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.
I’d be interested to see if / how Cloudflare will respond to this. Because at this point I’m not 100 percent sure who is in the right.
Repoint your DNS, send everything to legal, delete Facebook hit the gym
Realistically, this is why you pay for Akamai. You don’t get these shenanigans.
How the fuck were they still on a $250 dollar a month plan when they pumped through $2000 a month worth of traffic? That’s shady on the companiy’s part and Cloudflare shouldn’t have allowed it to happen in the first place.
Each party played their part here and did shitty things. Sounds like the tech equivalent of a crackhead arguing about selling stuff to the pawn shop employee.
I worked for Akamai for 7 years.
This is why, if your CDN infra is core to the operation of your business, you make your systems accommodate multi-CDN integration. Cutting one CDN off shouldn’t be significantly difficult, and it comes in handy during contract negotiations. All the major players work this way.
The $250/month plan supposedly includes unlimited traffic. If there’s actually a limit where you’re supposed to switch to a more expensive plan with no standardized price, maybe CF should say what the limit is?
They absolutely should have outlined a traffic limit for the $250 a month plan. That’s on Cloudflare for allowing it.
That said, if you make wildly excessive use of that loophole it probably shouldn’t surprise you if they do something like this. They called it “trust and safety” because it allows them to do anything they want under the guide of security.
Really, they didn’t define their service clearly and wanted to fire them as a customer unless they paid up for what they felt they were owed.
If something is marketed as “unlimited”, I don’t think there is such a thing as “wildly excessive use”. This isn’t a competitive eater going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and being mad about getting kicked out. It’s a business using a service in a way that’s seemingly in-line with what they paid for.
It’s the same definition of “unlimited” that Telcos use: you pay for unlimited but it really is XXgb of data per month, after that they either disconnect you or throttle your traffic at a glacial pace…
And in both cases, that is bullshit. Just because it happens doesn’t mean we should accept it.
A man walks into whorehouse at half past seven, inquires about prices, and learns that it’s 250 per night, per person for the room. “Everything they consent to is available to the customer” says the proprietor. Gladly he pays and climbs up the steps with his hand clasped tenderly, finally landing upon a plain pink cushion, whereupon he proceeds to fuck the absolute shit out of his companion for six full hours. The brothel quakes in rhythm with their dual shrieks of ecstasy for the full duration.
As he begins dressing himself across from the nearly comatose prostitute, the proprietor returns, requesting two hundred and ninety dollars for the extended stay and sixty for the damage to her employee. It was at that moment that the man realized that the madame was a 70 foot tall crustacean from the Paleozoic era. He yells “goddamn Loch Ness monster, I ain’t giving you no three fifty!”
…huh?
South Park reference. Probably the funniest episode in the whole show outside of “Hare Club for Men”.
Sounds like any Cloudflare customer should reconsider their hosting setup . Mark Anderson has decided to strip the customers to increase the bottom line… And once the numbers are up but the customers are gone… Will move on to the next company
Don’t believe anything advertised as unlimited , cause it isn’t, they always cover their asses in the fine prints in their TOS.
Does this mean hackernews & cloudflare are colluding together?
A simpler explanation is that users are tired of everybody with a customer support issue running to daddy HN and making a big fuss trying to get their way.
After Twitter went to shit, where else do customers have to go for customer support like this?
Admittedly, I didn’t read the article, but I have seen plenty of other cases woth cloudfare or other big providers where people have only been able to set things right by kicking up a fuss on social media — like that recent one with amazon aws.
You think we’re hitting that point where line go up must wreck lives?
We hit that point centuries ago, if not millennia.
Not a huge surprise, they’ve got a long history of doing all kinds of scumbag shit. Nobody should be surprised when the leopard eats their face.
Yeah pretty much all red flags from cloud flare
Can’t wait for this to become a louis rossman video
- what is HN? Edit: never mind, answered below: hacker news (ycombinator)
- daaamn… I hated cloudflare before for their shitty and non-adblocker-compatible (often not working at all) “I am not a bot” checks, but fuck me are those EVIL motherfuckers…
While I have been reading through this topic, I have been feeling worried since I was thinking about using Cloudflare to protect a site of mine for some time. This is because I found out from somewhere that they have protection against AI LLMs scraping page data from websites, which is what I’m mainly worried about since there are things and stories that I put a lot of thought and work into. And finding out about Cloudflare shutting someone else down here over what sounds like the level of traffic has me feeling I might not be able to use them and not sure what other options there are.
Right. And if you depend on them for your logic with cloudflare functions you will never be able to migrate to another CDN.
Never let a vender do anything for you beyond standardized features. That’s why a “selling point” if we go with this guy we can do this… never makes sense. Because if option B can’t do it also you wouldn’t want to do “this”, and you should probably implement it in a more old-school way.
The same thing happens in fastly with the VCL
Yet more evidence that CloudFlare is inherently damaging and hostile to the Internet.
this is disgusting and knowing this, i will never pay cloudflare for anything nor recommend them to anyone ever
Found the thread on HN. Here’s what (I’m guessing) a mod had to say:
It set off the flamewar detector, got flagged by users, and got downweighted by a mod.
The ‘customer support of last resort’ genre is common and not usually a good fit for HN [1]. If people feel this story is unusually relevant and interesting, I’m not sure I agree—long experience has taught us that one-sided articles like this nearly always leave out critical information—but I also don’t mind yielding in an occasional specific case, so I’ve rolled back the penalties on this thread.
The issue from our point of view is not about story X or company Y—it’s a systemic one: the most popular genres of submission (especially the rage-inducing ones) get massively over-represented by default, so countervailing mechanisms are needed [2] if we’re to have a space for the more intellectually curious stories that the site is meant for.
Cracking insight - well done!
