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.
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 large sums of money immediately.
The part that feels shady is the way their sales team represented themselves as "business development" initially and when that didn't result in a sale they came back in a fortnight representing themselves as the "trust and safety" team.
They also refused to even start with monthly billing, instead they demanded $120k upfront within 24 hours or else they'll purge and they followed through with the threat deleting the lot.
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.
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.
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 large sums of money immediately.
The part that feels shady is the way their sales team represented themselves as "business development" initially and when that didn't result in a sale they came back in a fortnight representing themselves as the "trust and safety" team.
They also refused to even start with monthly billing, instead they demanded $120k upfront within 24 hours or else they'll purge and they followed through with the threat deleting the lot.
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.
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.