I am a plebe who doesn’t understand these things but what exactly does cloudflare do? I see it popping up more and more often redirecting before visiting a site. I assume that this has something to do with bot traffic? It seems like every mention of cloudflare is about how it ruined someone’s day.
Just a few weeks ago, Primeagen read a blog about how Cloudflare threatened an online casino with taking their sites down if they didn’t pay them 120k$ in a day.
If you read about it instead of the headline you would have discovered that the casino was simply trying to take advantage of cloudflare in a similar fashion they had been doing to people gambling in their own casino, by leveraging the cheap tier cloudflare provided and slamming the network which was a detriment to other users with smaller bandwidth needs.
Imagine a slow semi truck hogging a two lane road and getting mad at you for trying to go around him just to go home. Cloudflare said they had six months to pay for a higher bandwidth trunk or they can go fuck themselves. The casino did nothing for six months, so they got to go fuck themselves
I wouldn’t really defend cloudflare here. Sure, the tier might have been a bit cheap for a big online casino with high traffic. However, cloudflare should have set limits in place or warn the casino beforehand and not just surprise businesses with great amounts of builtup “damage” money if the business was causing their network to “struggle”. The call they made with the CF sales team about the serious issue wasn’t a warning at all. According to the blog, they just asked if the casino considered the enterprise tier. Nothing about their networks struggling is said at all. Additionally their future calls were misleading and just tricks to get the casino to talk with the sales team. I’m not sure how CF’s fooling the casino here can be seen as something reasonable at all.
They shouldn’t call it unlimited if they can’t handle high amounts of traffic.