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

pawelurbanek.com

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

#81

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

jgrahamc wrote: 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.

My application[1] with similar rpm as OP received 503 status last month for about an hour first time in 1.5 years, I assumed it to be an one-off issue at CF end. It happened while I was using it and so I'm now concerned if it's a regular affair for my users, most of whom are not from my geographical location(data-center).

I'm a free plan user because my application is not monetized and obviously would switch to paid plan once it starts generating money. CF free plan has been indispensable for many such free projects.

UptimeRobot(Free) doesn't show anything fishy, except for CF error 521 occasionally. Again UptimeRobot requires paid version to check for HTTP status message, guess I'll have to do it or setup a self hosted(recommendations?) solution to monitor HTTP status of CF Free application.

If CF does perform rate limiting for such low rpm, I would prefer to be intimated as even third rate shared hosting providers do it and I hope CF wouldn't put their reputation on the line for something like this.

[1]https://needgap.com

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

#82

Post by avereveard »

buisi wrote: post #46
avereveard wrote: post #16

what a load of horseshit, this is my free plan 30 day stats, 2 order magnitude more request, a order magnitude less cache hits, no request limit in sight https://i.imgur.com/UOlW836.png edit: changed bull crap to the more appropriate horseshit in response to this unsubstantiated-bordering-conspiracy blog post, because if the former is already enough to triggers the community downvoting brigades, no point in showing a…

What sort of traffic patterns do you have? Are they dispersed between a large number of Cloudflare datacenters? Or few?

Very few, we're a regional level startup, the CF map doesn't show it well because it's per state and not per pop on the free account, but basically all hits in logs are marked MXP or FCO

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

#83

Post by avereveard »

pawurb wrote: post #68
avereveard wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You don't, but your monitors will show the 503 happening, how often, on which endpoint operation and in which regions; that will give you a pretty good picture of whether is actually your CDN layer or something else triggering the 503

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

#84

Post by talkingtab »

My cost benefit analysis is that the Cloudflare free plan is a bargain. At any time I can instantly turn on the protection I might need because I have already integrated Cloudflare into my infrastructure.

I am careful about what technologies I add to my stack because I am a sole developer, but Digital Ocean and Cloudflare have been big wins for me.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

capableweb wrote: post #9
jgrahamc wrote: 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.

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.

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by 40four »

Jamie9912 wrote: post #4

That does seem strange, I never experienced this myself. Also, I don't understand the use case for Cloudflare here, can you elaborate on "I’ve been using Cloudflare free plan for Abot"

I was wondering this myself. How exactly does a slack chatbot benefit from Cloudflare?

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

#87

Post by pdimitar »

jgrahamc wrote: 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.

I understand you can't share a customer's account details.

But can we at least get an update if this is the intended behaviour of the CF free plan accounts (so people know to upgrade) or is it an one-off incident?

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

#88

Post by jtbayly »

monkin wrote: post #67
matthewdgreen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They did get back to him. What evidence do you have that they were still investigating anything? They answered his questions and the answers were no good.

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

#89

Post by jtbayly »

oji0hub wrote: post #75
monkin wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What if he accuses them without justification? Which He's already doing that. Even if it turns out that he happens to be right, it's coincidence.

From where I sit he is entirely justified, and the only reason problem is getting fixed is precisely because he finally decided to warn others about this problem.

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

#90

Post by gcbirzan »

While this blog post has very little in the way of proof, we actually got screwed over by CF a few weeks back. Basically, one morning all requests started being slow: small responses would take 7 seconds (within a few milliseconds, if you accounted for the RTT to the edge) with 7 seconds TTFB, larger ones (not sure exactly what the threshold was, but it was hundreds of KiB, not MiB) would take 1 minute (again, almost exactly 1 minute), but these would just stream very slowly. All while having cf-cache-status: HIT.

It turned out we got throttled because we were serving some (a minority, something like 10% of the traffic) video files from the domain and they wanted us to upgrade to enterprise (from business, I think). We just stopped serving video through them.

The annoying part was that we weren't notified and, obviously, had some downtime (no way you can call a site loading in 5 minutes up). They said they have released an update that does notify customers when this happens, though.

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