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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

#301

Post by rgbrenner »

last_responder wrote: post #284
pffft8888 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I was just about to code a key part of our startup's platform using workers and durable objects. I had zero idea that workers are intended for html output and that if they were used for JSON-RPC they would ban us if we are too successful. Crazy. The whole point of the service is free egress. What a joke. Pass. Will look into Fastly.

Im on the fence about whether this is accurate. There was an addendum posted somewhere in this thread that clarifies that non-html is just fine. In reality Im in the same exact position you are and maybe I just want to believe this is something other than that. I dont see why they would care about the content. There has to be something else to this story. I didn't deploy yet and this has me scared enough to get me th…

Sure it’s all fine until an ai or person bans your account for it. It’s cool to talk about what the contract says until you try that and find out their practices implement something else. Unless you plan to sue Cloudflare, the implementation is more important than the contract.

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

#303

Post by mkl »

kentonv wrote: post #223
webstrand wrote: post #219

I've been interested in using Cloudflare Workers as the backend for an application. I don't care about caching or anything like that, but, can I serve exclusively non-html content from my Cloudflare Workers? Or is that a violation of their ToS? I would have never honestly considered serving _html_ from a Worker. I hope we can get an extremely clear statement from Cloudflare on what their policy is.

You can serve non-HTML content from Workers. This is explicitly called out in the supplemental terms for the Developer Platform here: https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-terms/ (I'm the lead engineer on Workers. I don't know what happened to OP, though; I'm not personally looped into that conversation.)

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think that's explicit at all (I've tried to understand this before). The only mentions of HTML are in "(iv) Workers KV, Durable Objects, and R2, storage offerings used to serve HTML and non-HTML content": Workers KV, not Workers.

Meanwhile, section "2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content" of the terms says: "The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. If we determine you have breached this Section 2.8, we may immediately suspend or restrict your use of the Services, or limit End User access to certain of your resources through the Services."

Serving a "disproportionate percentage of [...] non-HTML content is prohibited". To my understanding, that means that web APIs are allowed, but only if they don't return a disproportionate percentage of non-HTML, since the supplemental terms don't expressly allow it (e.g. no JSON-only APIs).

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

#304

Post by vertis »

dicknuckle wrote: post #176
vertis wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the height of knee-jerk reactions, worse still it's largely pointless. Unless you're big enough to negotiate a specific contract with a cloud provider you're always going to be at the mercy of their catch-all policy. The only way to actually be protected in this case is to run a multi-cloud strategy. Even then it's only going to protect you so far if you piss off the powers-that-be / community (see the hostin…

If the redundancy is already in place to not fully rely on cloudflare's product (whatever it is, DNS, R2, etc) the it's not a kneejerk reaction. It's an "I don't want to wake up to all our stuff running only on the backup provider because cloudflare shut us down for seemingly no reason with no warning". It's avoiding unnecessary alerts and triage for the ops team by snipping an apparent liability from the stack. I've…

So instead you're running only on the backup provider now. Congratulations on invalidating your multi-cloud strategy. You've failed to understand that the core reason you had that strategy is that any of them can let you down.

Every single one of the cloud providers has had instances of this kind of problem. It's somewhat an inevitability of the way they all work. Eventually someone triggers an automated system somewhere and gets taken down. Or has outages that they shouldn't have had.

Better cloudflare where the CTO hangs out on HN, than Google where both the ban and the appeal are not even humans with empathy.

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

#305

Post by d1sxeyes »

capableweb wrote: post #256
ajdude wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this is the norm when ML algorithms are at the wheel. Nobody can conclusively tell why an AI restricted an account; they can only guess. I don't know if this is the case for CF but it seems to be for other businesses.

> Unfortunately this is the norm when ML algorithms are at the wheel. Nobody can conclusively tell why an AI restricted an account; they can only guess. I don't think it's usually that they don't know what's going on, but that they don't want to tell you, because they think that's giving away too many details. I've been flagged in many systems as I move around in the world quite a bit, so sometimes I use a credit car…

Normally banks are restricted from explaining why your account was locked. It’s not necessarily their fault.

