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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

#241

Post by genewitch »

luckylion wrote: post #58
sschueller wrote: post #8

[flagged]

> Many ISPs have good solutions that work well without you having to break open your SSL to use the service. What are they going to do if a botnet with tens of thousands of IPs are hitting your server? Nullroute it to take the load off their network? Somehow figure out what traffic is legitimate and what isn't and just drop a bunch of stuff?

before cloudflare companies such as verisign would take over all your routing (i think just for the IP range(s) affected) to mitigate DDoS. Although if you're a company that has a /20 of ipv4 and whoever is DDoSing you is doing it for an actual reason (as opposed to bored teens or whatever), they'll figure out you own a huge number of IPs and start nuking them all. Verisign could also handle that. There were others, comodo maybe? Then cloudflare appeared, it was way cheaper for smaller traffic sites, then they had so much bandwidth in so many places they offered CDNs; and those were cheaper than Akamai and whoever the other player was.

I think they got lucky, market placement when they entered was entrenched by large companies that did not care about small customers at all.

and yet.

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

#243

Post by tpxl »

philliphaydon wrote: post #40
nubinetwork wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, most of the stripe whiners I see on here are trying to do shady shit... like that guy last week who didn't think we'd connect the dots from his last shady stripe scheme.

Got a link? Curious what he was doing!

"Shady shit", aka nothing illegal. If it was illegal, there'd be police, not account closure.

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

#244

Post by _cenw »

byteofbits wrote: post #187

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've been in a sales call with a German CF representative, and it just seemed to be a third party being excited about the features using the demo account half for their hobby and half for demonstrations with almost every feature set up and demoable. They even hosted their own toy AS on Cloudflare Magic Transit.

It was pretty novel and refreshing.

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

#245

Post by sirsinsalot »

lolcrow wrote: post #55

Maybe they booted you because your business model is to use Cloudflare to repeatedly and aggressively scrape data from cryptocurrency exchanges and then resell it for hundreds of dollars a month. Sounds like an abuse of their terms of service to me.

Aren't all users or CloudFlare doing [ACTIVITY] to resell something for profit?

What planet are you on?

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

#246

Post by bastardoperator »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #204
tardis_thad wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be happy to provide more info but I have none. First I communicated with support which told me that my account was restricted most likely due to 2.8 clause violation (non html content) and suggested to contact with sales which I immediately did. Sales over the phone (was fastest) told me that it's good I contacted as otherwise in 24hours my account would be fully banned(whatever it means) and that they will prepa…

Hilarious you got sales to call you back. I had to ping their CTO after multiple attempts to have sales work with me failed. He finally got them to give me a demo of their zero trust solution. No one ever followed up with me again though. It’s like they don’t want to sell an enterprise (tens of thousands of dollars a year) subscription… The only sales guy who called me back before the CTO got involved was Kingsley Ok…

Why would I chase 10 of thousands of dollars a year when I can chase hundred of thousands or millions of dollars? You didn't talk to an actual salesperson, you spoke to a BDR. A BDR quantifies leads and determines if your spend is worth the time. If you didn't get a call back it's because the BDR identified you as small time. I'm not trying to be rude, just pointing out how many sales teams tend to work.

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

#247

Post by byteofbits »

_cenw wrote: post #244
byteofbits wrote: post #187

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've been in a sales call with a German CF representative, and it just seemed to be a third party being excited about the features using the demo account half for their hobby and half for demonstrations with almost every feature set up and demoable. They even hosted their own toy AS on Cloudflare Magic Transit. It was pretty novel and refreshing.

This is really interesting - all my interactions have been with people in the London office and were not like this.

Perhaps it varies by region?

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

#248

Post by mustacheemperor »

jgrahamc wrote: post #102
kkielhofner wrote: post #78

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)

There's a number of users in this thread who describe being "ghosted" by your sales team, including for tens of thousands of dollars per year subscriptions. It seems like the email responsiveness you're personally offering does not match with what some people experience from Cloudflare in general, so I'm not surprised people wouldn't think to email you and expect a response.

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

#249

Post by irq-1 »

tardis_thad wrote: post #189
_vufv wrote: 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…

I'd be happy to provide more info but I have none. First I communicated with support which told me that my account was restricted most likely due to 2.8 clause violation (non html content) and suggested to contact with sales which I immediately did. Sales over the phone (was fastest) told me that it's good I contacted as otherwise in 24hours my account would be fully banned(whatever it means) and that they will prepa…

> I should update my ticket to ask unbanning my account

That is a very broken process! Ask the user to change the ticket, so they can do something that they already know is approved? Sales department sounds like a disaster.

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

#250

Post by KennyBlanken »

rexreed wrote: post #180

From an earlier comment I made regarding Stripe shutting merchants down, and those merchants resorting to posting on HN and getting someone on HN to advocate for them to resolve their problem [0]: "The main issue is not that [COMPANY] is working hard to protect itself and its customers, but that customers feel very powerless in these situations. When it takes a massive effort to get attention, especially if you're sm…

> What can you do to help empower the powerless customers when their livelihoods are at stake? Can you provide some way to not instantly assume fraud or malicious intent on behalf of the customer and provide some quick and direct way for the customer to feel empowered?"

Legislation and regulation.

Mill owners used to send little kids into running machines and they'd get shredded. Now we have child labor laws where under a certain age someone isn't allowed to operate most powered equipment.

Mill owners used to not pay people for their wages. Now we have laws with civil and criminal repercussions if you don't pay someone timely and in full.

The phone and electric companies have to follow a bunch of regulations around shutting off your service, because of the consequences.

Companies should not be able to say "and if we fail, lol whatevs, fuck off." If you are providing a service, and someone depends on it to run for their business, then you should be responsible if you fail to provide service. Cost of doing business.

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