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Cloudflare took down our website

robindev.substack.com

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Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#51

Post by CydeWeys »

ksec wrote: post #39
ajross wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 also seems strange they dont know their Traffic Numbers. >Note that 80TB is the number they tried to sell us, I don’t know if it is accurate since they removed all our access to historical analytics. I mean you dont need accurate Data but surely most would know by heart their traffic in rough figures? Or am I the old dog where every new Web Dev are so used to Cloud and Serverless they have no idea what they are us…

Eh, your traffic is a total cost you pay per month. That's how I would look at it. The one figure I know best of all is annual revenue, and how our annual revenue this year is on track to do compared to last year's.

As far as exact volume of QPS or TB/month or whatever, I really couldn't say.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#52

Post by user_7832 »

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 90 or 95% of their traffic comes from a single domain (and presumably has for a while), that still doesn’t make OP sound guilty. If there was a legal issue Cloudflare legal should’ve stepped in, not their sales team.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#54

Post by icedchai »

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.

10TB/month is 30 megabits/sec on average. Not much for a CDN. They probably need Cloudflare more for DDOS protection than anything else, I'd think?

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#55

Post by smt88 »

saagarjha wrote: post #17
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 mean, sure, they’re probably doing some sketchy regulatory dodging or whatever. Which part of this can Cloudflare solve by having them pay $120k/year to them?

Over-charging is a legal way to effectively deny service. When I'm offered jobs I don't want, I sometimes tell them my salary is 3x what I really need.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#56

Post by CydeWeys »

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.

A reasonable scenario to me seems to be: An automatic "upgrade to the enterprise plan" requirement was triggered, and then in the process of the sales calls to make that happen, Cloudflare got serious eyes on the customer for the first time (whereas at a paltry $250/month previously they wouldn't have), and realized exactly what line of business the customer was involved in, and decided to fire them.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#57

Post by delusional »

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.

That's not true at all. That line of argument gets close to "if this product is free for open source, why is it not free for me? either it costs something to operate or it doesn't." You don't get to price the service.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#58

Post by willmadden »

jsheard wrote: post #4
h2odragon wrote: post #2

Racketeering is easier and more profitable than actual services. Shocking how often "gatekeepers" fall to the temptation.

Speaking of racketeering, it's an enlightening experience to search for "stresser" or "booter" providers (euphemisms for DDoS-as-a-Service) and look up their NS records to see who helping them ward off competitors DDoS attacks and keep their origin servers hidden. 9 times out of 10 it's Cloudflare, with the few exceptions being DDoS-Guard, who more or less specialize in facilitating crime.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if DDOS protection providers were using DDOS on their prospective customers via proxy. Problem, reaction, solution. Did you pay your "protection" money this month, Luigi?

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#59

Post by JoeyJooste »

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 because of the risk that you carry as a gambling company.

Cloudflare needed you to have to enterprise plan to remove liability from them. It's not even a big request, they have specific pricing plans for a reason.

Re: Cloudflare took down our website

#60

Post by numair »

> I'm a SysOps engineer at a fairly large online casino. We have around 4 million monthly active users. We had been happy Cloudflare customers since 2018 on the "Business" plan which has some neat features and costs $250/month for "unlimited" traffic.

Sorry to be “that guy,” but, you’re serving 4 million people at a casino and paying $250 a month for shared multi tenant infra, and you’re SURPRISED you have problems? Really?

To be honest, I’m glad these sorts of businesses get kicked off Cloudflare because it causes problems for others sharing the same IP space and infra. I’ll let someone else with experience discuss how many times a day the network would see a hacking or DDoS attempt against the online casino, which is by far the favorite target of hackers. But in general, I just don’t want any of my infra touching the same stuff as these guys.

Like another person here, I am assuming that Cloudflare ops told someone “tell these guys to get their own IPs and upgrade,” and then the message went to Cloudflare’s (utterly lousy!!!) sales people to try to fix before shutdown, and then it all turned into the mess we see here.

The true moral of the story, I think, is, if you’re running an online casino on a shoestring budget, expect bad things to happen to you. Of all kinds.

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