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.
Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h
Yikes. That sounds bad.
I’m a SysOps engineer at a fairly large online casino.
Okay all my sympathy is gone. Online casinos deserve to die.
That said, my feelings towards economic vampires aside, the way the events unfolded is concerning to say the least. Cloudflare has been racking up evil-corp points quite rapidly in recent months.
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’m honestly not surprised.
I used to hook up with a guy who was 100% convinced that he could game the system. It had something to do with break frequencies from various services and certain time windows for playing. He won sometimes, but he obviously didn’t talk much about his losses. He wasn’t a very happy person, and I think gambling offered an easy release.
That’s my big issue with gambling. It’s a business preying on addicts leaving many in financial ruin, and overall they do nothing for society at large. Here in Sweden it is regulated, but you honestly don’t notice it. There are so many internet casinos vanishing and cropping up on an almost daily basis. If you turn on the radio the adverts are like 40% online casinos, 40% sex toy sites, and 20% various services, like tyre shifting, glass repairs, etc.
A lot of those exploit EU rules on open markets to dodge proper local licensing (I’m also from Sweden)
I just wonder how much was left out
If it’s providing games of skill like online poker, it’s actually a very intellectually stimulating game. People have made a ton of instructional videos and many books on the poker variations.
After playing poker professionally I was able to leverage the skills of bankroll management and emotional control to become successful in investing in the stock market.
I held all of my stocks through the entire pandemic to rebound from a loss over multiple years holding tech to a $600,000 profit by buying at the bottom. If I hadn’t played poker I probably wouldn’t be able to stomach looking at a six digit loss in 2021. I only sold my bonds which I used to buy more stocks at a cheaper price (which was the point of the bond allocation)
I used to be in credit risk for a very large stock market company.
Calling the bottom of the market is the same as betting big and getting 21 in blackjack.
Super cool when it happens, but not skill. The number of grown men I had to hear crying because they were dollar cost averaging down to the bottom until they went broke still disturbs me.
I’m happy this worked for you, but it was not skill.
You can’t go broke with 1x leverage, and I bought $AMD all the way down from $100 to $70
If it went to $50 I wouldn’t go broke, if it went $1 I wouldn’t go broke. I just would have missed a bigger opportunity
If it goes from $100 to $1, there’s not much left to go before bankruptcy/delisting. Say hello to swaths of BBBY bag holders… oh wait, no bags left there!
Is it really so crazy that if you practice gambling you might end up good at gambling? I dont see any difference between playing the stock market and playing cards for money.
Yes, that’s the point, I’m good at combinatorics, probability. These mathematical skills have a lot of carryover
Would you advise others that learning through increasingly higher stakes is a good way to practice these skills and apply them to make a living?
I admit I dont have much issue with gambling as recreation/sport, but I dont know its a benefit to society to treat gambling as a profession.
Stock brokers gambling with others money is a whole other thing.
Only to the point that you get bored and do something useful with your new knowledge.
People enter tournaments for all kinds of games and those tournaments have money prizes and entry fees. I think it’s unfair to single out poker since it’s a game of skill.
It just so happens it doesn’t make sense to play without even the smallest stakes. Otherwise the best strategy is to go all in with any hand and try to double up quickly (if the chips are free, there’s no downside to doing this)
Even like $2 buy in games are much tighter than play money games
Everything in your post seems to give reasons for recreational gambling, and I do agree that the stakes are part of the game, and one with no stakes is markedly different. It does seem though that this is all in service of fair play, and to reward those for requiring they pay to prove they are in good faith.
To me I dont think the potential reward is the point with recreational gambling. You might even give your winnings back in a friendly game were you to find out that the stakes bled out into real life.
However I dont see how all of this applies to gambling as a profession and as a part of society in larger ways such as stock markets and Crypto currency. What’s the supposed benefits of that?
I would argue that the professional setting is not recreational at all, and in many cases is abusive, with there seeming to be some intent to disguise how abusive it is to the victim.
Nah, you don’t play with stakes that could matter to someone. In my case, our buy-ins in the home game are $28 when converted to dollars and nobody bats an eye at dropping $100
The tiny reward does make it more interesting because you actually care about winning. It’s better to do $20 stakes and keep the money than play for $100 stakes and have to give it back because someone was irresponsible with their money
deleted by creator
Sounds like a shake down, and it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving group.
Still, real lesson in how Cloudflare does business.
THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS MY FRIEND
True, and this time “The House” wasn’t the casino.
somebody has out gambled the gamblers. It’s finally happened!
Jesus. Something shady is happening with cloudflare.
That does not inspire confidence.
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.
That Cloudflare were justifiably unhappy with the situation and wanted to take action is fine.
What’s not fine is how they approached that problem.
In my opinion, the right thing for Cloudflare to do would have been to have an open and honest conversation and set clear expectations and dates.
Example:
"We have recently conducted a review of your account and found your usage pattern far exceeds the expected levels for your plan. This usage is not sustainable for us, and to continue to provide you with service we must move you to plan x at a cost of y.
