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

321–330 of 483 posts

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#321

Post by luuurker »

ecjhdnc2025 wrote: post #305
Twirrim wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

What you wrote is that "the CEO’s strategy was to turn up here and criticise Google for not deindexing quickly enough".

The CEO replied to someone asking about the services they were working with and complained about Google taking longer than the others. Maybe we're reading his comment in a different way, but to me there's a big gap between what he did and having a "strategy" to blame Google.

Cloudflare's CTO (jgrahamc) was on that thread too and didn't spend his time criticising Google. He wasn't hiding or saying "look over there instead!".

So I don't see any strategy from the CEO, CTO or the company to criticise Google or to ignore the fact that CF had f'ed up. Pointing out that Google was slow to remove cached pages is, in my view, a valid criticism.

Now, if you said that they had a strategy to minimise the problem, then I'd agree with you.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#322

Post by orhmeh09 »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #294
nolverostae wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BYOIP is reasonable, though I doubt anyone actually does legislation blocks by IP. Since like half of companies on the internet use Cloudflare or other multi-tenant infrastructure everyone is aware that you can't block an IP address and hit one target. The only thing I've seen is DNS blocks (both DNS protocol directly and based on TLS SNI). FYI, we also fully block users from the US (due to regulations). My problem h…

While they absolutely shouldn't ban IP for reasons you said, some do that anyway. The most (in)famous case is China's GFW which banes IPs all the time. Yes, other websites often get accidentally blocked, but they don't care. Moreover, you can't even communicate with them because there are no official legal regulations. This is something what any CDN or cloud providers have to deal all the time.

There are numerous official legal regulations and decisionmaking bodies pertaining to the GFW. What do you mean?

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#323

Post by vundercind »

johnklos wrote: post #315

Cloudflare is evil, even though they do a decent job of pretending they care. They are smart to offer gateway services (gateway as in gateway drugs - stuff to get you hooked) for free to end users, since it grows their fanboi base, gets more people familiar with their services, and gets people hooked in ways that make it very difficult to use something else when their projects grow. However, any reasonably competent…

The consistent reaction when I brought up Cloudflare with other CDN technical and sales teams, as of about four years ago, was a laugh and something along the lines of “yeah we’ve got some customers with some stories about them”.

Bait-and-switch seemed to be the most common pattern, plus crazy-high prices once you’re on the “switch” side of things.

But their sales team was so uniquely uninterested in our business that I never had to find out first hand.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#324

Post by juped »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #251
nolongerthere wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, but if you‘re onboarded in a Sales Team you‘re at first getting small fry customers to get used to your Job. Cloudflare is massive and a complete no-brainer for 95% of companies. Not only that, she couldn‘t even land a single enterprise upcharge. Cold calls are hard, but upsells are much easier because companies are pretty much vendor locked with CF. If you can‘t land a single customer in 6 months under these…

source: you made it up based on never having been on either side of big or even medium organization vendor relationships

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#325

Post by remram »

chadsix wrote: post #21

This is a really important lesson here. Don't put your eggs in one basket, and if network delivery/etc. is core to your revenues and livelihood, don't trust a random third party host to look out for you. 10TB/80TB at 120k/yr, either way, Cloudflare is taking you for a ride. If you aren't self hosting, you're really doing it wrong.

What is "don't put your eggs in one basket" here? Your DNS has to point to something... and changing it will go through propagation delays, during which it will be down if you are banned suddenly.

It's not like you can have your domain/DNS somewhere else and point to Cloudflare IPs (to not put DNS and CDN in same basket). Cloudflare does not allow that setup.

You can't protect your website from your DNS provider or hosting provider suddenly kicking you off. You are going to be offline for a couple of days.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#326

Post by hnbad »

Way to bury the lede of OP running a gambling site and doing a ton of shenanigans to make it legal in different jurisdictions. I understand why you might think you shouldn't lead with that but it puts the entire response from Cloudflare into perspective as dealing with gambling sites sounds like a headache and it's reasonable they might not want to run that kind of venture on a regular plan.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#327

Post by nexoft »

1-The gambling business is shady by design, whether you like it or not. This was probably more risk than benefit for them based on what they were getting from you.

2-Your business is probably very profitable, and $300 a month is very cheap compared to the potential hassles they could face working with such a business.

3-I find it very inappropriate to dox business representatives and show names when you have carefully hidden any information regarding yourself and haven't even disclosed your company name.

After all they can choose with whom they want to do business. They gauged what price they could ask you, factoring in how profitable your business is and how noisy and painful it might be to work with you. It sucks but this is the downside of SaaS/PaaS.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#328

Post by remram »

hubraumhugo wrote: post #18

The Cloudflare CEO & co-founder is quite active on Twitter[0] and somewhat active on HN[1], would be interesting to get his perspective on this. [0] https://x.com/eastdakota/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eastdakota

I don't know how those situations work though. The customer is obviously allowed to say whatever they want, but if a Cloudflare employee or CEO disagreed, would they be allowed to provide their own version of the facts? Wouldn't that go against privacy rules in some way, showing the details of someone's account? I would think they would only open themselves up to legal trouble.

As far as I can see, the author was careful to redact their domain from all screenshots.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#329

Post by kmeisthax »

byyll wrote: post #316
kmeisthax wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> CloudFlare shouldn't have hosted Kiwi Farms in it's current state, because I don't think hosting dox should be legal But they keep doing it. Just not KiwiFarms but other websites. I've reported it to them, they claim they are only a proxy (that's not true, they are also the registrar and DNS). Nothing was done.

Sounds about right from the "censorship is when packet loss" crowd.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#330

Post by itake »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #162
dingnuts wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They're mad that cloudflare cut them without real warning. And they should be! Anyone can get on a big company's bad side, and if there aren't extremely important messages being withheld by the author this makes it scary for anyone to use cloudflare. If a custom IP is going to be mandatory, they need to say that and give a deadline, at the very least .

The IP-reputation damage is immediate. Cloudflare is choosing to pass the hard landing directly onto their customer instead of forcing their other customers to share the damage.

As a CF customer, I am happy that Cf is preventing another business from damaging mine.

Post reply on HN