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.
They were in violation of the TOS for abusing CF’s IPs with site rotation to circumvent IP bans to their online casino. They need an enterprise plan to BYOIP with their level of traffic. They were given 48 hours notice of site deletion but were given almost 2 weeks before doing so. Read the comment at the bottom of the substack post for further detail.
If that’s the case, and from what I read it could be, then I still blame cloudflare for 2 big things. First communication, because they clearly were confused about what was happening and felt like they didn’t have anyone technical explain it to them and it felt like a sales pitch. Second is still communcation, but an offramp plan. You have 1 week to come into compliance, and we can tell you exactly what is not in compliance, and then your services will be terminated. They gave them a very, very short timeline, did not tell them exactly what was out of compliance, and then just turned it off.
As someone who has accidentally been on the wrong side of TOS before, it’s a nightmare. These large corporations don’t tell you what you’re doing wrong, or where the issue even is, they just say “You’re suspended, gtfo”. That has happened to me for personal accounts, I can’t imagine what it’s like when your business depends on it.
I don’t think that was the case.
The substack post is a one-sided and very partial account, and one that doesn’t pass the smell test. They use an awful lot of weasel worlds and leave about whole accounts on what has been discussed with cloud flare in meetings summoned with a matter of urgency.
Occam’s razor suggests they were intentionally involved in multiple layers of abuse, were told to stop it, ignored all warnings, and once the consequences hit they decided to launch a public attack on their hosting providers.
From what I’ve been reading on reddit, Lemmy and hackernews, this public attack is only bringing to light what a scummy company they are, not CF, so it has failed tremendously. It doesn’t help that no one wants to defend an online casino in the first place.
dunno about that with OP defending them