Them very aggressively highlighting the BYO IP feature and then even suggesting third parties to rent IPs from strikes me as a significant detour from their normal “script” (having dealt with their AU sales team before).
CF calls and says there is a problem with domains. They want to push an enterprise plan. Customer wants to solve problem, dropping domains, making changes. CF says, only enterprise plan will remedy the situation.
There is obviously a sales script involved.
“get back to Trust & Safety"
Heard that story several times, it's always another team, e.g. "Licensing" that need to be satisfied, or that if you don't pay up, that team will be off the leash. Also heard the pay-for-a-year-upfront for several large vendors who pull this. The reason is, some sales reps need to make numbers, so they shake the tree and see who falls down:
"Cloudflare has absolutely no information on when they will force you into custom billing, but when they start "urgently" needing to talk to you you're probably not going to get out until you have a juicy custom contract with them."
this customer is damaging Cloudflare IP reputation which hurts other customers. Cloudflare can either fire the customer to protect other customers using Cloudflare IPs, or force this customer to use their own IPs and damage/manage their own IP reputation.
unfortunately this is expensive and OP is mad they can't do their legally fraught gambling operation on Cloudflare's addresses for free
If a custom IP is going to be mandatory, they need to say that and give a deadline, at the very least.
As a CF customer, I am happy that Cf is preventing another business from damaging mine.
They weren’t protecting you or any of their customers. This is a mafia style shakedown
This is directly contradicted by the contents of the article, perhaps you should re-read it.
>$120k up front for one year of Enterprise
Doesn't sound like a reputation problem.
They could've explained the problem ("your gambling business is a problem for our IP reputation") and offered a solution ("we can switch you over to BYOIP so this won't be a problem"), but instead they sent in an army of sales reps that demanded an upfront payment for a product tier that they only needed one small part of, to the point of sales people pretending to be part of other teams.
It makes business sense to kick out casinos, but OP got fucked over by Cloudflare's shitty practices.
But only after getting ~US$100k up front first, just because you can.
> We do have multiple domains that mostly act as mirrors to our main domain. We have these for a few reasons. One is that since we are a casino, we have different regulatory requirements we need to comply with in many countries.
Evasion:
> Another is that we use them to target different global user groups and affiliates and track conversions long-term. This also means that if a country DNS-blocks our main domain, a secondary domain may still be available.
This is more like one gang hitting up another for "protection" payments. I had to laugh when they called it "Trust & Safety".
It's impossible to say what's going on since it's an anonymous post with no details.
Maybe it's all 100% true.
Maybe there are some key details being left out. Wouldn't be the first time I've seen one of those outrage posts that seriously misrepresented things.
Whatever the case, obviously the author is not an unbiased party. These posts do well because "zomg Cloudflare bad!", and maybe they are, but I sure as fuck don't trust some casino guy either.