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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

#191
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…

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.

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

#192
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any good alternatives that you (or him) already looked into?

Not OP, but we run two environments each of our service on Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, and Fly.io (a small service albeit, 200 to 300 requests per second). In the event one is down, we switch to the other (via DNS).

This, my system architect friends, is the proper response.

Do NOT put all your eggs in 1 basket. Build redundancies and failovers so no 1 vendor can shutdown your business.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re changing your arch because you saw a one-sided completely unverified post on HN? At this point @jgrahamc has the worst of it - people show up here time after time hoping they can make enough of a stink to get him involved.

When they could just email me (jgc@cloudflare.com)

I have a question that I couldn't find on the help docs: I got several domains on the early bird Pro price. Do you plan to discontinue the Early Bird pricing this year with the pricing increase?

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

#194

The comments here have mainly focused on the issue of instant suspension - which is obviously deeply concerning - but I also feel like there is a huge issue at Cloudflare regarding their Enterprise pricing model. Cloudflare's sales team and Enterprise pricing model are one of the least effective sales organisations I have encountered in this space. Given the technical nature of their product, it's extremely hard to e…

I'm also a massive fan of Cloudflare in general, love their Workers and related products, just that one aspect of account suspension without warning could be improved a little bit :)

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

#195

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

Hey tardis_thad, can you please do a detailed post mortem on this?

I don't know anything more just yet, just that my account was unbanned.

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

#196
post #183
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…

oh it is 100% entirely OK to share that you got screwed by a company .. this crap happens all the time.. companies like this get away with ZERO shits give about customer support all the time.. it is insane..

Not that this is true in this case, but a large number of HN support thread creators are very cagey about the nature of their business. I suspect a lot of the time they know they broke the ToS and are hoping that HN will get the pitchforks out to help them get their way regardless.

Again, that doesn't seem to apply here, but I've stopped assuming that the existence of an HN support thread by itself shows malfeasance or incompetence on the part of the company.

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they could just email me (jgc@cloudflare.com)

The fact that stuff needs to be raised at all is the problem. Clearly something has gone wrong if customers get treated this way.

Before piling on too much more, here ...

... Cloudflare has a lot of customers[0]. They have to balance the cost of providing (a lot of) human support against the cost they can reasonably charge for their products. It's a balancing act, and one that has worked out well for me, personally. It sounds like this issue is happening related to R2, which is quite new.

You're not likely to see a post hit the front page with the title "I've integrated Cloudflare's products with 30 or so customers and never had an issue" (or even be written). But experience an issue this large and you're going to do everything -- make calls, post things to social media, reach out on HN where you know the CTO is an active participant -- and a lot of those are going to get attention from the small percentage of customers who felt wronged by CF but hadn't spoken up.

It's a crappy situation because it gives the impression that things are a mess when -- I'm willing to bet -- it's something along the lines of a problem in a quota checker and a failure of internal process to escalate the problem appropriately. That happens at every big company in various places all the time.

Really, the only major difference here is that unlike every other big company, their CTO actively watches Hacker News. When a problem pops up, he willingly chooses to be Customer Service and from the sounds of it, that escalation to address "problems like this" is now happening. There's going to be gaps like this at every company. When I worked at "BigCo", if something like this hit the front page of HN, you could expect a mess of people to have their phones ring. Work would be done to respond to the customer (variations on "acknowledge/minimize/suppress" communications -- on official company hosts). Staff would be forbidden from interacting in the ongoing discussion. The CTO might have had to have explained to him how to get to the web site containing the complaint.

[0] I don't work for them; I'm just a happy customer so everything here is my view from the outside.

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

#198
post #155

Literally just sent an email to my devops guys to move off cloudflare asap. This cavalier lack of respect is a diservice and insult to all the people who rely on my product for their livelihood.

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…

[deleted]

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

#199
post #11

i'm about to move a significant amount of traffic to cloudflare. holding off until i see how this is handled. Can you please update this to reflect the total time of service outage and time to resolve. As a busy tech company, this is an unneeded problem. We pay cloudflare to be fast. Not make our sites slow and unresponsive.

Outage started around 00:00UTC today. I was able to contact via support chat to confirm it's indeed Cloudflare related issue as wasn't sure as it's not displayed in any form on Cloudflare dashboard that indeed account is restricted. That was around 8AM UTC. Since then I also contacted with sales team (got the details already as they approached me in last few weeks as mentioned before) in order to upgrade to Enterpris…

Your biggest mistake is building a service that depends on a single vendor. Where's your redundancy? Where's your failover?

Creating a HN post is not a proper failover strategy.

All vendors do crap like this. They often have automated systems that sometimes make mistakes. It's your responsibility to build a system that takes these failure points as a reality and build working redundancies and failovers to keep your service online while you sort them out.

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

#200
post #4

Looking at this with interest as I've multiple projects on cloudflare now and in development.

The lesson here isn't that you can or cannot trust Cloudflare.

You can't trust any vendor. Build your system with redundancies and failovers so no 1 vendor can take your system offline.

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