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I knew a guy who served tens of terabytes of uncached content per month using Cloudflare's free plan. Cloudflare reps tried to call him for meetings "to discuss

I knew a guy who served tens of terabytes of uncached content per month using Cloudflare's free plan. Cloudflare reps tried to call him for meetings "to discuss his usage and satisfaction with cloudflare" multiple times and he avoided them for years. He stopped for other reasons but afaik they never banned him. I expect these rules are a formality to ban users like him.

judge2020 3y ago
tens of TB a month is not that bad in all respects. They already did this for super egregious customers, see this user that pushed 10TB/day through the network and was officially asked to upgrade to the $200/mo business plan: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-way-you-handle-bandwidth-over-usage/42969/3?u=judge https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-way-you-handle-bandwi... I also know some users who do >5tb/day of images and get away with sitting on the legacy "pro for all your domains" $20/mo plan. The abuse team is definitely very sympathetic to customers, and I imagine limits are raised if a site is particularly advantageous to have for other abuse protection purposes (like aiding in gathering network intelligence by having tons of unique users).
- donmcronald 3y ago
  > legacy "pro for all your domains" $20/mo plan Ive always wondered why it’s per site. I wonder what the logic was for making it per site if a paid plan used to cover all domains.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    Having done community support in the Cloudflare Community / Forum, there are a lot of consulting/hosting firms that provide "all in one" domain management, and that typically involves putting all of your customers on one Cloudflare account, with many users revealing thousands upon thousands of websites managed under their account.
    - donmcronald 3y ago
      I wonder if a better partner program would help with that kind of thing. The blog post for their self server partner program [1] looked really awesome in terms of customers owning their accounts. Pushing people towards solutions like that are better, especially if the customer can also have a direct billing relationship with Cloudflare. However, I won't trust it.. The blog post started with: > We’ve heard from many of you that you enjoy working with Cloudflare, but cannot support some minimums for our Enterprise partner programs. This program is built to help you get started, with no upfront commitments for qualified partners. And the enrollment page [2] says: > Unlike our Enterprise program, our agency path requires no upfront commitments and includes volume discounts on all self-serve customer spend. But the enrollment page FAQ says: > There is no fee during the open beta. As we move to early and general access in 2023, there will be $1000/year annual program fee required for platform access and onboarding. How is a required "annual fee" not an "upfront commitment"? I've always been bullish on Cloudflare because I thought they saw value in serving under-served markets. However, every year they seem to trend towards the attitude every other tech company has lately. They only care about big, rich customers. I tell a lot of people to move their DNS to Cloudflare since it's reliable and opens the door to other services that can be useful, but I'm not paying $1k / year to onboard potential customers for them. 1. https://blog.cloudflare.com/self-serve-partners-beta/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/self-serve-partners-beta/ 2. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/cloudflare-partners-self-serve-program-closed-beta/?ref=blog.cloudflare.com https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/cloudflare-partners-self-se...
yamtaddle 3y ago
That very likely already fell afoul of their long-standing content rules—I doubt it was tens of TB a month of "webpage content". Usually takes mass-scale image hosting, video hosting, binary file hosting, et c., to hit those kinds of numbers, and that was already not allowed.

judge2020 3y ago

tens of TB a month is not that bad in all respects. They already did this for super egregious customers, see this user that pushed 10TB/day through the network and was officially asked to upgrade to the $200/mo business plan: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-way-you-handle-bandwidth-over-usage/42969/3?u=judge https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-way-you-handle-bandwi... I also know some users who do >5tb/day of images and get away with sitting on the legacy "pro for all your domains" $20/mo plan. The abuse team is definitely very sympathetic to customers, and I imagine limits are raised if a site is particularly advantageous to have for other abuse protection purposes (like aiding in gathering network intelligence by having tons of unique users).

donmcronald 3y ago
> legacy "pro for all your domains" $20/mo plan Ive always wondered why it’s per site. I wonder what the logic was for making it per site if a paid plan used to cover all domains.
- judge2020 3y ago
  Having done community support in the Cloudflare Community / Forum, there are a lot of consulting/hosting firms that provide "all in one" domain management, and that typically involves putting all of your customers on one Cloudflare account, with many users revealing thousands upon thousands of websites managed under their account.
  - donmcronald 3y ago
    I wonder if a better partner program would help with that kind of thing. The blog post for their self server partner program [1] looked really awesome in terms of customers owning their accounts. Pushing people towards solutions like that are better, especially if the customer can also have a direct billing relationship with Cloudflare. However, I won't trust it.. The blog post started with: > We’ve heard from many of you that you enjoy working with Cloudflare, but cannot support some minimums for our Enterprise partner programs. This program is built to help you get started, with no upfront commitments for qualified partners. And the enrollment page [2] says: > Unlike our Enterprise program, our agency path requires no upfront commitments and includes volume discounts on all self-serve customer spend. But the enrollment page FAQ says: > There is no fee during the open beta. As we move to early and general access in 2023, there will be $1000/year annual program fee required for platform access and onboarding. How is a required "annual fee" not an "upfront commitment"? I've always been bullish on Cloudflare because I thought they saw value in serving under-served markets. However, every year they seem to trend towards the attitude every other tech company has lately. They only care about big, rich customers. I tell a lot of people to move their DNS to Cloudflare since it's reliable and opens the door to other services that can be useful, but I'm not paying $1k / year to onboard potential customers for them. 1. https://blog.cloudflare.com/self-serve-partners-beta/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/self-serve-partners-beta/ 2. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/cloudflare-partners-self-serve-program-closed-beta/?ref=blog.cloudflare.com https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/cloudflare-partners-self-se...

yamtaddle 3y ago

That very likely already fell afoul of their long-standing content rules—I doubt it was tens of TB a month of "webpage content". Usually takes mass-scale image hosting, video hosting, binary file hosting, et c., to hit those kinds of numbers, and that was already not allowed.