Top all-time · #4780
Robin Dev
Personal blog · robindev.substack.comwebprogramming
Robin Dev writes Robin’s Substack, a personal blog at robindev.substack.com about web and programming. Since 2024, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Cloudflare took down our website”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this Substack post, which recounts Cloudflare taking down a website, as evidence that Cloudflare enforces enterprise upgrades and cuts off customers. Most links are cited as support.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
My personal Substack.
Most-linked posts?
- Cloudflare took down our website14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2024-05-26
What Hacker News says?
It's open for benchmarking. V1 release next week. Businesses are built on outliers. It doesn't make sense throwing your hard earned insights while paying them money to steal it. Also, cloudflare https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “Clef: Open-weight decision models, and new RL fine-tuning platform”Submitted Cloudflare took down our website as a story · 1044 points
HN discussionAnd it's not only threats, they actually enforce them. Here is an example, but there are many more: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “Why is Cloudflare Pages' bandwidth unlimited?”> I don't think they care much about few "Pro" upgrades here and there. The real money, and their focus as a company, is in enterprise contracts. Cloudflare's enterprise customer acquisition strategy seems to be offering free or extremely cheap flat-rate plans with "no limits", then when a customer gets a sizeable amount of traffic they will try to sell them an enterprise plan and cut them off if they don't buy (see…
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “Why is Cloudflare Pages' bandwidth unlimited?”Cloudflare is known to extort customers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44150898 (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808 (2024) https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web... Reddit comments report more such incidents, with Cloudflare demanding an upgrade to Enterprise. This has also come up for other sites, such as gambling sites. Also, Cloudflare implicitly screws over everyone…
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “Web Search API”Cloudflare's "protection" is basically a racket. e.g. https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack”I think the comment section of that story is a gold mine: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web... . Not necessarily authentic, but apply your own judgement.
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website/comments
on “Comparing AWS S3 with Cloudflare R2: Price, Performance and User Experience”One example https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “arXiv moving from Cornell servers to Google Cloud”https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “Serverless-registry: A Docker registry backed by Workers and R2”"We've been on the Cloudflare Business plan ($250/month) for years. They suddenly contacted us and asked us to either pay them $120k up front for one year of Enterprise within 24 hours or they would take down all of our domains." I'm sure INWX is not going to do this (#alleggsinonebasket) https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “The Irrevocable SSL Certificates of Cloudflare”Probably things like this: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “Cloudflare Data Platform”Or your provider randomly decides you need to be on an enterprise plan: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “Dropping Cloudflare for Bunny.net”I imagine it's referencing this story: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web... HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “Cloudflare Crawl Endpoint”Isn't that exactly what https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web... purports happened?
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “GoDaddy Gave a Domain to a Stranger Without Any Documentation”I'd only use Cloudflare if I want my website to be held hostage with no possibility to migrate: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “GoDaddy Gave a Domain to a Stranger Without Any Documentation”https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web... - one of a number of citations. To find more insert the terms [Cloudflare, hostage] into your favorite search engine.
Comment linking /p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
on “GoDaddy Gave a Domain to a Stranger Without Any Documentation”
