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Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay $120000 within 24h (robindev.substack.com)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

196 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Also, interesting comment I found on HackerNews (HN):

This post was definitely demoted by HN. It stayed in the first position for less than 5 minutes and, as it quickly gathered upvotes, it jumped straight into 24th and quickly fell off the first page as it got 200 or so more points in less than an hour.

I'm 80% confident HN tried to hide this link. It's the fastest downhill I've noticed on here, and I've been lurking and commenting for longer than 10 years.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (3 children)

As I said in another comment: The up-front payment is the only thing that makes sense for Cloudflare. You got a customer that's costing you money each month. They broke ToS. You offer them a deal still to keep the services running. And their CEO/CFO tells you they are looking at other providers like Fastly.

If Cloudflare gave them a monthly contract then the casino would simply pay for a month and switch over their services to a competitor in that time. So Cloudflare loses all the money from the past (where the casino used far too much traffic) and will barely recoup 10k (minus the running cost, so more likely 7k at the high end) for a single month. It's just not worth it.

So they offer: Stick with us for a full year at least or get fucked. Which is fair.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This scenario would mean major negligence on their part, as they had been with Cloudflare for years. When it was clear their services were costing more than the business plan paid for, that's when they should have been contacted with clear numbers and a sheepish admission that "unlimited" doesn't actually mean unlimited. It certainly seems shady to me that they attempted to make it about a TOS violation, that there's no public information about enterprise level and pricing, and that the second they said they were talking to a competitor they had their data purged. It sounds like a failed attempt at extortion to me.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

Read to me as:

Look, for a ToS-breaking [and/or] legally questionable site, we need a LOT to make it worth our while given we could be named as co-defendants someday - and obviously we’re not saying [cough] you’re a sketchy business we don’t want, because if we said that then we shouldn’t take bribes and should cancel you no matter what, so please read in between the lines.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

I don't think I particularly agree with this take, but it's an interesting perspective.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

If you are cloudflare and you suspect they broke ToS you quote which ToS has been broken, you specify which country blocking the customer is trying or has tried to circumvent and you force the customer to either move away or enforce geo-blocking for those countries (or have a separate account for those with your own IPs). There is no reason to cancel the whole account if the blocking is country-specific and there is no way that 10k a month is anyway a sufficient benefit for cloudflare for their IPs to be blocked in a country (affecting potentially hundreds or thousand of customers).