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Ask HN: Is Cloudflare ripping me off?

10 points by jazoom ↗ HN
The reason I'm asking here is 9 days ago I asked Cloudflare to clarify the bill and I STILL haven't received a response beyond effectively them saying "I don't see the problem".

Cloudflare's latest invoice to me shows a bill of $1 for load balancing (I'm leaving out the billing for other services). The small number is not what's important here, so don't focus on that.

The Cloudflare load balancing service gives 500000 DNS queries for free, then $0.50 for each additional block of 500000 "authoritative DNS queries against Cloudflare's name servers": https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005254367-Billing-for-Load-Balancing

The bill shows 1.2 million DNS queries. If that is true then the pricing is correct.

The problem is there were only about 2.2 million total HTTP requests that went through Cloudflare that month. When you consider that most visits to my website result in over 30 HTTP requests over the 3 minutes the average user spends on the website, AND that most of my visitors are active users who regularly visit the website, I find it hard to comprehend that over HALF of ALL HTTP requests resulted in an authoritative DNS query.

Furthermore, the Cloudflare document I linked above says this: "You can reduce the number of authoritative DNS queries by configuring your Load Balancer as "proxied" (orange cloud) for your HTTP(S) services". All my requests go through the "orange cloud". So if that wasn't the case, how many DNS queries would there be? All 2.2 million HTTP requests?

Maybe I'm missing something here? Hence the Ask HN.

5 comments

[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 20.6 ms ] thread
detaro
The ratio seems odd, but without detailed logs it's impossible to know if and how the requests got generated.

Is there lots of e-mail traffic through your domain, or is there other uses for the domain you might not be accounting for apart from the website? Web requests aren't necessarily the only cause of DNS lookups.

jazoom
Only a few emails per day. We're not doing anything strange that I'm aware of.

If I was doing something strange Cloudflare should probably point that out instead of pretending everything here is normal.

jazoom
This is my content breakdown in the Cloudflare Analytics dashboard:

JSON: 45.1% (most user requests are for data from the API)

JavaScript: 28.7%

HTML: 12.3%

Other: whatever remains

gtirloni
At your volume, I wouldn't bother and I doubt Cloudflare is trying to rip you off.

That being said, they do offer advanced analytics features which includes DNS statistics [0]. Although pricing is unknown.

It's the Internet. Some script kiddie could have easily tried a bunch of random scripts on you, maybe testing your DNS to see if they could knock you out and perform DNS poisoning without understanding the implausibility of having any impact on Cloudflare.

If this is happening on a regular basis, I would open a support request and ask them to enable advanced DNS analytics temporarily to at least determine if this is coming from a single country, etc.

The other issue is that helpdesks optimize for impact so, although $1 isn't the core issue here, it definitely plays a role in you not getting access to the upper layers of their support org.

0 - https://www.cloudflare.com/analytics/

jazoom
My total bill is not $1. Even if it was, they should be able to justify what they bill me for. So far, they have failed to.

I take your point. Though, the script kiddie scenario seems less likely than Cloudflare not billing correctly, based on my experience with large organisations.