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.

I just wonder how much was left out

Is there? The casino is on a cheap $250 a month plan they don't belong on and they broke ToS with the domains. While also costing Cloudflare money each month (as the casino admits themselves, their traffic alone is worth up to $2000 a month).

It's absolutely in the right of Cloudflare to drop a customer that's bothersome. Casinos usually are (regulations, going around country restrictions), them costing them money on top is a massive issue.

120k a year is a big slap of course, but it's probably the amount Cloudflare would want to keep them on as a customer. If they leave, so be it.

I've seen it several times before at companies I worked at. They cheaped out and went with a tiny service plan to coast by. Or even broke ToS because it would be cheaper. That usually got stopped by plans getting dropped (GitLab Bronze for example), cheap plans getting limited, or the sales team sending a 'friendly' message that we're abusing their plan and how we're going to fix it. If you don't play along at that point you're going to get the hammer dropped on you.

It also wasn't 24h as the title says, the first communication happened in April. At that point they should have started to scramble, either upgrading to a bigger tier immediately or switching providers. And it's totally normal to go to the sales team when you break the ToS of your plan or you abuse a smaller plan. They're going to discuss terms, it's not a technical issue.

Edit: And I should also say, the whole "paying for a whole year is extortion" is bullshit too. Their CFO or CEO told Cloudflare they are looking at switching providers (as they looked at Fastly). So of fucking course Cloudflare is going to demand a full year upfront. Otherwise the casino could pay for a single month and during that month they switch away to another provider. So Cloudflare would still be thousands in the red with that ex-customer after they used so much traffic the last few years.

The biggest red flag is the up-front payment for a year, gives the indication that they are in actual financial trouble, meaning short in cash right now.

Fucking idiots could have been just increasing the price yearly without any resistance, it’s unlikely a big casino would care about an extra 50-100 per month.

Okay, that's understandable

Yeah this substac just reads as we abused cloudflare then were surprised they didn't take us saying no well.

The irony here is that the article author confirms that they break TOS of CF and he still has a Pikachu face. Reddit discussion is pretty positive that CF is right in their decision and that new provider will shut them down at some time as well.

The $250/month plan supposedly includes unlimited traffic. If there's actually a limit where you're supposed to switch to a more expensive plan with no standardized price, maybe CF should say what the limit is?

I worked for Akamai for 7 years.

This is why, if your CDN infra is core to the operation of your business, you make your systems accommodate multi-CDN integration. Cutting one CDN off shouldn't be significantly difficult, and it comes in handy during contract negotiations. All the major players work this way.

"Pay us money or we will destroy your business." Pretty cut and dry extortion. The entire article was infuriating to read.

Sounds like a shake down, and it couldn't have happened to a more deserving group.

Still, real lesson in how Cloudflare does business.

CF doesn't give a fuck about 80tb of traffic. These guys were in severe TOS violation that could affect all CF customers if CF IPs got blocked. Given 48 hours to bring their own IPs and switch to (expensive AF anywhere) enterprise account and finally shut down TWO WEEKS later after trying to weasel their way out of this instead of accepting they need to pay to play this stupid game.

We've been CF customers forever and enshitification is definitely affecting all of their services and mostly customer support, but in this instance I'm 100% on the side of CF.

Okay, yes this is an issue. But small business? This was a multinational casino site… that doesn’t scream small business to me.

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?

Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/