How Much Traffic is Too Much Traffic For CloudFlare?
This was flagged to my attention and I've reviewed all the interactions between the author and our team. The site in question was using the free version of CloudFlare's service. On February 2, 2013, the site came under a substantial Layer 7 DDoS attack. While we provide basic DDoS mitigation for all customers (even those on the Free CloudFlare plan), for the mitigation of large attacks a site needs at least the Business tier of CloudFlare's service. In an effort to keep the site online, our ops team enabled I'm Under Attack Mode, which is available for Free customers and enhances DDoS protection.<p>The attack continued and began to affect the performance of other CloudFlare customers, at which point we routed traffic to the site away from our network. While we encouraged the site owner to take advantage of the Enterprise tier of service given their needs and traffic levels, the site would have been brought back onto CloudFlare's network if they had upgraded to the Business tier of service ($200/mo) which included Advanced DDoS mitigation.<p>To be clear, CloudFlare does not bill based on traffic. However, resources are not infinite and when an attack against a Free customer begins to affect the performance of other customers we will take measures to protect the overall integrity of the CloudFlare service.<p>Matthew Prince, CEO, CloudFlare, @eastdakota (Twitter)