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.

  • @ChriszzEnglish
    34•7 months ago

    250$ a month for their service seems like cloudflare was straight up losing money on the deal. Although cloudflare seemed to have given them extra time than they said before terminating service, which they didn’t have to do. That being said, I think both sides suck here.

    • @[email protected]English
      61•7 months ago

      Nah. CF initiated a contract renegotiation, and then suspended services right after being informed the customer was price leveling.

      That’s crappy.

      They gave less than a single billing period notice for a price increase.

      That’s crappy.

      They sent a price increase for 40x the current billings, with no corroborated cost or value.

      See where I’m going here?

    • @pete_the_catEnglish
      17•7 months ago

      I agree. It’s shitty for Cloudflare to just straight up destroy this company’s DNS, but also it seems like the company violated the ToS. They had about two weeks to migrate to something else, but instead they just continued debating with CF. Also, this company doesn’t have a secondary DNS server in case CF ever went down? That’s pretty stupid on their part. Redundant systems are key, I hope they learned that lesson haha

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

        Isn’t CF advertising themselves as the solution to needing multiple DNS’ with their failsafes, switchovers and load balancing?

        If I need to maintain multiple anyway, what’s the benefit of CF to begin with? There are a million CDNs out there I could use instead, if I still have to maintain the network architecture.

        • @pete_the_catEnglish
          1•7 months ago

          Regardless of what they tell you, if you care about uptime, you ensure this yourself. I feel this is 60% the company’s fault and 40% Cloudflare’s.

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

          Do you believe everything that companies tell you? If Google or Apple tell you “we’re the solution to everything, you never need to buy anything else”, do you listen to them?

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

            No, but if I use a service to solve a specific problem only to see the need to have a failover in place regardless, I might as well not use the service.

      • @ChriszzEnglish
        1•7 months ago

        Thanks for actually reading my comment unlike the other guy

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

      $250 a month unlimited business plan, is for a business with a Website, like a restaurant website that has a menu and takes reservations, maybe a small online store that handles a few dozen SKUs. When the website is the business they move you to an enterprise solution.