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.
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
I’m really glad for you, that sounds amazing. I don’t think you’re the rule, though. I think you’re the exception. I also feel like it wouldn’t be unfeasible to have competitive/e-sports poker while still strictly regulating online casinos.
I think we should keep games of skill and pure slot machine strictly separated
It’s still gambling and getting people addicted.
People get addicted to alcohol and caffeine. Should we can those too?
Removed by mod
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.
Okay, that’s understandable
I love hacker news. The internet needs more things like this
Jesus. Something shady is happening with cloudflare.
That does not inspire confidence.
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.
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.
Exactly my thoughts
I think it’s far more likely there’s some sales goal and or performance indicator at play here.
0F,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.
I read the post and it doesn’t sound abusive at all
Plus: cloudflare kept putting them in touch with the sales department. Not legal. Not technical support
It’s just shit customer service, even if the customer is making a ton of money compared to your fees. Should a casino pay more for other services, too, just because they" don’t need a subsidy"?
As strange as this may sound… if you’re having serious technical problems, it’s the sales team you want to talk to.
Sales people have way more pull at tech companies than the engineering teams do. If your sales rep sounds an alarm, people listen. When tech support sounds an alarm, nobody bats an eye.
In this particular situation, they should be reaching out to cloudflare’s legal team. But, with their own legal team.
Good luck with the lawsuit for breach of contract when you broke the contract. I’m sure the judge will be amused.
Subsidise how? They were using their existing plan as intended and even willing ditch the grey-area parts. If CF cannot afford to offer their plans as they are, they should change the offered plans, not hunt for easy prey.
Clearly CF were losing money on this account, so their other customers were subsidising.
Ah fuck it, I’m clearly at the bottom of a dog pile here, and I don’t want to be friends with any of you, nor am I going to start thinking that an online casino deserves anything but contempt, so I’ll be off.
No no, you’re really not far off. Few, if any people here are advocating for CF to continue to provide the same services for the same price. It seems clear to most (including the author) that a price increase was justified. The problem we’re all having is how they went about it, agnostic of the client.
(I don’t care who the client was and don’t care one way or the other about online casinos.)
It’s not the decision to ask more money, it’s how they made it and in violation of their own terms of service, also extortion, so yes they are dipshits.
HN thread is here and it’s on the front page 7 hours old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808
Many mentions made that a significant part of the issue seemed to be Cloudflare IP addresses getting banned in some countries. They wanted the customer to switch to a bring-your-own-IP plan.
Also, the discussion took place over 1 month, not 24 hours.
I think the HN thread is reasonably informative and nuanced. CF didn’t do great but it was somewhat a fog of war situation.
Realistically, this is why you pay for Akamai. You don’t get these shenanigans.
How the fuck were they still on a $250 dollar a month plan when they pumped through $2000 a month worth of traffic? That’s shady on the companiy’s part and Cloudflare shouldn’t have allowed it to happen in the first place.
Each party played their part here and did shitty things. Sounds like the tech equivalent of a crackhead arguing about selling stuff to the pawn shop employee.
The irony here, is this is the kind of vague and obtuse fuckery online casinos and sportsbooks pull with their customers all the time.
The irony here is that the article author confirms that they break TOS of CF and he still has a Pikachu face. Reddit discussion is pretty positive that CF is right in their decision and that new provider will shut them down at some time as well.
Well that all reads like extortion.
“Pay us money or we will destroy your business.” Pretty cut and dry extortion. The entire article was infuriating to read.
casino
lmao get fucked
Sounds like a shake down, and it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving group.
Still, real lesson in how Cloudflare does business.
deleted by creator
250$ 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 agree. It’s shitty for Cloudflare to just straight up destroy this company’s DNS, but also it seems like the company violated the ToS. They had about two weeks to migrate to something else, but instead they just continued debating with CF. Also, this company doesn’t have a secondary DNS server in case CF ever went down? That’s pretty stupid on their part. Redundant systems are key, I hope they learned that lesson haha
Thanks for actually reading my comment unlike the other guy
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.
Also, interesting comment I found on HN:
What is HN?
Hackernews, unironically named to appeal tech circles, but run by venture capital fund y-combinator, mainly to promote companies they invest in.
As such it’s mostly used by techbros (MBA types) and tech companies to show-off, start drama, push their PR, damage control, and occasionally post news.
It’s like linkedin, in reddit format. It’s all about your connections.
Hackernews
Sorry for confusion, I edited the post to make it clear
Pro tip: Don’t waste your time over there.
It’s incredibly selective about which topics it’s good for. Want insight into advanced mathematics or new programming languages and people there have amazing insight. But they bring the same level of confidence to the discussion when talking about topics they’ve no idea about.
deleted by creator
It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.
(I am referencing the Soviet Union implementation thereof, for clarity)
It’s never going to bite the hand that feeds it, where people will voting-ring or the owners will just force-edit it to prevent that from happening. Outside of that, sometimes it might say something useful. The problem is that today’s problems are not because of a lack of advanced mathematics understanding or new programming languages.
It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.
At least someone else gets it.
It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.
A very interesting description. I only occasionally read HN via links from other sources, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a lot of truth to your characterization.
I’d suggest they’re just as wrong about programming languages and maths as any other topic.
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.
The same thing happens in fastly with the VCL
Does this mean hackernews & cloudflare are colluding together?
I wonder how this is going to go
