But for $10k a month cloudflare is ok with that? Either it's acceptable or it's not, there is no way that this looks good for cloudflare either way.
In support of your theory particular is I don't think enterprise sales "ragequits" a conversation when the customer is mid-evaluation based simply on the idea that they are considering multiple options.
Why would they walk away at this point, let alone ban the customer.
From the write-up I bet CloudFlare had it as a "60% to close" in their CRM at this moment. It doesn't make sense for them to drop the ban hammer in this moment.
PS: explanation or not, this is deeply shady behaviour from CloudFlare. Just perhaps a little less so.
> Why would they walk away at this point, let alone ban the customer.
It wasn't just that they were considering multiple options. Looking at the timeline, this was about a month after their initial soft gloves approach/enforcement action and they drug their feet the entire way through it.
Once CF got to the top of the leadership chain at their company and it was clear that all the relevant decision makers were involved in the conversation but were unwilling to pay, they just folded their cards, resumed the initial enforcement action, and moved on with their day.
If this was a small account they probably wouldn't have even blinked twice with just striking down the user for causing reputation harm and violating TOS but since they were a large account CF clearly went out of their way to meet with them multiple times and try to find a solution. But after a month of little to no progress while the account continues causing reputational harm and is unwilling to budge, they just called it quits and moved on.
If there is a TOS issue I’m not listening to a sales pitch on it. You better tell me what the issue is upfront in the first email instead of dicking around with the commission based workers. Like very low level stuff here imo
I don't see an unwillingness to fix TOS issues anywhere. Just an unwillingness to buy the enterprise tier. Those should not be treated the same way!
It doesn't matter the reasoning - its the execution wherein lies the issue - this is an extortionary business practice plain and simple.
By the way, it appears gambling sites are fine on CF [1].
[1] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/using-the-services-for-on...
That being said, I doubt that's the core issue in this case.
If you think something your client wants could explode into a liability, you can turn them away or you can just make sure their bill covers your exposure.
If it's a legally questionable service, there's likely to be plenty of abuse contact, or they're going to be a big target of crime, they're going to end up paying more. This is the same reason why some industries (eg porn sites) have always paid more for card processing.
Their business was causing IP reputation damage and all plans but the enterprise BYOIP plans share the same IP pool.
Essentially it was "use your own IP pool and pay us for the cost of maintaining that pool for you or GTFO".
This wasn't just a normal sales rep hitting them up. This was trust and safety (i.e. the moderation team) coming to them with a compromise that would allow them to stay on the platform. They chose against that and were dragging their feet.
The timeline of the article also really makes this clear. This wasn't over the course of 24 hours. This started a full 4 weeks prior with sustained back and forth. They only included a few images of emails from the discussions but the article makes clear that there was more discussion happening.
And to quote the article. After receiving the ultimatum, they got an entire extra week to deliberate.
> We managed to buy a week of time by letting it escalate to our CEO and CTO and having them talk directly with Cloudflare.
Then finally when they told CF that they were just buying time while looking to move elsewhere, CF dropped their act of goodwill and the moderation team resumed the moderation action they would have taken in the first place had this been a smaller account.
----
So yeah it sounds bad from the snippets but this was basically "hey you are a big customer and you are breaking rules we would normally ban anyone else for but if you can compensate us we'll spend the labor hours and infra to let you keep operating in your own little quarantine box.". So this really should be seen as an act of goodwill rather than malice.
They also were clearly lying in those email messages: The second email says that domain rotation is strictly forbidden, but a few days later in the third email they're explicitly selling features for rotating domains more effectively.
And sorry, but a company selling "we'll override the Trust and Safety team if you pay us $$$" is absolutely unacceptable. There are only two options, both bad. Either they're not running a real TnS operation, but just pretend-staff one in order to run these kinds of shakedown operations. Or they're running a real TnS team that found a real problem but are letting sales people override the TnS team's honest judgement.
It's called "extortion"
You put yourself in a bad spot. We can either kick you out or work (for a price) to help you.
Extortion ? Hardly. Nobody work for free, you know.
Risk can be mitigated, especially if you take care to know what the risk is, but risk mitigation and the salaries of the risk mitigation teams are not free.
The answer of "no, we will not host you unless you pay us enough money to hire people to make sure we're not breaking laws by hosting you" makes plenty of sense, and an online casino that is likely dubiously legal in many countries is definitely a place where you might use that answer.
I'd also expect there are cases where Cloudflare enter into enterprise agreements with customers, get a good hard look at exactly what's happening, and then tear up the agreement and walk away.
To me it looks like https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... is entirely the wrong email to send in the situation and if you are as old as I am and come from where I come from, you will have flashbacks to "reading between the lines" of the party daily in the 1980s. The real content is at the bottom:
> As we have a very short window to report back to Trust & Safety team, please let me know if you can make time tomorrow
Big red flashing lights: the right questions are 1) why is T&S involved at all 2) What are their concerns which forces such a hurried deadline? 3) What are the consequences of missing this deadline.
The right email would start with something like this:
> Providing services to your business constitutes serious legal risk to Cloudflare. We are happy to work with you in the future if you are buying an Enterprise plan. As we need to commit significant resources to accommodate you, we need an annual commitment. Otherwise, with much regret we need to terminate our services provided to you as it is our right per Terms on date/time. ("We may at our sole discretion terminate your user account or Suspend or terminate your use or access to the Service at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all.")
> This plan would also include these features:
Companies take risks if the reward is considered good enough. In this case, that reward is income from the customer (who can still be dropped if the hit pieces start getting published).
I'm not saying cloudflare can't do it, I'm just saying it's wrong.
> if a country DNS-blocks our main domain, a secondary domain may still be available
>Note that 80TB is the number they tried to sell us, I don’t know if it is accurate since they removed all our access to historical analytics.
I mean you dont need accurate Data but surely most would know by heart their traffic in rough figures? Or am I the old dog where every new Web Dev are so used to Cloud and Serverless they have no idea what they are using?
I spend a lot of time wondering if the Emperor is wearing any clothes.
It would be completely different for a small project of course, but once you're counting in TBs... it's less important.
As far as exact volume of QPS or TB/month or whatever, I really couldn't say.