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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

You are more than welcome to use our free products. That's what they are there for!

Whoa! One of the few CTOs that you can randomly run into on the internet, but still I have nothing to ask or tell about their service. Thank you for what you’re doing!

You're welcome!

Finally, a random HN Cloudflare thread!

How am I supposed to reach out to Cloudflare support?

If I start at cloudflare.com, and click "Support", "Contact Support", that takes me to the Cloudflare Dashboard. In the upper corner, there is "Help Center" and "Cloudflare Community". In the bottom, "Contact support". "Contact support" and "Help Center" both lead to the same page: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us ; that page has a giant "Submit a request" button on it. Clicking that takes me … back to the dashboard. I suppose there is the community, but the UI seems to imply there is a "file ticket" thing, but the UI seems broken.

Also, your RDAP implementation — is the API (not just the web UI) to it something people are free to use? Additionally, it's not quite RDAP; it doesn't conform to the RDAP RFC (RFC 9083) in the eventAction string used for expiration dates. (It calls the eventAction "Expiration Date"; the RFC calls it "expiration". Parsers are picky.)

Are you logged into your account?

Yes.

Seems like a UI bug, yeah. After you get back to the dashboard, if you click "support" again, you go to a different page, where you can actually contact support.

For me, it ended up on this URL:

https://dash.cloudflare.com/<myzoneid>/support

Basically, append /support to your dashboard URL.

HN is just that one unique place where you could run into high profile persons in random threads. Pretty amazing community.

Are you John Graham-Cumming? If so, hello and thank you for POPfile! Didn't know you worked at CF. :- )

I am. And yes, I did create POPFile (https://getpopfile.org/). And yes, I do work for Cloudflare, been there a while... https://blog.jgc.org/2012/02/programmer.html

Curious: How does Cloudflare pay for the email routing network bandwidth + hosting charges it incurs for its free services? I ask because it seems Google ran this for a decade and then found out that it is time to charge for it.

We have a lot of bandwidth for our CDN and DDoS services.

This is the most common misconception about our business. Bandwidth, when you're small. But the scale economics in bandwidth are unlike almost anything else. As you get more and more bandwidth, the cost per bit drops until, in most places, it will go to zero. If you know those dynamics are present in a market, you can forward price knowing that you'll get to those scale advantages. Today, servicing a new free customer is virtually costless to us. So, to this college-bound customer and others, welcome.

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