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Cloudflare took down our website

robindev.substack.com

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Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#141

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#142

Post by macNchz »

endisneigh wrote: post #103
jrochkind1 wrote: post #77

I have been hearing stories from developers/entrepeneurs about Cloudflare being very weird to deal with: "We'd like to talk to you about an enterprise plan." "No thanks, I'm fine with the free plan." "Based on your traffic, we'd like to talk to you about an enteprrise plan." "Is there a traffic limit on the free plan?" "No, there is no limit. But based on your traffic, we require you to get an enteprirse plan." [Give…

I wonder why they don’t just have clear limits - seems like it would make it easier to grok.

Presumably it gives them a lot more flexibility in deciding who has to pay more.

With published thresholds they’re less able to upsell someone just shy of the limit without publicly changing the tiers. Doing that has the potential to upset existing customers who are over the new limit all at once, while also providing intel to competitors looking to undercut them.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#143

Post by Dylan16807 »

gruez wrote: post #127
albert_e wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate: If a country A decides to block twitter.com but forgets to ban x.com which remains available ... is Twitter engaging in illegality / violation of CDN terms of service?

Like most things in the legal system, it depends on intent. It's pretty obvious that twitter's rebrand to x.com was an actual rebrand and not some way of evading domain bans.

The author claims a reasonable intent and they give a traffic number that proves they're not doing "domain rotation".

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#145

Post by gostsamo »

endisneigh wrote: post #103
jrochkind1 wrote: post #77

I have been hearing stories from developers/entrepeneurs about Cloudflare being very weird to deal with: "We'd like to talk to you about an enterprise plan." "No thanks, I'm fine with the free plan." "Based on your traffic, we'd like to talk to you about an enteprrise plan." "Is there a traffic limit on the free plan?" "No, there is no limit. But based on your traffic, we require you to get an enteprirse plan." [Give…

I wonder why they don’t just have clear limits - seems like it would make it easier to grok.

They don't want you to know where you are. It's like Kafka but the liberterian edition.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#146

Post by intelVISA »

andersa wrote: post #83

Do we know of any alternative services providing at least the basics of what Cloudflare does? Such as: - Unmetered DDoS protection (i.e. no absurd base fee for it existing) - Unmetered rate limiting (protection against cost attacks on the next) - Reasonably priced object storage (i.e. not more expensive than numbers listed here https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress)

Easy to build in a few weekends, grab a few geodistributed racks with Mellanox NICs and do HW offload. Obj storage is a similar NVME DMA approach.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#147

Post by threecheese »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #116
endisneigh wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why they don’t just have clear limits - seems like it would make it easier to grok.

Genuine question: Why did you use `grok` in that context?

Are you also weirdly angry that Musk used the term for their “he has one so I also must have one” LLM? *Stole* the term? That’s a special word, and out of the mouth of anyone but Valentine Michael is obscenity.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#148

Post by gruez »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #14
brigadier132 wrote: post #8

has this happened to any businesses that were not questionably legal?

There are links in the article, for example: "Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639212 Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31336515

In both examples you provided it was less "banned" and more "switch to a higher priced plan or we'll kick you off". In both cases they seem to be bandwidth related, and in the second case specifically they mentioned having hundreds of terabytes bandwidth but were upset for being told to upgrade to the $200 plan.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#149

Post by jsheard »

endisneigh wrote: post #103
jrochkind1 wrote: post #77

I have been hearing stories from developers/entrepeneurs about Cloudflare being very weird to deal with: "We'd like to talk to you about an enterprise plan." "No thanks, I'm fine with the free plan." "Based on your traffic, we'd like to talk to you about an enteprrise plan." "Is there a traffic limit on the free plan?" "No, there is no limit. But based on your traffic, we require you to get an enteprirse plan." [Give…

I wonder why they don’t just have clear limits - seems like it would make it easier to grok.

I think it being difficult to grok is the point, if they laid down exactly how much they want you to pay for bandwidth then it would be easy to go price shopping between them and the competition. But when it's "free" bandwidth, with a fuzzy line where it stops being free, and ambiguous pricing when it does, they can hook people in with a great deal and try to shake them down later.

I still encounter people who refuse to believe that CF bandwidth isn't really free, when you can easily demonstrate that it's not by just observing who uses them. If their bandwidth truly was free and unlimited with no catch whatsoever then every bandwidth giant like Imgur would use CF, but they don't. Imgur uses Fastly, probably because it's cheaper than CFs "free".

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#150

Post by tgtweak »

Once you upgrade to Enterprise it's a nonstop 6 month cycle of asking you to pay more.

Couple this with the fact you have a new rep every 6 months and you get some pretty annoying nag service for the entire duration of your contract.

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