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.
  • Jo Miran
    18•6 months ago

    Online casino with 4 million active users paying $250/month. That’s mental.

      • Nora
        11•6 months ago

        Of course there was. They’re a casino, that’s their game. Lie and trick to get a better outcome.

        Not defending CF. This article has me thinking maybe I should move to something from the open source community.

        • @[email protected]
          4•6 months ago

          Regardless of whether this is the whole story or not, the advice at the bottom to at least limit your CF dependence is a good idea.

        • @[email protected]
          2•6 months ago

          Just based on cf response I’m guessing lawyers were threatened along with looking for another cdn.

          Are there any open source options? Just based on scale I can’t think of any

          • Pup Biru
            4•6 months ago

            the problem with open source here is that open source isn’t really a solution… the software is kinda irrelevant: it’s the CDN itself - the hardware and networks - that’s the only important thing… that’s not something you can really open source. that’s just something you have to pay someone for

  • @[email protected]
    8•6 months ago

    And that’s why they should never offer “unlimited” plans, because edge cases will cause issues. I would have definitely opened a support ticket right away the moment you found you you were talking to sales. Those two organizations tend to be diametrically opposed and you can usually find out what’s going on when commission isn’t involved.

    This is a problem in general when relying on other vendors for things. I know you can’t just spin up your own CDN, but not locking yourself in goes a long way. The article gives some good tips for how to safeguard your company, especially around domain names, that’s the big thing. It would have been easy to change up an A record and point to a static page saying “Sorry, CloudFlare fucked us” as long as you still control DNS.