If no agreement is reached by [date x] your service will be suspended on [date y]."
Clear deadlines and clear expectations. Doesn’t that sound a lot better than giving someone the run-around, and then childishly pulling the plug when a competitor’s name is mentioned?
Considering the perspective of the poster, the misleading title, etc - are you actually sure they didn’t?
Until Cloudflare responds to the post, it is IMO most beneficial to assume that the OP is being truthful and forthright. Doing so puts pressure on Cloudflare to either clarify or rectify the situation, whereas treating Cloudflare as though they are above suspicion accomplishes nothing.
After all, OP is very much the little guy here.
Eh, I have a couple of issues with that. For one, I doubt CF would even respond to this. I could easily see them using this very writeup to sue, with all the admissions in it.
The bigger part though, is calling an online casino, whose own IT team (the writer) admitted they were knowingly abusing the plan they were on, the “little guy”.
Are they small in comparison to Cloudflare? Absolutely, those schmucks have way too much control of the internet. Calling an online casino, whose own staff lied in the title, the little guy though… Doesn’t sit right with me.
No, I’m not going to side with them, or with CF. I’m going to make my assumptions off what I know (two terrible companies, one of which has a liar writing an article where they pretend to not have admittted to their own lies about the subject), and I’m going to assume this:
- Terrible casino used a plan they know they shouldn’t have been on.
- Terrible casino would have known what their traffic looked like for a long time.
- Awful CF noticed, and said “Hey guys, wrong plan, talk to sales.”
- Terrible casino threatened to just leave awfuo CF.
- Awful CF demands a year up front to ensure their costs are covered for previous abuse of the TOS.
- Awful CF figures “screw it, they are stringing us along, just cut them off so we don’t spend more money. TOS violation makes it easy.”
- Idiot IT from terrible online casino writes an article (stupidly) in which they admit to TOS violations, and pretends not to know about their own traffic from a resource they are relying on.
Seems pretty obvious to me. Barring further details, my assumptions are based on what I know, and I am perfectly happy sticking to that.
You do you.
The first communications were intentionally misleading though. CF wasn’t trying to solve a problem, they were trying to sell a service. If CF had just led with “upgrade or we nuke your site” then that’s scummy, but fair. Leading these guys on about technical problems and “trust & safety” bullshit was not fair at all.
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.
It’s because CF could see that moving to another provider would not be too difficult for them. If they went month to month then they would be gone after one month. So CF decided to go with extortion instead. Either pay for $120k, or CF will set fire to your business.
I’m pretty heavily invested in cloudflare. This news is definitely making me reconsider that investment.
What I can say, is their stock is looking very healthy. There are a lot of people buying a lot of stock for them and the prospect over the next 3 to 5 months looks very promising. The only way they wouldn’t have cash on hand as if they’re spending a ridiculous amount of cash on some project that I’m not aware of, and I feel like I would be aware of it.
This is very peculiar. Definitely warrants further investigation.
The only way they wouldn’t have cash on hand as if they’re spending a ridiculous amount of cash on some project that I’m not aware of, and I feel like I would be aware of it.
Maybe someone dipshit in marketing heavily invested in LLMs, since that’s the current hype among dipshits?
Cloudflare is publicly traded. They had $1.6 billion in cash or equivalents in December. Maybe they want to grease up the quarter to show better growth against the market, but that is a fuckload of cash.
or maybe it’s just a lower level manager who wants to polish up their revenue numbers to ask for a raise / promotion :) capitalists are ugly little critters like that.
As I said in another comment: The up-front payment is the only thing that makes sense for Cloudflare. You got a customer that’s costing you money each month. They broke ToS. You offer them a deal still to keep the services running. And their CEO/CFO tells you they are looking at other providers like Fastly.
If Cloudflare gave them a monthly contract then the casino would simply pay for a month and switch over their services to a competitor in that time. So Cloudflare loses all the money from the past (where the casino used far too much traffic) and will barely recoup 10k (minus the running cost, so more likely 7k at the high end) for a single month. It’s just not worth it.
So they offer: Stick with us for a full year at least or get fucked. Which is fair.
This scenario would mean major negligence on their part, as they had been with Cloudflare for years. When it was clear their services were costing more than the business plan paid for, that’s when they should have been contacted with clear numbers and a sheepish admission that “unlimited” doesn’t actually mean unlimited. It certainly seems shady to me that they attempted to make it about a TOS violation, that there’s no public information about enterprise level and pricing, and that the second they said they were talking to a competitor they had their data purged. It sounds like a failed attempt at extortion to me.
If you are cloudflare and you suspect they broke ToS you quote which ToS has been broken, you specify which country blocking the customer is trying or has tried to circumvent and you force the customer to either move away or enforce geo-blocking for those countries (or have a separate account for those with your own IPs). There is no reason to cancel the whole account if the blocking is country-specific and there is no way that 10k a month is anyway a sufficient benefit for cloudflare for their IPs to be blocked in a country (affecting potentially hundreds or thousand of customers).
