Always call out Cloudflare for their bullshit. For those working for companies in devops, share this with your teams…
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.
From the post: I’m a SysOps engineer at a fairly large online casino. We have around 4 million monthly active users. We had been happy Cloudflare customers since 2018 on the “Business” plan which has some neat features and costs $250/month for “unlimited” traffic.
This seems a bit like abuse of the business plan not cloudflare bs. They are using the cdn for 4m users for $250 a month.
As they stated in the article, they were fully open to them calling out anything that was against the ToS, but CF never explained to them what was wrong, or how they could rectify it. They attempted multiple meetings with them to try to figure out what was the culprit, but cloudflare hit them with a 120k/month bill insisting it was necessary and never telling them why.
Clouflare fucked up in multiple ways:
- It should have never happened in the first place. (If they should have been on a different plan than this is a billing system bug, they should have just fixed their bug with billing, or it should have been locked behind a paywall.)
- They had multiple opportunities to tell them what was wrong, and how they could rectify it.
- Absolutely no service provider should ever cancel an account with such short notice. Full stop. Unless there is a legitimate legal reason not to, which at this point we have not seen anything (and I mean feds could be involved legal), it is extremely unprofessional to do that, and I would not trust them with my business. There is zero reason they couldn’t have given then at least a month’s grace period.
That and also, what company of that scale can you just go to finance and be like “Hey Cloudflare just jacked up our rate from $250/mo to $10000/mo and they want the whole 120k for the whole year right now and we need it done within 24h or they’ll cut us off”. Even for companies spending a million a month on AWS costs that’s 12% of the budget.
And also asking it all upfront, like, what? What happened to monthly billing? What company has the money to pay infrastructure bills yearly like that, especially on such notice?
Large companies have big cash flows, they don’t have 120k just laying around, it’s tied in some assets somewhere especially with the inflation, having large amounts of plain cash is bad finances. They probably need to take out a loan or sell some stocks or whatever. You can’t do that in 24h.
I have no doubt the author is omitting important details in the story, they may have been getting warnings for a while at this point and they just ignored them because “we’re happy with our business plan”. But the whole upfront part, then terminating the account as soon as they expressed looking at competitors pricing which is absolutely normal to want to do when your bill goes up 40x, if not required by company policy. Shady as fuck from Cloudflare.
