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Cloudflare took down our website

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Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#301
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. 1. According to the CEO the layoffs in question were for "~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market org"[1]. Is that really a "mass layoff"? 2. Did you not remember that the layoffs coincided with reversal in macroeconomic conditions? Specifically…

90 days isn't enough time to close enterprise deals. The whole point is that the firings demonstrate that she was never set up to succeed by the organization.

That's why the org took heat online for it.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#302

After reading this article carefully I have a few thoughts. Firstly you were knowingly in violation of TOS after they pointed it out to you. Violating their TOS is a fast way to have your account suspended. Secondly I'm a little confused why they would require you to pay a year upfront? I would like to hear from cloudflare as to why they required this? It's pretty fair for them to ask you to pay a year in advance bec…

Every customer is in violation of the tos if you read the html-only section

They know this

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#303
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I read the screenshots of the emails from the articles seemed to suggest that something the authors company was doing was causing issues with IP reputation on CloudFlares range. Them very aggressively highlighting the BYO IP feature and then even suggesting third parties to rent IPs from strikes me as a significant detour from their normal “script” (having dealt with their AU sales team before).

this is exactly what is happening. Cloudflare uses an anycast network, so IPs are shared by default. this customer is damaging Cloudflare IP reputation which hurts other customers. Cloudflare can either fire the customer to protect other customers using Cloudflare IPs, or force this customer to use their own IPs and damage/manage their own IP reputation. unfortunately this is expensive and OP is mad they can't do the…

And why did they want to push them to Enterprise service?

>$120k up front for one year of Enterprise

Doesn't sound like a reputation problem.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#304

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…

Our experience has been quite the opposite once we were forced to migrate from a free plan (a long time ago after what felt like abusing the free plan due to the amount of bandwidth we were using). The bandwidth caps and all included features were clearly spelled out in the entetprise contract and when we went over, they didn't push for a contract renegotiation unless the overage lasted like 3+ months. And we frequen…

> In fact, recently they asked to renegotiate the contract due to some obsolescence and we ended up significantly dropping the bill as a result. Kind of backfired on them, I wonder if the account manager is kicking herself for this.

Only if the cost of supporting the depreciated feature was less than the delta.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't remember them blaming Google for their screw up. You're putting words into my mouth.

I'm not sure what you were expecting people to take away from your message, with the way that it is worded. It may not have been the intent, but the particular way you expressed your point heavily implies it.

I wrote what I wrote. He came here and in his only comment, criticised Google for not being quick enough.

That is all I wrote and all I meant.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752#13721644

I don't much care if words are being put in my mouth but I do point it out.

But then again as Maya Angelou said:

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#306
post #108

From personal experience I know that 10TB per month is like 30k/year and SSL for SaaS is around 40k/year on the enterprise plan. No idea about pricing for having your own IP. I have no idea why Cloudflare would ask you to use these two features. SSL for SaaS is only useful if you want to add domains and certificates via API. I have had my fair share of negative experience with Cloudflare but this is next level bad. U…

> Unfortunately companies can chose who they want to do business with but it shouldn't be like this. If you have a contract with them then they can't arbitrarily choose who they do business with. OP would presumably have a chance at a lawsuit against cloudflare here, the success of which would depend on how well cloudflare argued the ToS violation. A lawsuit might not be worth pursuing here, but this isn't a case of…

You signed the ToS, article 4 gives them the ability to terminate the service.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#307

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 have spent far too long dealing with this as an RNG supplier Is there much of a market for that? I thought random.org had it all sewn up.

Gaming machines are highly regulated, almost like medical devices.

There are seals on the hardware, any modification must be approved, you must certify that the payout is the expected one, ...

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#308
post #298
post #189

Can any1 explain how HN algo works that this post, which at time of writing has 355p, 180comments while being posted 1 hour ago, isn't even on first page (ranked 31)???

It set off the flamewar detector, got flagged by users, and got downweighted by a mod. The 'customer support of last resort' genre is common and not usually a good fit for HN [1]. If people feel this story is unusually relevant and interesting, I'm not sure I agree—long experience has taught us that one-sided articles like this nearly always leave out critical information—but I also don't mind yielding in an occasion…

> The 'customer support of last resort' genre is common and not usually a good fit for HN

They're already off Cloudflare, I would see this story more as "Dealing with tech company X is a business risk" cautionary tale.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#309
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

CloudFlare only dropped Kiwi Farms because Keffals made it inconvenient for them to do business with enterprise customers. Said customers were looking at Twitter and saying, "Wait, you host WHAT?!"

Before that CF was high and mighty on the "free speech" horse.

There's an old spat between CloudFlare and Malwarebytes where MB was threatening to block all of CloudFlare because they wouldn't remove literal malware. The argument being that running a reverse proxy "isn't hosting", and should be treated differently, even though to literally anyone else there's no difference between an origin server and a proxy.

CloudFlare is just sketchy as all get out, IMO.

Putting my biases on the table: I think CloudFlare shouldn't have hosted Kiwi Farms in it's current state, because I don't think hosting dox should be legal. A website that hosts dox is not engaging in speech, it is engaging in censorship. Hell, in the EU, it's already illegal to host dox, the US just needs to pass a privacy law comparable to that of the GDPR. Kiwi Farms is legal in the US purely for the same reason why the CIA/FBI/NSA can legally buy advertising data from Google and Facebook.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#310
This sort of situation is not time for an angry blog post. It's time for lawyers. OP needs to speak with counsel and find out whether they have a claim against Cloudflare for interfering with their business in this way. (If OP's business is so illegal they can't get a lawyer to help with that, that's another story, but it sure doesn't look that way.)

Fundamentally, the OP might be involved in something scummy or at least against Cloudflare's TOS. But if that's the case, if you have a customer who is violating your TOS, you don't hit them up and say "pay me an extra $119k a year and I'll look the other way". You say "here are your violations, fix them and prove to me that you fixed them, or pay for plan X which has terms under which they are not violations."

The way Cloudflare handled this is completely inappropriate and even if it wasn't their intention, makes it seem very strongly like extortion. Two wrongs don't make a right, and OP's business being possibly shady does not give Cloudflare license to extort them.

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