CloudFlare don’t need to subsidise an online casino with millions of subscribers, at everyone else’s expense. Sure CF are a bunch of gigglefucks but this time I think they made a good decision.
Unless the casino is doing something illegal, it’s really not their decision to make. If they don’t want to subsidize them, all they’d have to do is be transparent and fair in their pricing. They way CF handled it instead just seems unprofessional and deceitful.
Now they’re getting $0 and bad press, so no I don’t think they did.
On lemmy and substack. The damage will be minimal and forgotten.
Found the thread on HN. Here’s what (I’m guessing) a mod had to say:
It set off the flamewar detector, got flagged by users, and got downweighted by a mod.
The ‘customer support of last resort’ genre is common and not usually a good fit for HN [1]. If people feel this story is unusually relevant and interesting, I’m not sure I agree—long experience has taught us that one-sided articles like this nearly always leave out critical information—but I also don’t mind yielding in an occasional specific case, so I’ve rolled back the penalties on this thread.
The issue from our point of view is not about story X or company Y—it’s a systemic one: the most popular genres of submission (especially the rage-inducing ones) get massively over-represented by default, so countervailing mechanisms are needed [2] if we’re to have a space for the more intellectually curious stories that the site is meant for.
I love hacker news. The internet needs more things like this
Cracking insight - well done!
Okay, that’s understandable
The irony here, is this is the kind of vague and obtuse fuckery online casinos and sportsbooks pull with their customers all the time.
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.
even if they were breaking tos (and i don’t think it sounds quite so cut and dry), shouldn’t the response be to notify them and allow them to fix it, or just terminate the account? demanding a ton of money to make the problem seems a skeevy way of handling it on cloudflare’s part.
They had two weeks to fix, instead they stood their ground and argued.
They very well knew that they were costing a lot more than the $250 they were paying and couldn’t get a deal anywhere else
First of all, congrats! Your business must have become pretty successful. How exactly did CF decide to “ask” you to switch to Enterprise?
Maybe…
* You violated their terms of service…
I wouldn’t say Cloudflare is innocent, here, but this business handled Cloudflare the cudgel that was used to beat them. They admit to doing something with their domains that was expressly prohibited in the service they were paying for.
Then they offered to resolve it in whatever way CF deemed appropriate and CF refused to elaborate exactly which domains were the issue.
resolve it in whatever way CF deemed appropriate
CloudFlare deemed the upgrade to Enterprise service appropriate.
Today’s tech business model:
First you get the power, then you extort the money.
Multi CDN integration is a thing. And fuck CF. Unlimited means unlimited. Stop trying to lie to your customers and change the rules.
If the IP’s were an issue, then they wouldn’t have offered to make the issue go away with $$$.
But, the guy admits that what they were doing with the domains was expressly permitted in the “Enterprise” class service. If it was expressly prohibited in the “Business” class service, then they set themselves up for the shakedown.
250$ a month for their service seems like cloudflare was straight up losing money on the deal. Although cloudflare seemed to have given them extra time than they said before terminating service, which they didn’t have to do. That being said, I think both sides suck here.
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?
I really love cloudflare especially for my hobby projects but in this case they asked for outright Ransome. From this I learnt to keep Nameservers & domain sellers different. I am going to transfer domain away from nameserver.
Not just “this case”, there’s been countless cases like this with CF.
Could you provide a couple?
You can google for cloudflare issues ranging from providing hosting for actual nazi sites to extorting customers by threatening the exact scenario se saw in this blog post. Feel free to google “cloudflare account suspended” to see many posts about people having not just DDoS mitigation disabled, but everything related to an account deleted and disabled. Many of those people had the audacity to, get this, rely on DDoS protection! The nerve, right?
Right. And if you depend on them for your logic with cloudflare functions you will never be able to migrate to another CDN.
Never let a vender do anything for you beyond standardized features. That’s why a “selling point” if we go with this guy we can do this… never makes sense. Because if option B can’t do it also you wouldn’t want to do “this”, and you should probably implement it in a more old-school way.
While I have been reading through this topic, I have been feeling worried since I was thinking about using Cloudflare to protect a site of mine for some time. This is because I found out from somewhere that they have protection against AI LLMs scraping page data from websites, which is what I’m mainly worried about since there are things and stories that I put a lot of thought and work into. And finding out about Cloudflare shutting someone else down here over what sounds like the level of traffic has me feeling I might not be able to use them and not sure what other options there are.
Don’t believe anything advertised as unlimited , cause it isn’t, they always cover their asses in the fine prints in their TOS.
Well that all reads like extortion.
“Pay us money or we will destroy your business.” Pretty cut and dry extortion. The entire article was infuriating to read.
Yeah pretty much all red flags from cloud flare
Can’t wait for this to become a louis rossman video
