Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cloudflare took down our website

robindev.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 483 posts

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#131

Post by Dylan16807 »

aeyes wrote: post #108

From personal experience I know that 10TB per month is like 30k/year and SSL for SaaS is around 40k/year on the enterprise plan. No idea about pricing for having your own IP. I have no idea why Cloudflare would ask you to use these two features. SSL for SaaS is only useful if you want to add domains and certificates via API. I have had my fair share of negative experience with Cloudflare but this is next level bad. U…

From personal experience I know that 10TB per month is like 30k/year

What the hell? That's way more than AWS costs, 90% of which would be egress fees. And cloudflare has done a lot of marketing to rightfully call out those egress fees as far too high.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#132

Post by RyeCombinator »

silverquiet wrote: post #32
EligibleDecoy wrote: post #20

The recommendations to, basically, not keep all your eggs in one basket and have backups of config are surely good ideas. But if you have to plan on dropping cloudflare in some arbitrary 24 hour window, perhaps it’s CF that’s the problem. This sort of stuff and other recent articles about CF are so worrying that it’s now being run by the finance team (hence why every email they got in this article was from sales team…

I’d say be wary of any public company and actively make plans to get out of any company that gets acquired by private equity. Actually had a sales call with Cloudflare in the last month and I got some bad vibes from the whole experience. We did not end up going with them.

May I ask who you ended up going with? We had a similar experience recently and have some concerns with anything on CF.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#133

Post by sersi »

scrollaway wrote: post #49
lightedman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Now this needs a bit of context on what they are talking about. We do have multiple domains that mostly act as mirrors to our main domain. We have these for a few reasons. One is that since we are a casino, we have different regulatory requirements we need to comply with in many countries. For example, many games are only available in some countries. Some countries we block completely. Then we have a few different d…

When it comes to laws and taxes, "comply" and "evade" tend to be synonyms. "In order to comply with tax regulations and donor laws, we had to structure our activities in order to make it possible for political donations to be classified as regular consulting income".

At least from discussions I've had over the years with my accountants, comply and evade are very different. Evasion is when you are doing something that's explicitly illegal. Optimization and compliance is when you comply with the law while trying as much as possible to reduce your tax. In some cases, there's a bit of a grey area where you use multiple structures that according to your accountant should comply with the law but in a way that has never actually been tested legally. That last part tends to be named "optimization" rather than "compliance"

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#134

Post by pornel »

ghoshbishakh wrote: post #11

Is this why cloudflare manages to be cheap?

Their business model is described in their S1 filing: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...

* Cloudflare operates at a scale where its caching saves a lot of bandwidth, which saves ISPs money, which makes Cloudflare an attractive partner for peering and co-location.

* CDN is a platform on top of which Cloudflare can offer a lot of additional services that used to be expensive dedicated middleboxes.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#135

Post by Dylan16807 »

perihelions wrote: post #37

- "This also means that if a country DNS-blocks our main domain, a secondary domain may still be available. This could arguably be seen as a violation of the Cloudflare TOS, as they wrote above." Attorneys love it when people put everything in writing like this.

This is legally equivalent to "we have domain aliases". Lots of sites have those. Do you think that's really the problem here?

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#136

Post by Tao3300 »

Hikikomori wrote: post #16
candiddevmike wrote: post #5

Sounds like OP is a casino and plays domain games to avoid regulatory interest. Recommend reading article carefully before reacting to the headline. Hopefully Cloudflare provides a perspective.

How does paying $10k a month solve that?

Nice place you got here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.

Except the "place" isn't Mom and Pop's bodega, it's a casino dodging countries blocking its main domain.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#137

Post by dingnuts »

J_tt wrote: post #99
getlawgdon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. My take is the casino structured its business to comply, not to evade interest. Further, I don't see how Cloudflare benefits by taking on the risk to charge more to help a customer avoid scrutiny. More like: they know it's a humming business and want a piece.

The way I read the screenshots of the emails from the articles seemed to suggest that something the authors company was doing was causing issues with IP reputation on CloudFlares range. Them very aggressively highlighting the BYO IP feature and then even suggesting third parties to rent IPs from strikes me as a significant detour from their normal “script” (having dealt with their AU sales team before).

this is exactly what is happening. Cloudflare uses an anycast network, so IPs are shared by default.

this customer is damaging Cloudflare IP reputation which hurts other customers. Cloudflare can either fire the customer to protect other customers using Cloudflare IPs, or force this customer to use their own IPs and damage/manage their own IP reputation.

unfortunately this is expensive and OP is mad they can't do their legally fraught gambling operation on Cloudflare's addresses for free

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#138

Post by pteraspidomorph »

587846 wrote: post #66

This is my first post on Hacker News as I primarily just browse. This situation kept me intrigued, wanting to know how it would unfold. The Google Cloud situation and all these little happenings, including the proliferation of Gen AI into everything, make me long for the days when companies had their mainframes onsite, in closets or separate rooms, away from CDNs and cloud networks. It seems like a better idea to use…

Unfortunately it's difficult and expensive to scale those traditional solutions to the modern world of billions of internet users located all over the world. It's still quite slow to access a server on the other side of the globe. It's less noticeable for an american user accessing an american company's resources.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#139

Post by skrebbel »

tempaccount420 wrote: post #121
skrebbel wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a similar experience. Stuff suddenly started breaking for 10% of our traffic, support dragged their feet for weeks wrt any sort of insight as to what was going on, and then the answer was “you’re over an undocumented limit, try the enterprise plan”. Fwiw this was some years ago and we moved most of our stuff away from them in response. I didn't get the feeling that this was malicious from their side, more like…

> undocumented limit this makes it sound like the limit is automatic or applies non-discriminately to customers, but my first instinct is that this was manually set by someone, maybe the sales reps again?

Yeah so I think it might’ve been a real system limit of sorts. Something timing out somewhere, some pipe getting clogged in a way that their edge nodes couldn’t scale their way out of the way they usually do. Eg because the scaling/monitoring code didn't detect that particular pipe getting clogged etc. We had weird long-running http requests at the time.

Note, this is pure conjecture, I’m just well aware from my own engineering experience that stuff can break under varied load in all kinds of unexpected ways. A large part of the work of an infrastructure business is going “woa shit I hadnt expected that we could fail in that way too” and then building infrastructure to be able to handle that case. You simply can’t predict everything your customers are going to throw at you. I think this was what happened + not sufficiently knowledgeable/experienced support. But I admit that I’m really just guessing.

The alternative would be that CF purposefully dropped 10% of our traffic to convince us to upgrade to enterprise, and despite our bad experience, I don’t believe they’re that kind of business. And if they were they handled it very badly because it took them 3 weeks of feet-dragging to even bring up the upsell.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#140

Post by marziply »

CydeWeys wrote: post #41

$250/month sounds like nothing at all for a site with a claimed 4M MAU. The enterprise rate of $10k/month sounds a lot more reasonable. If everything presented here is accurate, I'm not understanding the sharp discrepancy in pricing tiers. If anything they should've already been paying more than $10k/month for massive traffic on the basic plan and then be able to save money by paying for massive scale when negotiatin…

The amount shouldn't matter, it's the unprofessional response from CF that's of concern. Also, the author doesn't necessarily say that they would be unwilling to pay more or even negotiate a higher price. The author has made it explicit that CF were more or less unwilling for any practical conversation. That, to me, is the problem. A lack of professional courtesy, communication, and transparency. Obviously there may be details from this exchange which have been omitted but if I were in this position, I would be equally upset.
Post reply on HN