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Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

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Re: Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

#141
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So HN to the rescue again. It's unfortunate (although the outcome is great for you!) that you have to go through the social media amplifier first.

Personally I maintain my opinion that problems getting fixed by HN are a bigger red flag than problems not getting fixed at all. The HN reader Upper Management Person either thinks putting out fires before they become higher profile failures is a cheaper way of avoiding bad press than instituting actual good policies with regards to not fucking over their customers, or they want to implement those policies but are no…

Well OP chose to use Cloudfare and stay on it. It's his choice.

Re: Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

#142

> when I got approached by Cloudflare sales team I explicitly asked if I can still be on pay as you go/self server model and reply was: Never entirely trust what is said to you to secure/continue a sale, unless you have it written in a contract. > … "Enterprise wise, that's up to you and you could likely get away with utilising self-serve as you go … especially if what sales say to you is couched in vague works like…

> Never entirely trust what is said to you to secure/continue a sale, unless you have it written in a contract. This time last week, Cloudflare shut off our access to one of their services we were using because we went over quota. Well, we had actually negotiated overage charges and did actually have this in our contract. They turned the service off anyway instead of applying the overage charges we had agreed. This i…

Did you resolve it? If so, did you have to use their HN customer support or did they have a phone number?

Re: Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

#143
post #28

Cloudflare: MitMaaS https://framagit.org/dCF/deCloudflare/-/blob/master/readme/e...

Wow that's a whole lot of ire, rivalling some other large tech firms. Definitely worth investigating. I consider Cloudflare to be an annoyance generally but I hadn't put it in context to what they ultimately have control over.

Re: Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

#144
post #135

Glad to hear this got resolved. Heads-up that your name may be infringing on a US trademark held by the BBC.

Trademarks are for specific categories of goods/services. The trademark is for: - Audiovisual media - Books - Clothing - Toys - Entertainment events

The USPTO record for this trademark includes several more categories:

https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:lq...

In particular, if I ran this business, I would be concerned that I was infringing on this part of the trademark:

"( computer software for use in downloading audio, video, still and moving images and data in compressed and uncompressed form from a computer or communication network; )) [ computer software for use in database management; downloadable electronic publications, namely, magazines, books, newsletters, pamphlets, printed guides, catalogues, manuals and programs featuring entertainment, instruction, education, sport and news; ] "

That said, IANAL and specifically IANAIPL so as I said just a heads-up.

Re: Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

#145
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So HN to the rescue again. It's unfortunate (although the outcome is great for you!) that you have to go through the social media amplifier first.

Personally I maintain my opinion that problems getting fixed by HN are a bigger red flag than problems not getting fixed at all. The HN reader Upper Management Person either thinks putting out fires before they become higher profile failures is a cheaper way of avoiding bad press than instituting actual good policies with regards to not fucking over their customers, or they want to implement those policies but are no…

They may need the user's details to look into it and determine if it's an actual issue. When they have done that, it makes sense to fix it for that user at the same time. They should definitely come back and tell us that they have fixed it and why it happened as soon as possible afterwards, but I would understand if it takes a few weeks given normal levels of corporate bureaucracy.

That said, it's bad that this happened in the first place, and it makes me a little anxious about using Cloudflare's services.

Re: Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

#146
post #101
post #2

I've asked internally to understand this.

Can you clarify the terms an conditions about Cloudflare R2 please? On the R2 page https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ we see: > No more egress charges. You shouldn’t have to pay to access your data. Pay no egress charges for data accessed from R2. Our affordable and consistent pricing means no more surprise bills. Whereas I think the non-HTML traffic terms still apply to R2. Or do they?

The supplemental terms about the developer platform apply to R2 (https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-terms/#cloudflare-de...). Same goes for Workers itself (the Cache api within Workers is also covered under these vs the non-HTML content restriction applies to the normal CDN path).

Re: Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. I'm taking all this too personally.

Wow this is the worst take about customer service I have ever seen by a company. You cause huge issues for business with the touch of a button, and when they require help and don’t think the cause was acceptable behavior, they’re whining? Just wow.

Those are the people in control of like half the internet traffic in the world.

Let that sink in.

Re: Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

#148
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So HN to the rescue again. It's unfortunate (although the outcome is great for you!) that you have to go through the social media amplifier first.

Personally I maintain my opinion that problems getting fixed by HN are a bigger red flag than problems not getting fixed at all. The HN reader Upper Management Person either thinks putting out fires before they become higher profile failures is a cheaper way of avoiding bad press than instituting actual good policies with regards to not fucking over their customers, or they want to implement those policies but are no…

> "Don't send me your details, I've fixed the problem for you and everyone else with the same issue" = green flag

While I agree with the sentiment, fixing it in this way for any org of the CF-like scale will take days or weeks (because of peer reviews, compliance etc.). Fixing it fast by adding exception in some control panel is probably fine.

What's alarming is that the escalation process didn't really change for all the time I'm using Cloudflare as a customer (8 yrs now?) and watching jgrahamc's involvement. The fact he has a bat signal trained on the HN is a major red flag.

Re: Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a large bank, my internal backend would receive couple orders more requests from other internal apps and users and probably similar traffic. It is very easy (relatively) to build a SaaS platform that serves this amount of traffic and this can be done by even a one determined individual or a small startup team. I don't think it is useful to measure the size of the company in the amount of requests they ar…

Are you doing RAM-aaS or something? Must be alot of redundant data back and forth.

I said nothing about the application and you already know everything about it.

Seems like I spent quarter of century in this business for naught.

Re: Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

#150

Around 12:00 UTC today ban has been lifted for my account thanks to @jgrahamc - thanks!

It would be interesting to see what caused the ban and what will be done by Cloudflare to prevent this from happening in the future. It is good that your issue got solved but I hope others that don't know about HN can also benefit from a more structural fix.
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