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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#321

Post by JimDabell »

Aeolun wrote: post #154
JimDabell wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That sounds more or less the same as everything AWS produces.

No? My comment describes the exact opposite to AWS. The primary billing complaint people have with AWS is that there is no way to stop billing when you hit a predefined limit. Meanwhile, AWS devex looks awful from the outside, but if you have to deal with AWS they are very well organised.

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

#322

Post by Firerouge »

tardis_thad wrote: post #90
IanCal wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you saw a huge spike I feel like not letting you know before is totally unacceptable. Also, while that's in the terms that's a generic get out clause I know they need but doesn't at all help you figure out what services are ok.

No huge spikes at all, so not sure what triggered it.

Cloudflare seems to be claiming that you did have a huge spike.

> Traffic from this customer went suddenly from an average of 1,500 requests per second, and a 0.5MB payload per request, to 3,000 requests per second (2x) and more than 12MB payload per request (25x)

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/09/cloudflare_traffic_th...

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

#323

Post by tardis_thad »

Firerouge wrote: post #322
tardis_thad wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No huge spikes at all, so not sure what triggered it.

Cloudflare seems to be claiming that you did have a huge spike. > Traffic from this customer went suddenly from an average of 1,500 requests per second, and a 0.5MB payload per request, to 3,000 requests per second (2x) and more than 12MB payload per request (25x) https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/09/cloudflare_traffic_th...

I don't have a reason to not believe them in that regard, there was a spike, but it was not visible in analytics I have access to it seems.

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

#324

Post by tardis_thad »

_vufv wrote: post #169

OP, you have garnered a lot of sympathy by the HN community which I believe in part contributed to your problem being resolved. I think it would be fair to provide more info about what the issue was in the end. It's not OK to be like "HN I had a bad experience with Company X" and then be like "k, thx @jgrahamc, bye" when your complaint gets resolved due to the attention it received. There are so many questions this l…

Here's good summary of what happened https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34696763

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

#325

Post by smcin »

nullcaution wrote: post #306
smcin wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Noone said it was their highest priority. But given that HN has a daily stream of horror-stories/complaints from SaaS/cloud/payment users, it would be unreasonable to expect us to wade through them if we don't at some point get a brief follow-up saying what the outcome (and possibly the root-cause) were, and in what timeframe, and how to avoid/fix this for other users, or else which alternative companies to use.

And to requote the OP back to you like I did above, given that customer support told them there's a 24hr limit to that ban becoming permanent and tried to help them get it resolved before then, in this case it was in fact entirely reasonable to expect at least a one-line update within (in this specific case) a day, since either way the outcome would be known.

And in fact here's the OP's followup post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34721870

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

#326

Post by ignoramous »

yamtaddle wrote: post #254
ignoramous wrote: post #62

> ...anyways I get it, perhaps I pay too little and should be on enterprise plan already If you're on Workers Unbound, you're probably paying closer to ~$800/mo for 4b requests; or if you're on Workers Bundled, then ~2000/mo. What were you quoted for the Enterprise plan? I thought those start at $1500/mo?

> I thought those start at $1500/mo? I wasn't able to get them to size something down under high-$4,000/m, when I looked at this a couple years ago. They acted like I was being annoying just for thinking there might exist any option between $200 and $5,000. We ended up somewhere else that was much cheaper for the actual service we needed. Every other company in this space I talked to was happy to come up with a plan…

Thanks. Appreciate your response.

Crazy to think that Cloudflare who are super aggressive napping up upstarts looking for cheaper alternatives to the Big 3 (Azure, GCP, AWS), are this incompetent in closing out Enterprise deals. I thought they were as adept at Sales as they are at Engineering.

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

#327

Post by rexreed »

rexreed wrote: post #180

From an earlier comment I made regarding Stripe shutting merchants down, and those merchants resorting to posting on HN and getting someone on HN to advocate for them to resolve their problem [0]: "The main issue is not that [COMPANY] is working hard to protect itself and its customers, but that customers feel very powerless in these situations. When it takes a massive effort to get attention, especially if you're sm…

My point is proven. @jgrahamc never responded. Because just like all the rest of you, I'm too small and unimportant to get the attention that others have. That's why resorting to HN to get your critical support needs met doesn't work for the 99% of us.

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

#328

Post by ignoramous »

luckylion wrote: post #134
ignoramous wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why didn't you use the load-balancer service? Speaking from experience, if you only need rudimentary L7 load balancing, then Cloudflare Workers is as good as it gets. > How much are you paying for the workers/month? Per my estimate, probably between $600 to $2000 for Workers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639930

> Speaking from experience, if you only need rudimentary L7 load balancing, then Cloudflare Workers is as good as it gets. What would you do in Workers that you couldn't do with Load Balancing? LB handles origin health, can do traffic steering, session affinity etc included. With Workers, you'd need to take care of all that. I see a point if the Workers do some lifting / caching / transforming etc before passing on t…

You're right: Workers are not a generic L7 load balancer, but of course plenty useful for the other stuff you point out (for ex, transformations and caching).
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