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

#306

Post by nullcaution »

smcin wrote: post #288
nullcaution wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not OK to be like "HN I had a bad experience... That is rather aggressive?? Maybe thry live in another time zone and are asleep, or have other obligations like school pickup. Given them at least 24 hours to respond. sheesh...

Ok, but it's reasonable to suspect other users might also have had their accounts banned if it had been a systematic outage or ML hiccup, and given there's a 24hr limit to that ban becoming permanent, it's reasonable to expect an update soon as possible, even if that update is just a one-line "our status is X but we still don't know why this happened to us".

What? no. On the flip side what if their company is convulsing at the possibility of being offline for a few days due to the issue, updating a HN post would be their lowest priority untill they find a solution. Give them a break, OP owes us nothing.

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

#307

Post by NicoJuicy »

nolok wrote: post #252
NicoJuicy wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare is really transparant about things ( eg. outages). Reality is that Cloudflare serves 60% of the internet and this issue popped up. They are checking it internally what happened, as I understand from jgrahamc.

I don't think you realize it, but your answer while being wrong on many levels isn't even saying what you think it is saying. Reading your message, what one understands is "Cloudflare has so much on their hand you would be stupid to give them your business and think they would have time to deal with it", aka run away.

That's not what it says. Having many employees means you need to improve processes sometimes.

I actually don't know any businesses ( except solo ones) that don't have issues tbh. It's part of having employees.

That cloudfare handles 60% of the internet, just makes the odds really high for someone to complain.

It's resolved pretty quick and they are following up internally on what happened.

And the OP mentioned himselve what the issue was fyi. Check his latest post. This whole thing is about someone bending the rules concerning CW and he knows it :)

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

#308

Post by blast »

Veen wrote: post #31
jgrahamc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I replied when this has no upvotes and was nowhere near the front page.

That response misses the point by a wide margin.

jgrahamc responded directly to the point. Replying before it made the front page means this post didn't need to go viral or win the front page lottery in order to get support, making it a counterexample to the GP.

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

#309

Post by Dylan16807 »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #307
nolok wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you realize it, but your answer while being wrong on many levels isn't even saying what you think it is saying. Reading your message, what one understands is "Cloudflare has so much on their hand you would be stupid to give them your business and think they would have time to deal with it", aka run away.

That's not what it says. Having many employees means you need to improve processes sometimes. I actually don't know any businesses ( except solo ones) that don't have issues tbh. It's part of having employees. That cloudfare handles 60% of the internet, just makes the odds really high for someone to complain. It's resolved pretty quick and they are following up internally on what happened. And the OP mentioned himsel…

> This whole thing is about someone bending the rules concerning CW and he knows it :)

Hell no. Using workers for non-html content is not "bending the rules". It's a normal and encouraged use case. And saying "I'm a heavy user, is that maybe part of it?" does not mean they did anything wrong.

I don't see any signs of bending rules.

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

#310

Post by godzillabrennus »

Johnny555 wrote: post #290
bastardoperator wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I chase 10 of thousands of dollars a year when I can chase hundred of thousands or millions of dollars? You didn't talk to an actual salesperson, you spoke to a BDR. A BDR quantifies leads and determines if your spend is worth the time. If you didn't get a call back it's because the BDR identified you as small time. I'm not trying to be rude, just pointing out how many sales teams tend to work.

If that's the case, then they should set up a self-serve portal that these small-time customers can use to buy service if they are too small to warrant talking to an actual human. But I don't understand why he had to talk to enterprise sales at all if he was already a paying customer, why couldn't he just check a check-box for "High JSON file transfer" and pay an extra fee, then sales could contact him at their leisu…

Exactly! I would have bought via self serve or a channel partner but they don’t offer either purchasing option.
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