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.

  • @Potatos_are_not_friendsEnglish
    168•7 months ago

    As a person who works in server hosting (not as devops or IT), I’m often privy to customer interactions. I feel like my company does a really good job at damage control - where if we fuck up, some rep gets on the phone and makes things right. We’ve eaten costs on behalf of our customers.

    But sometimes, you just gotta tell a customer to go fuck themselves.

    And those customers, those biggest complainers are often in online gambling, crypto, adult content, or racist shit.

    We get DDos’d a lot from it. But I’m glad the company I work for doesn’t bow down to garbage companies.

    • DojanEnglish
      77•7 months ago

      I’m honestly not surprised.

      I used to hook up with a guy who was 100% convinced that he could game the system. It had something to do with break frequencies from various services and certain time windows for playing. He won sometimes, but he obviously didn’t talk much about his losses. He wasn’t a very happy person, and I think gambling offered an easy release.

      That’s my big issue with gambling. It’s a business preying on addicts leaving many in financial ruin, and overall they do nothing for society at large. Here in Sweden it is regulated, but you honestly don’t notice it. There are so many internet casinos vanishing and cropping up on an almost daily basis. If you turn on the radio the adverts are like 40% online casinos, 40% sex toy sites, and 20% various services, like tyre shifting, glass repairs, etc.

      • NatanaelEnglish
        21•7 months ago

        A lot of those exploit EU rules on open markets to dodge proper local licensing (I’m also from Sweden)

        • DojanEnglish
          14•7 months ago

          That explains why they all seem so samey. E.g. online casinos never have any sort of physical presence like scratch cards or what have you, even though we have plenty of scratch cards.

        • @[email protected]English
          5•7 months ago

          No they don’t, at least for Sweden. I remember when they regulated the market in Sweden (I was working for a gambling company at the time and I had to run the security & compliance for the Swedish license). There is no such thing as open market for gambling where the market is regulated (Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, not sure if Norway finally regulated).

          As far as I know, a handful of companies got regulated at the first round, some failed and could not operate in Sweden (this might mean you actually need to deny access to users from Sweden - since you do KYC you know) for quite some time (before they eventually managed to get the license).

          The problem (why the other user mentions all similar sites) is that the big companies (say Kindred group, Betsson) tend to spin up many alternative brands with different looks to attract different customers.

          Also, most of the companies that operate in Scandinavia use the Maltese license, but that works only in unregulated markets (Finland, Iceland and Norway for example - unless something changed in the last 3 years). That said, getting a license once you have another is quite simple usually. The Swedish license for example is easier to get than and very similar to the Danish one, so if you operate in Denmark you can just fill in the paperwork and you should be easily able to pick that one up.

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

        I despise gambling, I don’t gamble myself and I consider it a tax on those who don’t know math. That said, I worked for a gambling company and I know that different companies target different types of customers. Also they have responsible gambling programs that are more or less serious (some of which might be required by regulations). The company I worked for operated in Scandinavia and was sportsbook heavy (vs casino heavy), and had quite serious measures against suspected addicts (immediate block, calling the person on the phone if there were any signs like long sessions etc., proof of income to set limits proportional to income etc.), because it was considered bad for business. Many companies in general are terrible, and especially those who depend on casino games, where the margins are fixed and the dynamics are more prone to create addiction (available 24/7, quick feedback etc.).

        • @HowManyNimonsEnglish
          5•7 months ago

          If it had been a sports betting site OP would have said so. The fact that they said “casino” says it all.

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

            Many do both, I would say the vast majority. Same regulations and licenses apply, in fact. Simply some companies invest more in casino (which are purchased games from vendors in the vast majority of cases), some invest more in sportsbook. I guess the OP’s case is the former, but it’s not a very relevant distinction to make.