Ask HN: Are you leaving Cloudflare over the recent drama? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you leaving Cloudflare over the recent drama?

21 pointsjayFellows8 comments

I've seen lots of bad PR for Cloudflare recently (at least on YouTube and X). Seems to be related to poor-form sales tactics (lure in users for cheap and later require they up their plan or close their account). And indeed, the stories I'm seeing are pretty shocking and certainly hurt my perception of the company.

This is seriously making me reconsider Cloudflare as the primary service I use (Pages/Workers, KV, D1, R2, CDN, Domains, etc).

Has this motivated you to leave Cloudflare?

If so, what have you replaced it with?

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I left them a long time ago, as I felt—and still do—like the internet was too dependent on them. None of my projects ever needed DDoS protection though, so I mostly used them for DNS and caching at the edge.

If I ever needed DDoS protection it'd be nice to know of alternatives, if anyone has any to recommend. My provider—Hetzner—provides protection to some degree, but I'm sure a big attack would lead to black-hole routing.

Of course not. There is no alternative. No, it doesn't count as an alternative if it's not in the same price range. This specifically applies to R2.

Will keep using it until I can't anymore.

What's the recent drama?

There might be more but this is the one I remember:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808 The gist is Cloudflare has undocumented traffic limits. If above a sales person will push you into an enterprise plan. Then if you go higher you’re told to upgrade again. Nobody knows what the limits are and the sales person will not tell you either. One user wrote “From personal experience I know that 10TB per month is like 30k/year”.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zj7ei5Egk8&t=106s

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KHB2F8R4o8

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWtGwW_e56w

That's all videos about the same casino client? There's a whole thread about it.

The casino had to bring their own IP, so Cloudflare wouldn't get IP banned by countries because... casinos. And yes, that's an enterprise feature.

I'm currently on their free plan, which is pretty good. As long as they offer it, I'm not likely to leave. If I was on a paid plan it might be a different story, although I can't think of any alternatives off the top of my head, so maybe not!

Yes, I am afraid to recommend it for my clientes.

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