Hacker News Reader

Comment by deadalus | Hacker News Reader

Porkbun. Yes, Cloudflare Domains exists but let's support the small guys.

Given Cloudflare's reputation for shakedowns once you pass their undisclosed thresholds I wouldn't trust them with my domains.

I'm not expecting something for nothing, we all need to eat. I'm happy to stay within any limits or even have no free tier at all.

I just don't want the fear of waking up to a sales email one morning demanding I suddenly fork out more then I earn in a year off the project for an enterprise plan because I've exceeded their undisclosed thresholds.

Can you expand more on cloudflare's shakedowns? I have some domains on Cloudflare and thought they were a trustworthy service. Is there there anything particular you can point to?

I think they're referring to the Enterprise sales where people have felt pressured to sign six- or seven- figure contracts after usage goes above a certain point. However, all the articles I've read on it are from companies using Cloudflare to do suspicious things with rotating domains through IP addresses, or doing things to try and get around service costs. It also seems like they give you months of warning and will try to convince you to sign up for Enterprise, they don't just shut things off. But their sales team seems to portray themselves as legal, support, or compliance teams sometimes so not exactly forthcoming in their approach either.

I'm a happy user of Cloudflare, but if you're using it for domain registration and hosting infrastructure, you need to see it as a single point of failure. Any account issues and you won't be able to point your domain to an alternate host while you work things out. Any service outage in CF systems will similarly lock you out of routing around the failure. It's better to have DNS off of cloudflare if they're handling your hosting services also. Or host elsewhere and only handle domains on cloudflare. Their domain pricing doesn't add any costs over the base registrar cost, so the latter is a reasonable option.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808

You could argue in that case it was a gambling site and it will never happen to you because you're not in a high risk category.

The scary thing for me is nowhere in their initial communications did they explain the issue they just demanded $120k upfront (refusing monthly billing).

The CEO who is usually active on HN didn't show up to give their side either, there's no way they couldn't have been aware of a 1044 upvoted post which also went viral elsewhere https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481979

It's just traffic based: sales try to get you on a paid plan, or a higher tier. For some accounts they've given ultimatums ("pay for the higher tier by x date or we have to stop providing service"). But I believe those cases were e.g. online casinos doing specific things with the platform (say, evading national blocks on gambling websites) IIRC.

I've been using Porkbun for several years now. No problems and terrific service.

It would be worth recommending a non-US-based registrar, since the Texas government just demonstrated that they can unilaterally suspend any domain managed by any US registrar.

Are you referring to what happened with motherless? If so, using a non-US-based registrar probably wouldn't have made a difference in that case. The court order that took the domain offline targeted the .com registry operated by Verisign, not any individual registrar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com