote, for some integrations it is not possible to gather all the logs. Also how will you know that a client accessing your website in a browser gets 503 instead of your web page?
Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project
#69I 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.
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.
Proven is a strong word and rate limiting is not the only possible explanation. Something is happening and we don't know what.
Re: Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is SUPER scary, as a high volume website
If you're such a high volume site then why not pay for CDN/DDOS Protection? I'm amazed so many people feel this is something they deserve for free, and then complain when there's some kind of limitation on the free thing they're receiving.
If someone gave me a free car and I suddenly discovered that it had stopped working at 8:30am on Monday morning because the free car plan didn't support peak hour, just when I needed it most, I'd be annoyed as hell. This would be the case no matter how much I got paid at my job. Getting a nasty surprise because you didn't realise a product was inferior is upsetting for reasons that should be pretty obvious.
Admittedly the cloudflare free plan does say it's for things "that aren’t business-critical", but what does that actually mean in terms of resource quota and expected uptime?