Hacker News Reader

Comment by nexoft | Hacker News Reader

1-The gambling business is shady by design, whether you like it or not. This was probably more risk than benefit for them based on what they were getting from you.

2-Your business is probably very profitable, and $300 a month is very cheap compared to the potential hassles they could face working with such a business.

3-I find it very inappropriate to dox business representatives and show names when you have carefully hidden any information regarding yourself and haven't even disclosed your company name.

After all they can choose with whom they want to do business. They gauged what price they could ask you, factoring in how profitable your business is and how noisy and painful it might be to work with you. It sucks but this is the downside of SaaS/PaaS.

View on HN

Gambling site or not: Cloudflare took their money for years, failed to communicate any problems, then deleted their data when they didn't accept their "enterprise deal". There's nothing saying that they won't do the same to ANY of their other thousands of customers, many of who reads this forum...

Jup, that’s my takeaway. Even if they were in the “right” to stop serving the customer, the way they went about that is absolutely ridiculous.

To (1) - if this was the case, it would have been great if they had talked about it openly or in any way really. To (2) - I do agree that $300 is probably cheap. But I also think that $10k is very expensive, and it seems Fastly agrees.

(3) Mh, I don't think this is doxxing and didn't expect having names would be a big problem. I've just updated the screenshots anyways and censored the names of the representatives.

Cloudflare of course chooses who they want to do business with, but they also pride themselves in being neutral.

Cloudflare certainly handled this poorly in their execution and abysmal level of transparency, but they’re almost certainly purging loss-leading risky customers like OP and they really don’t owe OP the time of day.

OP is lucky CloudFlare even gave them 24 hours. I’m not going to dig through the their TOS or anything but I’m going to guess that you need to have an Enterprise contract to be a business of certain categories like banks/crypto, pornography, and gambling, which explains why they were being connected with a sales team.

OP mentions lost customer trust…but Cloudflare doesn’t want or need OP to trust them. $250 a month isn’t enough to deal with a business like that.

OP isn't the only customer whose trust they lose by handling the issue in this way. It's fine if they want to terminate a relationship with an unprofitable or risky customer, but doing it with insufficient notice to make other arrangements is pretty extreme. In a case of blatant abuse, that might be reasonable, but that doesn't seem to be the case here the way OP tells it.

I did quickly search the TOS for the word "gambling" and did not find it.

4. TERMINATION OF USE; DISCONTINUATION AND MODIFICATION OF THE WEBSITES AND ONLINE SERVICES

We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and/or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Websites and/or Online Services at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Websites and/or Online Services) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Websites and/or Online Services or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Websites and/or Online Services.

Yes, that means OP probably can't sue them. My comment is about customer trust.

OP isn’t a customer (anymore), therefore customer trust isn’t a concept that exists for them anymore.

For everyone else, this clause is pretty much standard for all SaaS services. Take your pick. If you don’t want this level of service with any vendor you have to sign an enterprise contract where termination procedures are agreed upon more intentionally by both parties.

This comment still misses the point.

Any customer or potential customer who reads about this incident may have their trust in Cloudflare reduced, and rightfully so in my opinion. They have the legal right to terminate the relationship without reason or warning, but exercising that right in this context hurts their reputation.

> OP isn’t a customer (anymore), therefore customer trust isn’t a concept that exists for them anymore.

I don’t know about you, but my customer trust is at an all time low, and I’m seriously considering at least moving all my registered domains off CloudFlare.

This still doesn't contain the word "gambling". Instead, it says that they can terminate your account at any moment, for any reason, no matter what your business type is, which is the opposite of "trust".

Oh well, last I checked “gambling” will match with a .* regex pattern.

You said "I’m going to guess that you need to have an Enterprise contract to be a business of certain categories".

If that was the problem, this issue wouldn't be relevant to most people.

When you switch to "they can terminate anyone", and they act this rashly and unexpectedly, that means anyone needs to live in fear.

But that’s the norm for SaaS products, especially when you don’t have an enterprise contract where termination procedures are more robust.

So nobody is going to live in fear when cloudflare has the exact same TOS policy as everyone else.

The "and" is very important. The TOS is standard. Cutting paying customers out of your infrastructure so quickly when they haven't done something egregious is not standard.

Yeah, but "gardening" matches too. So are you proposing that gambling sites and gardening sites have the same level of risk?

No, but I am saying that OP’s company has a combination of risk and likely overuse of services from being a global gambling website.

Being a gambling website makes you an outsized target for attacks.

OP basically wanted to run DraftKings from the small business plan and CF understandably didn’t care to deal with a loss-leading customer like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com