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Cloudflare took down our website

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Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#331

Post by jsnell »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #206
jmvoodoo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

You can't start the timeline from the first email, because clearly Cloudflare didn't communicate the actual issue to the customer. (Yes, the customer could be lying about what was said in that meeting, and they could have been told what the problem was rather than it being just Cloudflare trying to upsell them the enterprise plan without telling why. But then the "omg, we just discovered a problem with your site during a routine inspection!" email sent two weeks later wouldn't make sense.)

They also were clearly lying in those email messages: The second email says that domain rotation is strictly forbidden, but a few days later in the third email they're explicitly selling features for rotating domains more effectively.

And sorry, but a company selling "we'll override the Trust and Safety team if you pay us $$$" is absolutely unacceptable. There are only two options, both bad. Either they're not running a real TnS operation, but just pretend-staff one in order to run these kinds of shakedown operations. Or they're running a real TnS team that found a real problem but are letting sales people override the TnS team's honest judgement.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#332

Post by lapphi »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #216
bluelightning2k wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was rushing to judgment until I heard this... pretty plausible. In support of your theory particular is I don't think enterprise sales "ragequits" a conversation when the customer is mid-evaluation based simply on the idea that they are considering multiple options. Why would they walk away at this point, let alone ban the customer. From the write-up I bet CloudFlare had it as a "60% to close" in their CRM at this…

> In support of your theory particular is I don't think enterprise sales "ragequits" a conversation when the customer is mid-evaluation based simply on the idea that they are considering multiple options. > Why would they walk away at this point, let alone ban the customer. It wasn't just that they were considering multiple options. Looking at the timeline, this was about a month after their initial soft gloves appro…

It seems like the sales team went out of their way to try and land a $10k/mo deal. Then when they heard there was a second potential suitor in the mix they got upset and said “well we never wanted your $10k anyways!” and destroyed any chance of reconciliation. Very sour grapes/ no second date on tinder type of reaction.

If there is a TOS issue I’m not listening to a sales pitch on it. You better tell me what the issue is upfront in the first email instead of dicking around with the commission based workers. Like very low level stuff here imo

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#333

Post by EmilStenstrom »

nexoft wrote: post #327

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 carefull…

Gambling site or not: Cloudflare took their money for years, failed to communicate any problems, then deleted their data when they didn't accept their "enterprise deal". There's nothing saying that they won't do the same to ANY of their other thousands of customers, many of who reads this forum...

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#334

Post by jeroenhd »

dingnuts wrote: post #137
J_tt wrote: 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…

Cloudflare could've just said so. Cloudflare also chose to make BYOIP expensive.

They could've explained the problem ("your gambling business is a problem for our IP reputation") and offered a solution ("we can switch you over to BYOIP so this won't be a problem"), but instead they sent in an army of sales reps that demanded an upfront payment for a product tier that they only needed one small part of, to the point of sales people pretending to be part of other teams.

It makes business sense to kick out casinos, but OP got fucked over by Cloudflare's shitty practices.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#335

Post by dangus »

nexoft wrote: post #327

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 carefull…

Cloudflare certainly handled this poorly in their execution and abysmal level of transparency, but they’re almost certainly purging loss-leading risky customers like OP and they really don’t owe OP the time of day.

OP is lucky CloudFlare even gave them 24 hours. I’m not going to dig through the their TOS or anything but I’m going to guess that you need to have an Enterprise contract to be a business of certain categories like banks/crypto, pornography, and gambling, which explains why they were being connected with a sales team.

OP mentions lost customer trust…but Cloudflare doesn’t want or need OP to trust them. $250 a month isn’t enough to deal with a business like that.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#336

Post by ecjhdnc2025 »

luuurker wrote: post #321
ecjhdnc2025 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (jgraha…

[flagged]

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#337

Post by [deleted] »

EmilStenstrom wrote: post #333
nexoft wrote: post #327

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 carefull…

Gambling site or not: Cloudflare took their money for years, failed to communicate any problems, then deleted their data when they didn't accept their "enterprise deal". There's nothing saying that they won't do the same to ANY of their other thousands of customers, many of who reads this forum...

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#338

Post by Chyzwar »

nolverostae wrote: post #177
scrollaway wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there's some pretty key info being left out. I don't doubt that Cloudflare communication sucks especially when dealing with their sales team (aka bizdev which is what OP was originally contacted by), but the second screenshot is pretty damning. My guess: Their account fell out of the non-enterprise TOS for some reason which is being obscured in the post (probably domain rotation related). Their T&S team propose…

I did mention the multiple-domains issue in the post. It would not have been amazing for us to remove our secondary domains, but we would have been very happy to do it if it had resolved the issue. We asked them again and again but they would not give us any detail or options apart from their 120k/year package. Note that BYOIP (which I guess they could reasonably have required to isolate us even if we only use a sing…

For me, the worst part is blackmail and account ban.

If you had legal presence in EU then new Digital Services Act[1] might a help for you. I am not sure if you could sue them based on that law, but you could maybe lodge a complaint.

  https://www.wolftheiss.com/insights/digital-service-act-explained-new-obligations-for-online-businesses-and-other-digital-services/

  https://blog.cloudflare.com/digital-services-act

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#339

Post by HenryBemis »

luuurker wrote: post #118

The way Cloudflare approaches situations like this is not ideal for anyone. You start using the service and don't pay a lot, so you make plans around a certain level of expenses. Then out of the blue you receive an "urgent" email from a sales representative and suddenly you have to go from $20 or $250 to $thousands right away. Obviously it's not in CF's interest to keep a customer that doesn't pay enough, but droppin…

> but dropping a "bomb" on the customer

Why on earth any company would jump from $250 to $10k per month unless they had a gun to their heads? Even if their revenue is to the millions/billions (which most likely is considering the nature of their business). They work for their own profit, not Cloudflare's.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#340

Post by iamflimflam1 »

gruez wrote: post #104
iamflimflam1 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like auth0…

But they have explicit limits? https://auth0.com/pricing

Not on the enterprise plans… it’s a chat with the sales team. And they’ve generally got you over a barrel.
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