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.
Again, I’m not seeing an unambiguous TOS violation here. They have some catch-all stuff about creating an undue burden and an even broader clause saying, essentially they can drop any customer without cause. I have no doubt Cloudflare is legally in the clear, but when I read about something like this, I think I wouldn’t set anything important up with Cloudflare as a critical part of its infrastructure.
Of course, the author could be leaving out a bunch of context to make himself look good.
If the article was about a non profit or a legit small business with a web presence, I would agree with you. We’re talking about massively risky business with spectacular profit margins.
I just don’t believe that CF suddenly realized these guys are rolling in money and wanted their cut. The risk just wasn’t worth it to CF confirmed by the fact that they did not negotiate at all and happily lost the casino as their client.
We’re easily making enough to pay $120k/yr to CF, but they are not creating that much value for us and we’re not introducing any risk to them so what we pay makes sense for both sides.
Maybe I haven’t been clear enough.
I have no objection to Cloudflare or any other service provider dropping a risky or unprofitable customer. That’s normal and fair in business.
What I don’t like is their apparent poor communication and failure to provide a clear (and reasonably distant) deadline so that the author’s company could find a solution that avoided downtime. Were I on that company’s board, I’d likely be pretty unhappy with the author for not having a contingency plan prepared in advance, but as a third-party observer my main takeaway is that if I rely on Cloudflare and they suddenly decide they don’t like something I’m doing, I’m screwed.
Your conclusion is based on only one side of the story. And this story is coming from an unnamed business that’s using social media to shit on a provider that dropped them.
But even assuming that’s true, name any other large provider that would behave differently. AWS will terminate your services instantly and their support is even worse than CF. Apple is the same and then will take 2 weeks to reply. Google is a ghosting champion.
Just to be clear I’m talking about B2B relationships. Not end user communication.
It’s true I’m assuming the author is being honest about what Cloudflare sent them and not leaving out a message where they made the situation abundantly clear. That’s definitely possible, and we probably won’t find out because big companies don’t usually give public responses to this sort of thing.
I can’t, and this makes me inclined to believe it’s a mistake to rely on any of them without a failover plan. Of course that’s effectively impossible for some situations, like mobile apps requiring app store access. That seems like a situation that calls for antitrust enforcement.