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Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay $120000 within 24h
(robindev.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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The tl;dr seems to be this was a money losing account for Cloudflare, and they couldn't squeeze them so they weaseled out with some TOS violation to prevent losing money on what was promised to be unlimited traffic, they have better lawyers so they're not worried.
Cloudflare 100% in the wrong here, they are closing accounts for TOS violations when they are just unprofitable, I would very strongly consider how tightly to couple with them knowing how cavalier they are about squashing small businesses.
If enough of these happen though, they'll get destroyed by a class action lawsuit, and they'd deserve every bit of it
CF doesn't give a fuck about 80tb of traffic. These guys were in severe TOS violation that could affect all CF customers if CF IPs got blocked. Given 48 hours to bring their own IPs and switch to (expensive AF anywhere) enterprise account and finally shut down TWO WEEKS later after trying to weasel their way out of this instead of accepting they need to pay to play this stupid game.
We've been CF customers forever and enshitification is definitely affecting all of their services and mostly customer support, but in this instance I'm 100% on the side of CF.
I worked for an online casino in the past. What they do is a standard in the industry. The company I worked for was a small startup and onwed hundreds of domains, mostly just to protect the brand, 98% of which redirected to the main domain, with a few serving slightly different sites for different jurisdictions (e.g. Ontario regulations require that everything happens under a .ca domain). The "blocking evasion" doesn't require CF to do anything, besides forcing the customer to block traffic from certain countries (the ones where you are suspected to evade the block). At this point - if the casino is really operating in the black or gray markets - they can just set ingress to their site outside CF for those countries only if they really wanted. I worked also for a company who was doing this to allow traffic from Russia, changing every day mirrors (and they had an IT department of maybe 20, it was a joke), and Russia was the main market for them.
If what is told in the article is true - I.e. 95% of the traffic was through the main website - then it doesn't look like they were really doing this sort of evading deliberately, considering that in that 5% you have all your alternative TLDs plus the traffic from gray/black markets. Having hundreds of domains and some small percentage of traffic from black markets is something that just happens, it's different from continuously registering new domains for providing access where the previous ones got DNS blocked (this is domain block). It doesn't seem this is what they were doing based on the article, and if they were, then CF emails didn't mention it, which is insane.
Obviously we don't know the full story, so everything has to he taken with a grain of salt.