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Cloudflare took down our website

robindev.substack.com

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Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#41

Post by CydeWeys »

$250/month sounds like nothing at all for a site with a claimed 4M MAU. The enterprise rate of $10k/month sounds a lot more reasonable. If everything presented here is accurate, I'm not understanding the sharp discrepancy in pricing tiers. If anything they should've already been paying more than $10k/month for massive traffic on the basic plan and then be able to save money by paying for massive scale when negotiating rates for the enterprise plan.

Also this sounds like an online gambling site of questionable legality, knowingly serving customers in jurisdictions where it's illegal, so I can't say I have too much sympathy, and I feel like Cloudflare effectively fired them as a customer when they realized what they were up to.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#42

Post by Caligatio »

jmvoodoo wrote: post #10
candiddevmike wrote: post #5

Sounds like OP is a casino and plays domain games to avoid regulatory interest. Recommend reading article carefully before reacting to the headline. Hopefully Cloudflare provides a perspective.

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.

If it's legal but burdensome (somehow) to host a particular industry, requiring more money to deal with the increased burden seems reasonable. For instance, if their legal department needs to deal with complaints from various countries, that probably costs more than $250/month.

That being said, I doubt that's the core issue in this case.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#43

Post by Etheryte »

This doesn't pass the sniff test. From the actions Cloudflare took and their communication, it's very clear that there was something about the way their services were used that they were unhappy about. The post doesn't include what that problem was, but I have a very hard time believing that the author was not in the know and just got their account nuked without any further commentary, especially after being in a number of calls with real human beings from Cloudflare. Surely they'd have plenty of room to both ask and tell to figure out what the issue is. More than anything, this sounds like they knowingly did something shady and are now trying to shift the blame.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#44

Post by chadsix »

candiddevmike wrote: post #5

Sounds like OP is a casino and plays domain games to avoid regulatory interest. Recommend reading article carefully before reacting to the headline. Hopefully Cloudflare provides a perspective.

If that's the take, that means Cloudflare is okay with 'breaking laws' so long as they can take a heavy cut of the ill gotten gains?

Let's not try to find reasons to harm the messenger and stick to the facts -- a paying customer was suddenly extorted for hundreds of thousand of dollars out of nowhere.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#45

Post by nicce »

ajross wrote: post #25
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.

The point is more that the author is an unreliable narrator and you need to apply a little salt to the rest of the story. Cloudflare absolutely shouldn't be taking bribes to permit regulatory evasion. But if they are, I want more evidence than a substack post.

It was the opposite? To comply with regulation.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#46

Post by rvnx »

candiddevmike wrote: post #5

Sounds like OP is a casino and plays domain games to avoid regulatory interest. Recommend reading article carefully before reacting to the headline. Hopefully Cloudflare provides a perspective.

Taking a step back, why would they even care if their platform is supposedly neutral and not responsible for the content ?

If they can indeed stop providing services to a casino, why cannot they shutdown a website spreading pro-war propaganda, or a website selling illegal services ?

It means they are making editorial choices, instead of just being the technological provider and being a neutral "internet pipe".

Not sure it's really in their best interest to self-police in the end, as they could lose their DMCA safe harbor provision ?

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#47

Post by nolverostae »

candiddevmike wrote: post #5

Sounds like OP is a casino and plays domain games to avoid regulatory interest. Recommend reading article carefully before reacting to the headline. Hopefully Cloudflare provides a perspective.

I do encourage you to read the whole article cause there is some fine details in there. The main point is that we were happy to remove any domains apart from our main domain (which gets > 95% of our traffic) but Cloudflare did not give us that option or any other detail on the supposed issue.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#49

Post by scrollaway »

lightedman wrote: post #30
candiddevmike wrote: post #5

Sounds like OP is a casino and plays domain games to avoid regulatory interest. Recommend reading article carefully before reacting to the headline. Hopefully Cloudflare provides a perspective.

"Now this needs a bit of context on what they are talking about. We do have multiple domains that mostly act as mirrors to our main domain. We have these for a few reasons. One is that since we are a casino, we have different regulatory requirements we need to comply with in many countries. For example, many games are only available in some countries. Some countries we block completely. Then we have a few different d…

When it comes to laws and taxes, "comply" and "evade" tend to be synonyms.

"In order to comply with tax regulations and donor laws, we had to structure our activities in order to make it possible for political donations to be classified as regular consulting income".

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#50

Post by xnx »

candiddevmike wrote: post #5

Sounds like OP is a casino and plays domain games to avoid regulatory interest. Recommend reading article carefully before reacting to the headline. Hopefully Cloudflare provides a perspective.

This has been my experience with 80+% of these loud complaints about services, especially regarding "losing Google traffic". Dig into it just a little and you find out the complainer was doing something extremely shady that the service is often too polite/proper to call out in a public forum.
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