DevOps

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.

Maybe you're right that ultimately they were not on the correct plan and Cloudflare was right to make them move. I don't know enough about Cloudflare's different plans to say. But what I do know is that:

When we told them we were also in talks with Fastly, they suddenly "purged" all our domains

Is utterly indefensible anticompetitive behaviour. So is a 24 hour ultimatum for a 40x increase in cost. I don't care if they were on the free plan and should have been on enterprise. If the ToS violation isn't actively causing harm to the public, any adjustment should be done with sufficient notice that arrangements can actually be made. 30 days seem s reasonable.

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.

Nothing to do with usage imo. They were in very obvious TOS violation that was affecting IPs belonging to CF and therefore affecting all CF clients. After a 48 hour warning they were still given two weeks to switch to enterprise plan and bring their own IPs. Instead they fucked around.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I hope the CTO got fired for this.

And the article stated that they were probably abusing it and were ok negotiating a new contract. Did you read past the first few sentences?

Yeah. And I also take these posts by outraged people with a grain of salt. Sure large companies do shady shit, but we're getting just one side of the argument and it's from an angry person. Also, in this case, an online casino. Not exactly a source I trust 100%.

for what traffic again?

That it may well be, but it definitely falls on Cloudflare that they were able to take advantage of this for so long, and that the "unlimited traffic" was displayed as one of the perks in the Business plan (although I haven't seen any evidence that that was listed). The decision to charge $10k a month would seem fairer if they weren't insanely aggressive, and claimed there were violations of ToS where there don't seem to be any.

We've been using CF for a long time as enterprise and non enterprise customers and while their support went to absolute shit compared to what it was, I agree with the first comment on that article.

Casino was in violation of TOS and the only solution was BYOIP with enterprise plan. They were given 48 hours to correct, but tried to weasel their way out of it for two weeks when CF finally shut down their account.

I'm 100% on the side of CF in this instance. This also explains the sales calls. There was no tech issue to resolve.

It baffles me that you can advertise something as “unlimited” and then impose arbitrary limits after the fact.

I didn't saw anything on the post that suggests that was the case. They start with a reference to a urgent call for a meeting from cloud flare to discuss specifics on how they were using the hosting provider's service, which sounds a lot like they were caught hiding behind the host doing abusive things,and afterwards they were explicitly pointed out for doing abusing stuff that violated terms of service and jeopardized the hosting service's reputation as a good actor.

That's how I read this too, they were upset that this company was using so much and "only" on their lower tier. But, if they didn't want that then that means either their billing/account code has bugs in it because it didn't lock them out and force an upgrade... or it was mislabeled (intentionally or not). On all accounts, CF's problem, not this company's

Curious that I'm also using Firefox but in Windows and I get "rate limited" on the 2nd link I open on this specific site.

Should've known better than to what? Use Cloudflare?

This should have known better than to checks notes believe what they were told