Once again i would like eastdakota to respond to this sales tactic. Surely this can't be a double-digit driver for revenue to where he must stay silent on it.
If you read the article, the OOP was running a gambling site so it is fairly reasonable for Cloudflare not to want their IP blocks to be associated with that.
It’s a communication failure on CF’s end, but it’s not an ordinary situation.
And all of that is fine when communicated properly. Even if OP is an unreliably narrator are we to believe they also left out some of CF's emails?
To me it looks like https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... is entirely the wrong email to send in the situation and if you are as old as I am and come from where I come from, you will have flashbacks to "reading between the lines" of the party daily in the 1980s. The real content is at the bottom:
> As we have a very short window to report back to Trust & Safety team, please let me know if you can make time tomorrow
Big red flashing lights: the right questions are 1) why is T&S involved at all 2) What are their concerns which forces such a hurried deadline? 3) What are the consequences of missing this deadline.
The right email would start with something like this:
> Providing services to your business constitutes serious legal risk to Cloudflare. We are happy to work with you in the future if you are buying an Enterprise plan. As we need to commit significant resources to accommodate you, we need an annual commitment. Otherwise, with much regret we need to terminate our services provided to you as it is our right per Terms on date/time. ("We may at our sole discretion terminate your user account or Suspend or terminate your use or access to the Service at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all.")
I did read it and understand that they are running a gambling site. CFs handling of it though where they instead took this as an opportunity for high pressure upsell is the scummy part.
Why wouldn’t they allow them to pay monthly for enterprise? This would allow them to use their own IPs, eliminating the risk to CF, and allow for an orderly migration off the platform if they wanted. Forcing an annual contract with a massive price tag is again just scummy sales tactics.
Also after reading that and searching a bit it looks like this isn’t the first time that CF has had these types of “communication failures”.
EDIT: a few words to clarify what I meant on the lack of a monthly option in this exchange.
Ten thousand percent. When I read the article earlier they made the email something to the tune of "CF engineering says your account is seriously messing up our network. contact us to resolve this"
and it was a sales call. scummy as hell to get your kpis
