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

201–210 of 483 posts

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#201

Post by bluelightning2k »

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)

To be fair to CloudFlare - let's replace "unmetered" with "fair use".

Very typically free = actually "fair use".

Where it gets murky is when this becomes a shotgun sales tactic.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#202

Post by hardfriendship »

nso wrote: post #102
Etheryte wrote: post #43

This doesn't pass the sniff test. From the actions Cloudflare took and their communication, it's very clear that there was something about the way their services were used that they were unhappy about. The post doesn't include what that problem was, but I have a very hard time believing that the author was not in the know and just got their account nuked without any further commentary, especially after being in a num…

So CF is ok with shady for 10k but not for .25k?

[dead]

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#203

Post by gruez »

greyface- wrote: post #186
cookiengineer wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forget to mention that the DDoS traffic causing these issues are also behind cloudflare, but they don't give a damn about them, for obvious business reasons. Cloudflare controls supply and demand, which, by definition of the law, should be classified as extortion.

> should be classified as extortion. It meets the definition of a RICO "enterprise". The question is, will anyone bring it up for judicial review?

>It meets the definition of a RICO "enterprise".

1. It's probably not RICO[1]

2. Are businesses under any obligation to take down shady businesses (eg. DDoS services that are ostensibly stress testing services) absent a court order?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180305062824/https://www.popeh..., specifically sections "Wait. Isn't the defendant the enterprise?" and "So what's "racketeering activity"?"

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#204

Post by HlessClaudesman »

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…

Do they offer tangible benefits to justify the higher fees?

That's the thing that gets me about all types of subscriptions / pay walls. You have my attention momentarially, make your best pitch as to why paying you is in my interest.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#206

Post by CuriousCosmic »

jmvoodoo wrote: post #10
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.

But for $10k a month cloudflare is ok with that? Either it's acceptable or it's not, there is no way that this looks good for cloudflare either way.

It's not just 10k a month. it's 10k a month for the plan that allows you to BYOIP (Bring your own IP addresses). That was cloudflare's issue.

Their business was causing IP reputation damage and all plans but the enterprise BYOIP plans share the same IP pool.

Essentially it was "use your own IP pool and pay us for the cost of maintaining that pool for you or GTFO".

This wasn't just a normal sales rep hitting them up. This was trust and safety (i.e. the moderation team) coming to them with a compromise that would allow them to stay on the platform. They chose against that and were dragging their feet.

The timeline of the article also really makes this clear. This wasn't over the course of 24 hours. This started a full 4 weeks prior with sustained back and forth. They only included a few images of emails from the discussions but the article makes clear that there was more discussion happening.

And to quote the article. After receiving the ultimatum, they got an entire extra week to deliberate.

> We managed to buy a week of time by letting it escalate to our CEO and CTO and having them talk directly with Cloudflare.

Then finally when they told CF that they were just buying time while looking to move elsewhere, CF dropped their act of goodwill and the moderation team resumed the moderation action they would have taken in the first place had this been a smaller account.

----

So yeah it sounds bad from the snippets but this was basically "hey you are a big customer and you are breaking rules we would normally ban anyone else for but if you can compensate us we'll spend the labor hours and infra to let you keep operating in your own little quarantine box.". So this really should be seen as an act of goodwill rather than malice.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#207

Post by pclmulqdq »

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.

With a casino, the issue isn't just domains, it's also IPs. That's why they pushed BYOIP so heavily.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#208

Post by gruez »

nocfforever wrote: post #126
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 thought about using CF in some of my deployments. After hearing about these sorts of "discussions" from other colleagues, I certainly talked about using their services. And then I realized that I had to hand them over my DNS? Uhh, no. It could have been "set nameserver to ours in your DNS console". And also there was the recent SSL spoofing they're doing even with DNS with no hosted websites. And they charge money…

>And then I realized that I had to hand them over my DNS? Uhh, no. It could have been "set nameserver to ours in your DNS console".

>And also there was the recent SSL spoofing they're doing even with DNS with no hosted websites. And they charge money to send a revocation.

What's your threat model here? That cloudflare will go rogue and... MITM your users? Can't they do that even if they're not in charge of your DNS? Even if you point an A record to them, that's enough to get a certificate via an ACME http-01 challenge[1].

[1] https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/#http-01-challe...

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#209

Post by byyll »

hawthornio wrote: post #184
byyll wrote: post #98

After they deplatformed KiwiFarms, I thought that's an isolated case but turns out they are just unprofessional. I can't have pity for a casino service anyways.

> a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxxing and real-life harassment.These actions have tied Kiwi Farms to the suicides of three people targeted by members of the forum. Sounds like a pretty abhorrent website

Who wrote that?

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#210

Post by addicted »

jsheard wrote: post #149
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.

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…

Yeah our pretty large company switched to CloudFlare thinking of all the dollars they would save with little research but within a year were back at Akamai.

And Akamai is very expensive.

Post reply on HN