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this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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Cloudflare is a business. Businesses protect their profits. Online casinos are scams subject to regular massive DDOS by their scumbag competitors and by people who want them shut down. Cloudflare wasn't going to eat that loss anymore so they kicked them to the curb to save money. Also the time frame wasn't 24 hours. More like a month. This makes me suspect the scamming casino's story more.
And insurances provide monetary compensation until you become a common liability, too high to be covered by any sort of fee. DDOS protection is just the same. It's only feasible if it happens rarely, like they usually happen. However if it's a common occurrence it will just eat up the profits made by the fees and then some, which just is stupid to do in any case.
Comparing Cloudflare to insurance companies is not how you'll convince me they're not acting like jerks lol
I don't want TP convince anyone they are not like jerks, but rather highlight why a corporation would do something like this to a (most likely) lucrative client.
It is similar in that there's a pool of resource shared between all the clients, and the service provider can shift this resource around when in need.
You can make this argument for literally every business, though. Which business does not have a single pool of resources and multiple clients to consume them?
To me it seems a really arbitrary argument. Insurance companies estimate a risk, and if their chance to pay is almost certain, then for them there is no point in insuring you, they lose for sure so they refuse you.
DDoS protection services don't pay if their customers get DDoS. Cloudflare doesn't need to go and deploy more network appliances every time a customer gets DDoS'd, nor they need to hire additional engineers to implement features. They have done this already and if they do it's a company-wide investment, not a per-client investment.
The majority of factories. They get an order in and produce the product until that order is fulfilled. They don't have to be running 24/7, it is just that that is the most profitable.
But if you stick to your "analogy", a factory also chooses who their customers are. And if some are too demanding, they just drop them. Like the casinos.
I should have elaborated on it a bit more, my bad.
While it's true that DDoS is more of an active technology rather than a CYA thing. It does however also act as insurance when it comes to the "blame game": if your site goes down it's not your fault but the provider's fault, meaning you might be able to recoup lost profits through a lawsuit.
Of course the only way to avoid this for the provider is to provide better and stronger systems, which normally would grow homogenous through more customers and/or growing fees for all customers, which would pay for better capacity and stronger protection by itself.
However here we have a client that is a high value target that others might want to take down at all costs. Even if they didn't sue, a strong enough attack might, alongside naturally expected DDoS on other clients, not only take down this customer's server, but others as well, which really isn't something you want, for the reasons stated above. And rapidly increasing security could be not worth it, as it could devolve into an arms race by proxy with a high risk of the customer leaving if you raise their fees to much, leaving you with a system which's maintenance will now dig into your profits due to a lost big income stream, or make other customers leave if you raise the general fee.
I think they are only “very regulated” if they are based in certain western countries?
I used to hear a bunch of stories about issues getting payouts.
It's not that they got DDoSed, it's that unregulated off-shore gambling is illegal in many countries, so their IP addresses were getting blocked in these countries. The way CDNs like CloudFlare work is that many customers share the IP addresses, so they were getting other CloudFlare customers blocked as well.
CF wanted them to move to a "bring your own IP" plan so that their IP blocks wouldn't affect other customers, and that came with the steep price tag.
Online casinos are also tech. The devops in the article literally says they set up proxies to continue operating in countries where their main domain is blocked. I know the core domain of casinos are very regulated, but I doubt the entire tech aspect of online casinos are regulated. I imagine there's plenty of fuckery to do there.
Also casinos will throw out people who benefit too much at the expense of the casino. The casino benefitted too much at the expense of Cloudflare and refused to share the profits, so Cloudflare did what any casino would do and kicked them out.
They provide a whole lot more to begin with.
Sure, which is why I said:
An online casino would mostly benefit from WAF, DDoS protection and caching.
The arguments I was responding to is like saying that if you get too many web attacks they should kick you because the WAF is not anymore profitable. It doesn't make any sense.
They didn't get kicked out. Just moved to a more expensive solution / pricing structure
That wasn't it, Cloudflare didn't like the way the casino was using Cloudflare's IPs, since they were getting banned in multiple countries.
Cloudflare only offers byoIP as part of a business package, and that comes with extortionate pricing.
You say that like it's ok to do shitty things as long as "you're a business protecting profits"
The purpose of the comment is clearly: "Cloudfare didn't kick out the casinos because of a compromise with good ethics, but because it was making them lose money". Please read it again.
I was just having issues with your opener which sounds whole lot like justification.
I'm not the person you were replying to, either.
I say that like its the way things are.