Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h
robindev.substack.com
TL;DR: We've been on the Cloudflare Business plan ($250/month) for years. They suddenly contacted us and asked us to either pay them $120k up front for one year of Enterprise within 24 hours or they would take down all of our domains. While this escalated up our business we had 3 sales calls with them, trying to figure out what was happening and how to reach a reasonable contract in a week. When we told them we were also in talks with Fastly, they suddenly "purged" all our domains, causing huge downtime in our core business, sleepless nights migrating away from CF, irreparable loss in customer trust and weeks of ongoing downtime in our internal systems.

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.

    • @gdog05English
      51•7 months ago

      I didn’t see anyone saying that but the correct response is: in the next billing cycle we’re going to start charging X amount per month for X amount of traffic or we have to bump you to to the next tier.

      If things are so dire that the traffic is causing problems the correct response is to throttle certain domain traffic until it gets figured out in some way.

      Pay X amount in 24 hours or we remove you entirely is extortion.

    • @ricdehEnglish
      13•7 months ago

      Can you read?

    • @HowManyNimonsEnglish
      12•7 months ago

      The guy’s running an online casino. With millions of subscribers. CloudFlare can kick them off the internet and steal the copper off the eyelets of their boots for all I care.

      • @[email protected]English
        0•7 months ago

        Yes because you yourself are against something you should take the ability of adults choosing to do that away! And also make a company able to extort you for it!!

    • @[email protected]English
      9•7 months ago

      Ah yes, the nuclear solution. Very reasonable.

      With that said, we only have one side of the story.

    • chiisanaEnglish
      -20•7 months ago

      Lemmy hates cloudflare because they are scared of alleged “privacy” concern. So much so that they’d rather side with online casinos doing literal scammy business just to validate their claims that “cloudflare is bad”. They also severely lack the business acumen to understand what’s happening. It’s shit like this that pushes me further and further away from Lemmy and more and more back towards Reddit :(

      • @[email protected]English
        4•7 months ago

        Lemmy is getting bigger now, and you can see the quality of discussions in large Lemmy communities take a hit lately. If you want quality discussion, go to smaller communities.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•7 months ago

        Bye :)

        “You have 24h to pay up” seems a lot like ransom, therefore “cloudflare is bad”.

        • chiisanaEnglish
          7•7 months ago

          They were contacted in April. Any company can fire their clients they don’t like without having to go through a month of song and dance.