someone commented on the article and better explained what is going on.

This is a classic case of someone demonstrating themselves as being victimized in an effort to get others to sympathize with them. All the while, creating artificial ill will towards a vendor.

Imagine the horror of a company trying to run a sustainable business model where they return a profit???!!!

I read this and I see someone that's portraying their role in the situation as "we've done nothing wrong and they want to make us pay $120K to continue doing business." This requires peeling back the layers of the onion to see where the fault truly lies.

Since you’re openly sharing domains/emails of who you spoke with at the vendor, surely you could share the domains you using for your business.

If it’s a casino, it should be something we could go look at and become a customer of, right?

I mean...who doesn’t love a little online gambling in the middle of the night, right?

Why not come clean with the details of what they observed you doing to level the playing field?

This following statement is utter BS and IMHO, discredits anything else you've shared:

“When we told them we were also in talks with Fastly, they suddenly "purged" all our domains, causing huge downtime in our core business, sleepless nights migrating away from CF, irreparable loss in customer trust and weeks of ongoing downtime in our internal systems.”

Clearly your talking to Fastly had nothing to with your domains being purged.

Your domains were purged because you were in violation of terms of service. Not because you were talking to a competitor.

"Your account and domains were brought to our attention following intelligence of your account being involved in domain rotation activities, namely, activities to evade or otherwise circumvent blocks being placed on you by a third party."

In other words, you allegedly knew there were attempts by third parties to place the Cloudflare owned IPs associated with your account on block lists. Cloudflare detected said alleged activities carried out by your organization to circumvent them from being added to block lists.

And of course, this is all being done with IP addresses that belong to Cloudflare - not to you.

Anyone that understands how Cloudflare works knows their IP address space is shared across all of their customers. I would hope they would care a lot about the reputation of their IP address space.

Any actions that put their IP addresses at risk subsequently puts their other customers at risk.

Had you been using BYOIP all along, this probably would not have even been an issue and you probably would still be on their platform.

But BYOIP is only available to customers on an Enterprise plan so it isn't cheap.

I guess it's a calculated risk on your part. What is the cost to your organization if it was blocked vs. the cost to your organization for services that provide you with the ability to do what you need with your own addresses?

The email from support on 05/03/2024 informed you that you had 48 hours to provide them with what they requested or discontinue the activities:

"Usage of Cloudflare services for this purpose is strictly prohibited, and we would request you provide information as to what your account and domains are being used for within the next 48 hours. Note that your account may be terminated should you fail to respond, or otherwise react to this notice."

Based on what support said, they would have purged your domains on May 5th, had they followed what they said they were going to do.

The log you shared show your domains were purged on 05/16/2024 - 13 days after the day they reached out to you.

They were actually very generous seeing as how they provided an additional 11 days to get things under control and to move you to a plan that was more in line with your actual utilization and requirements.

They kept up with their commitment until they determined you were in violation of the terms of service.

Once you violate terms of service, it doesn’t matter who the provider is, the provider has every right to shut you down.

This is all too typical. Most people do not realize how much bandwidth, infrastructure, colocation facilities, R&D, support, etc. cost. Even on a Business plan for $250/month I would have to think they were losing money on your account.

Anyone can spend time going through the Cloudflare subreddit and read of the horrors of how they treated someone on a Free ($0)/Pro ($25)/Business ($250) plan.

Pricing is not based sheerly on the amount of bandwidth consumed or data transferred. There is a wide range of factors that influence the price.

It would be interesting to see what services Fastly required you to sign up for. Or how long you last on Fastly should you end up violating their TOS.

Hopefully your risk management team has a contingency plan in place in the event that you get booted from Fastly as well.

I don't think any of us want to see you go additional sleepless nights!