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Cloudflare took down our website

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Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#231

Post by sigseg1v »

thinkingkong wrote: post #27

Im reading between the lines here but it seems like the traffic amount, the saas subscription tier, and the actions required to remidiate some issue were all unaligned. 1. Its quite possible thar CF having this site on some multi-tenant infrastructure could be threatening. Not unreasonable at least to ask them to have their own IP block. 2. If thats the issue then a clear explanation should have been provided. Routin…

My thoughts here are also all speculation, but when you mentioned multi-tenant issues my mind immediately went to a situation I've seen all too many times before:

- a companies ops team identifies a tenant that is too heavy/burdensome for multi-tenant infra and is causing issues. These issues can cost a serious amount of money if you factor in dev/ops times to resolve, other customers impacted, etc. Certainly more than what a hypothetical single multi-tenant customer could be paying

- they escalated internally and need the tenant moved to enterprise asap to resolve

- the only reason the tenant was on multi was because sales sold them the wrong thing, so now it's on sales to explain how to fix this

- improper handling internally results in this landing only on sales, with no backup, and with their task being to get them to take enterprise

- when the customer refuses enterprise they go "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas"

Again, this is totally speculation and I'd hope CF has more mature practices than this but this is a scenario I've seen before in much smaller orgs.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#232

Post by nolongerthere »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #84
softwaredoug wrote: post #7

Cloudflare was the company that went viral for the firing of an account rep not hitting her goals. I wonder if it’s overall indicative of not a great culture in terms of relationships with enterprise customers. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7LuwPdp-_4c

She did say that she didn't bring in any customers...

She did say she was around for only 6 months and enterprise sales cycles can last 12+. Though I guess if you’re engaging in scammy behavior it can be much less… maybe she wasn’t willing to do that.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#233

Post by CtrlAltDelete51 »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #220
greyface- wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flags below the [flagged] threshold are invisible but still act to downweight the post.

I've noticed that cloudflare complaint threads get flagged with surprising and unwarranted regularity.

Almost, like … maybe one of the “protection” providers might have ways to suppress bad media?

puts on tin foil hat and looks around nervously

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#234

Post by zbentley »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #200

As far as I can tell, the issue with this is: OP runs a casino/gambling site. Gambling is a regulatory mess (I have spent far too long dealing with this as an RNG supplier), and so it's very hard to comply with every jurisdiction, and each one needs you to prove compliance to operate in that jurisdiction.* Gaming companies spend a lot on compliance and tracking, but since the internet is the internet, it's pretty har…

I also wonder if the company in the article didn’t know that (either by reading between the lines as you did or via other correspondence they didn’t mention) and weighed that in their decision to go with Fastly.

BYOIP isn’t just expensive—if your content is bad for IP reputation the time-to-flagging of your IPs is going to be way shorter on BYOIP than on shared IPs due to there being less dilution. And that’s without getting into the challenges around rotating/renting IPs on a continual basis.

I do agree that CF did not communicate that well or professionally—if the sales emails are the only comms that happened here.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#235

Post by moltar »

Just wow. We were in the midst of negotiations with Cloudflare and I’m Going to hard nope after reading this.

I’m guessing they aren’t doing that well and are looking for revenue to cover the holes.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#236

Post by oooyay »

safety1st wrote: post #230
nocfforever wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In fairness regarding this particular post, the author admits they were probably violating Cloudflare's ToS, and they knew it. The folks at CF could have been less obtuse in handling the matter. But at the end of the day this is an online casino breaking ToS and they got spanked.

I believed that too, then I noticed they had a feature for the TOS violation that didn't fundamentally change anything. The only difference was you paid for it. In that way it's not your average TOS violation.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#237

Post by pclmulqdq »

zbentley wrote: post #234
pclmulqdq wrote: post #200

As far as I can tell, the issue with this is: OP runs a casino/gambling site. Gambling is a regulatory mess (I have spent far too long dealing with this as an RNG supplier), and so it's very hard to comply with every jurisdiction, and each one needs you to prove compliance to operate in that jurisdiction.* Gaming companies spend a lot on compliance and tracking, but since the internet is the internet, it's pretty har…

I also wonder if the company in the article didn’t know that (either by reading between the lines as you did or via other correspondence they didn’t mention) and weighed that in their decision to go with Fastly. BYOIP isn’t just expensive—if your content is bad for IP reputation the time-to-flagging of your IPs is going to be way shorter on BYOIP than on shared IPs due to there being less dilution. And that’s without…

I think it is possible that the company posting this didn't realize that this might be the issue, but you are right that they may know. It may have been a small company, even doing that much bandwidth. Online gambling sites tend to push an entire video game when you are playing on their site.

Many gambling companies are fine just doing BYOIP or running dedicated hosting infrastructure that is on providers who are explicitly running hosting for that industry (although they are moving to cloud). There is a good reason this separate infrastructure exists. In general, I would not assume they are rotating IPs: this is not a scam, it's a business, and they are largely fine with being blocked in places where they can't legally operate.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#238

Post by busterarm »

gruez wrote: post #213
busterarm wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with you, I think the call is for companies to be less psychopathic and stop onboarding people within 90 days of mass layoffs. Especially in a world where people pick up their whole lives and relocate for jobs. Recent joiners aren't getting any sustainable kind of severance either. The idea is if you're hiring them you have a minimum commitment to support their success. Yes she was an obvious fire, but…

>I think the call is for companies to be less psychopathic and stop onboarding people within 90 days of mass layoffs. Was there any indication that the "mass layoffs" were planned 90 days in advance?

It takes around that long to plan and for public companies they don't just suddenly come to that decision within a single quarter, but also that's missing the point.

If you're a public company and you go from healthy to mass layoffs within a single quarter then your investors (and employees) should be a lot more concerned.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#239

Post by weird-eye-issue »

tristan9 wrote: post #215
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From personal experience I know that 10TB per month is like 30k/year Is this true? We are at 3TB and growing so I'm slightly concerned

It's not even 100Mbps sustained. That is nowhere near 30k/year or you're getting ripped off. For 3k/month you can get a good quality 10Gbps link. That's 3.2PB with a P.

Yeah that's why I was asking

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#240

Post by mtndew4brkfst »

gruez wrote: post #213
busterarm wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with you, I think the call is for companies to be less psychopathic and stop onboarding people within 90 days of mass layoffs. Especially in a world where people pick up their whole lives and relocate for jobs. Recent joiners aren't getting any sustainable kind of severance either. The idea is if you're hiring them you have a minimum commitment to support their success. Yes she was an obvious fire, but…

>I think the call is for companies to be less psychopathic and stop onboarding people within 90 days of mass layoffs. Was there any indication that the "mass layoffs" were planned 90 days in advance?

That wasn't how I interpreted this phrasing. I read it as "it is worth being critical of an org that does mass layoffs and then goes on to hire new people to fill vacated roles shortly after the layoffs were finished".

That timing shows that it's not just implementing headcount and budget reductions, which are somewhat defensible if still tragic. It was instead a forced turnover, which in some cases can be a route to wage suppression.

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