Also, interesting comment I found on HackerNews (HN):
This post was definitely demoted by HN. It stayed in the first position for less than 5 minutes and, as it quickly gathered upvotes, it jumped straight into 24th and quickly fell off the first page as it got 200 or so more points in less than an hour.
I’m 80% confident HN tried to hide this link. It’s the fastest downhill I’ve noticed on here, and I’ve been lurking and commenting for longer than 10 years.
Realistically, this is why you pay for Akamai. You don’t get these shenanigans.
How the fuck were they still on a $250 dollar a month plan when they pumped through $2000 a month worth of traffic? That’s shady on the companiy’s part and Cloudflare shouldn’t have allowed it to happen in the first place.
Each party played their part here and did shitty things. Sounds like the tech equivalent of a crackhead arguing about selling stuff to the pawn shop employee.
The $250/month plan supposedly includes unlimited traffic. If there’s actually a limit where you’re supposed to switch to a more expensive plan with no standardized price, maybe CF should say what the limit is?
They absolutely should have outlined a traffic limit for the $250 a month plan. That’s on Cloudflare for allowing it.
That said, if you make wildly excessive use of that loophole it probably shouldn’t surprise you if they do something like this. They called it “trust and safety” because it allows them to do anything they want under the guide of security.
Really, they didn’t define their service clearly and wanted to fire them as a customer unless they paid up for what they felt they were owed.
If something is marketed as “unlimited”, I don’t think there is such a thing as “wildly excessive use”. This isn’t a competitive eater going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and being mad about getting kicked out. It’s a business using a service in a way that’s seemingly in-line with what they paid for.
It’s the same definition of “unlimited” that Telcos use: you pay for unlimited but it really is XXgb of data per month, after that they either disconnect you or throttle your traffic at a glacial pace…
A man walks into whorehouse at half past seven, inquires about prices, and learns that it’s 250 per night, per person for the room. “Everything they consent to is available to the customer” says the proprietor. Gladly he pays and climbs up the steps with his hand clasped tenderly, finally landing upon a plain pink cushion, whereupon he proceeds to fuck the absolute shit out of his companion for six full hours. The brothel quakes in rhythm with their dual shrieks of ecstasy for the full duration.
As he begins dressing himself across from the nearly comatose prostitute, the proprietor returns, requesting two hundred and ninety dollars for the extended stay and sixty for the damage to her employee. It was at that moment that the man realized that the madame was a 70 foot tall crustacean from the Paleozoic era. He yells “goddamn Loch Ness monster, I ain’t giving you no three fifty!”
…huh?
South Park reference. Probably the funniest episode in the whole show outside of “Hare Club for Men”.
“Unlimited” doesn’t exist in this universe. It’s always “Unlimited under fair use”.
If you pay for your water park ticket and they offer unlimited free drinking water fountains, you can’t pay for your ticket, call up Nestlé and bring in the water trucks.
Besides the IP poisoning from the casino, ToS violations and so on, just using this much traffic would probably be enough cause for a cancellation (or a forced plan upgrade).
I worked for Akamai for 7 years.
This is why, if your CDN infra is core to the operation of your business, you make your systems accommodate multi-CDN integration. Cutting one CDN off shouldn’t be significantly difficult, and it comes in handy during contract negotiations. All the major players work this way.