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.

  • @catalog3115English
    31•7 months ago

    I really love cloudflare especially for my hobby projects but in this case they asked for outright Ransome. From this I learnt to keep Nameservers & domain sellers different. I am going to transfer domain away from nameserver.

    • Dr. DabblesEnglish
      19•7 months ago

      Not just “this case”, there’s been countless cases like this with CF.

        • Dr. DabblesEnglish
          -4•7 months ago

          You can google for cloudflare issues ranging from providing hosting for actual nazi sites to extorting customers by threatening the exact scenario se saw in this blog post. Feel free to google “cloudflare account suspended” to see many posts about people having not just DDoS mitigation disabled, but everything related to an account deleted and disabled. Many of those people had the audacity to, get this, rely on DDoS protection! The nerve, right?

          • @[email protected]English
            2•7 months ago

            So no sources then?

            If I have to dig, I’m most likely only getting one side of the story. This article pointed out that the customer broke the TOS and knew they were getting way better of a deal than they should’ve. I’m not so confident a random post online from angry customers is going to be so forthright.

            That’s why I’m asking. If you’ve seen some particularly interesting stories, it would certainly be easier for you to find them them me. I’m not looking for butthurt customers who got caught breaking the rules, I’m looking for legitimate cases of CF bullying rules-following customers into paying more.

            • Dr. DabblesEnglish
              0•7 months ago

              I told you how to find them so you wouldn’t have to bitch about my cherry picking. I can’t help if you’d rather bury your head in the sand, and it makes no difference to me what you believe.