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.
The first communications were intentionally misleading though. CF wasn’t trying to solve a problem, they were trying to sell a service. If CF had just led with “upgrade or we nuke your site” then that’s scummy, but fair. Leading these guys on about technical problems and “trust & safety” bullshit was not fair at all.
There were 3 issues at once, so “trust & safety” is definitely part of it.
- Too much traffic use, this is purely a billing issue and CF probably wouldn’t even care (they haven’t for years) despite losing money
- Violating ToS with the domains, a minor infraction probably, but enough to cancel the contract
- This is the big one: CF uses one pool of IPs for all customers, the IP of a gambling site (like a casino) will get banned by ISPs of various countries (Gambling being illegal, strictly regulated and so on). This is the trust & safety issue, CF is actively hurting by keeping this customer. The enterprise plan they want to push them to has ByoIP (Bring your own IP), which would probably have been one condition of keeping them on. CF could have communicated better (if we got the full story here…), but for $250 a month they’d much rather kick the customer off their service
