As someone who has run a wide range of sites on Cloudflare for many years, I am certain this is bupkis. 1. Cloudflare doesn’t send 503 when they’re deliberatel

As someone who has run a wide range of sites on Cloudflare for many years, I am certain this is bupkis. 1. Cloudflare doesn’t send 503 when they’re deliberately rate limiting; they send it when there’s an unexpected problem. It’s fairly rare, and it usually results in something being posted on cloudflarestatus.com if it persists. 2. Sometimes error rates are low enough or the conditions are obscure enough that you may have to contact support to point out that it’s happening. This is even rarer. 3. When you switch between plans, the IP addresses assigned to you may change, and users may hit different edges. If the issue is regional (as is usually the case), this may resolve it. 4. I have been sending tens of requests per second to a free plan over the course of several years and have never measured an increase in 503 responses on Cloudflare’s end compared to a paid plan. 5. Cloudflare’s response mentions specific 503 errors that are fairly rare; they’re notable because they look like a standard Nginx 503 page, rather than a nice Cloudflare error page. The only difference is that they will say “cloudflare” at the bottom where the Nginx version would normally be. You probably frequent sites that use Cloudflare free plans; how often do you see this error message? 6. What the hell is this n=1 correlation? It reads like a conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy theory. There are plenty of reasons to criticize Cloudflare, but this isn’t one of them.